Today, I am covering storm, an archetype with a bunch of different variations throughout Vintage. I will be talking about two variants, and one pseudo-storm list. We will talk about the pseