Thanks for taking your time to look at the deck. up votes, comments and suggestions are more than welcome as always.
The Picture "
The Cheese Stands Alone
" is what I like to think, is a fair representation of what one would look like when we beat the opponent with our awesome combo that they clearly loved every second of =P
This is a work in progress storm deck that I'm slowly testing and putting together over time. After looking at a considerable deck techs and even more deck lists, I've slowly put this deck here together.
For now at least I'll try to give a small explanation of the deck, how it works, and the cards + why I chose them.
Concept behind the deck:
For those that don't know about the mechanic "storm", whether they are new to magic or were yet to encounter it. The idea behind storm is that you get a copy of said spell for each other spell that is played before it this turn. The storm cards that we will be attempting to abuse in this deck are Empty the Warrens and Grapeshot
The deck does not need a whole lot of mana to operate, thus why we are running such a low amount, in addition to this, once we get our combo of spells going, we don't really want to run into all that much land. So being able to filter them out helps, this is why we include lands like Scalding Tarn. Instead of running a large mana base, we run rituals like Pyretic Ritual we pay 2 mana and get 3 back in addition to the lands mentioned above.
This on its own isn't all that powerful. This is where the main engine's of the deck comes in.
Pyromancer Ascension
and Goblin Electromancer. These spells allow us to get more bang for our buck.
By using these rituals, and the other low costing spells that allow us to draw while still giving us relevant effect's, we slowly work up our massive combo (or continue to play heaps of spells) until a finishing blow with Grapeshot destroy's them (copying him 10+ times with the storm mechanic). Please note that in modern most players will be taking damage from shock lands and fetch lands, so rarely will you need a storm count of about 16-20.
For anyone who is wanting to make a deck like this. its relativity cheap. the most expensive cards is actually the land base. by removing the Scalding Tarn, Misty Rainforest, and Arid Mesa and adding in other lands you can get this deck down to as low as $100 - $250 and it still be competitive.
Card Choices and Quick Descriptions
Main Deck
Grapeshot - Main wincon of the deck, hit for lethal once your storm count gets high enough. We are running 3 instead of 2 because I personally prefer the option of being able to early game scry one away if necessary and still be confident in seeing the other 2, this also means we have more shots at taking down our opponent.
Pyromancer Ascension
- Doubles every spell once we have 2 counters on it, and altho this doesn't give us twice as many storm counters for each spell we play, its still huge!
NOTE: When
Pyromancer Ascension
copy's Grapeshot or Empty the Warrens it does not copy the storm count. Storm only occurs when we play from our hand, thus copied spells unfortunately don't benefit from the storm count we already have accumulated.
Pyromancer's Swath - We are only running one of these in the deck due to its down side "discard hand at end of turn" as we only really want to see this if we are going off on a shakey at best hand setup. The reason he did make the cut is that I found myself barely casting
Desperate Ravings
unless I was in fact .... Desperate.. So I decided to reduce the count of
Desperate Ravings
. But you may be asking why not something else? well a 1 of lightning bolt seems kinda pointless to me, and if i were to add another draw spell, why not just keep the desperate ravings. With this in mind, I decided to look for something that would pump the combo, but also wasn't necessary to hit. This guy does this.
Gitaxian Probe - Lets us look into their hand at the cost of either 1 blue mana or 2 life, plus draws a card. probably best early cantrip you can hope for in this deck. (cantrip means a card that replaces itself WITH a side effect).
Pyretic Ritual - 1st of the 3 rituals in the deck, we use these to generate massive amounts of mana once we are trying to go for the kill.
Desperate Ritual - 2nd of the 3 rituals in the deck, This ritual has a small and mostly insignificant twist, however it can .. sometimes.... still be relevant. Splice into arcane allows us to play 1 Desperate Ritual Then, by paying the splice cost from the 1 still in the hand we can use its ability while not using the card itself. This can allow us to net 6 mana, but only use 1 of the rituals while the other sits in our hand in turn getting more use out of the ritual card that we would have otherwise not had. The major problem with this is that we need the card that we are splicing onto to have the "Arcane" trait (this means that we can only splice our Desperate Ritual onto another Desperate Ritual.
Manamorphose - The 3rd ritual in the deck, this is a little different to the others as it generates more diverse mana, and allows us to draw a card. The only drawback is, is that you need Goblin Electromancer or
Pyromancer Ascension
active to get surplus mana from spending it.
Goblin Electromancer - Only creature in deck, makes our INSTANTS AND SORCERESS cost less, can block and beat down if necessary.
Peer Through Depths - This card was chosen as a finisher enabler. Once we have a lethal storm count, if we haven't seen grapeshot yet, this card lets us dig like crazy, especially if
Pyromancer Ascension
is active.
Past in Flames - This card is like a Snapcaster Mage on roids for us. Our ENTIRE graveyard gains flashback for the rest of the turn, this is pretty much a lethal hit for the opponent if there is even just a few draw and ritual spells in there, esp if we have already started a decent sized combo.
Serum Visions - Low cost draw spell. We use cards like these to keep the combo going while replacing themself's in our hand. this one in particular lets us look at the next 2 cards and help sculpt our next few draws
Sleight of Hand - Draw 2 the bottom 1 of them, another low cost draw but it gives us an option of what to choose when we draw for a very low cost.
Faithless Looting - The idea behind this card is that with it we can dump unwanted or currently unplayable cards like say... excess land or something, into the graveyard and sculpt our hand for the upcoming turns. With the cards in the graveyard (if spells) we can make use of them by turning
Pyromancer Ascension
on easier, and providing a bigger base to blow our opponents out with when we use Past in Flames. It costs 1 Red mana which is awesome and 3 to flash back if necessary. The other choice here is......
Desperate Ravings
- This, unlike Faithless Looting is instant speed, and nets us 1 card. the catch is, is that it costs more to cast, and the flashback is a different colour.. the 2nd one doesn't really count lol... and Lastly... we don't get to choose what card gets discarded.
The choice between
Desperate Ravings
and Faithless Looting is a difficult one and comes down to what the person playing the deck is looking for. These 4 cards are the ones that will change the most in this deck as I continue to test it.
Side Board:
Empty the Warrens - A 2nd win condition for the deck, this allows us to flood the board with 1/1 goblin tokens. It's also a means to get around Leyline of Sanctity.
Flame Slash - this is here effectively for Eidolon of Rhetoric.
Blood Moon - All non basic lands become Mountains ..... This almost completely shuts down certain decks in the format, but still works for us as we are primarily a red mana base deck and can use Manamorphose to get us our blue. (on top of our Island)
Defense Grid - Helps prevent our opponent from countering our stuff while we are trying to go for lethal and shutting us down completely.
Echoing Truth - This card is in here to remove troublesome cards like Leyline of Sanctity, Leyline of the Void, Rest in Peace and other such spells. Leyline of the void means we wont have a graveyard to interact with, making it just that much harder to kill them, and leyline of sanctity makes Grapeshot useless as we cant hit our opponent with it. This card is also awesome in conjunction with trying to prevent a Splinter Twin deck from wrecking you.
Lightning Bolt - Cheap damage that we can use to kill creatures or even help us to kill off the opponent. Plenty of options here.
Shatterstorm - Artifact hate, pure and simple.
An additional note: In regards to sideboard, if there is an abundance of aggro decks or lack of say (for example) artifact decks at your modern meet ups, then cards like Anger of the Gods or Pyroclasm or even a nice counterspell may be a better choice than say Defense Grid or Shatterstorm for your sideboard.
Conclusion
This is a deck that is easy to play, and hard to master and altho many people don't like decks that don't really interact with their opponents I personally find allot of enjoyment from deck's like these that take a lot of effort to actually win consistently, even if I'm on the receiving end.
As far as making this a budget version of the same deck, by removing the fetch lands (Scalding Tarn and Misty Rainforest) and adding more
Shivan Reef
/
Cascade Bluffs
/ Sulfur Falls or even Boseiju, Who Shelters All (if your really desperate) you can reduce the decks cost by an incredible amount. Each of the fetch lands go for easly $80 - $110 each (Australian 31/03/2014).
For a more casual gaming type (like kitchen top) you could also add banned spells (banned from modern) like Seething Song, Ponder, Preordain or
Overmaster
to make it just that much more effective =P
Again Thank you for taking the time to look at this deck, and have a lovely day!
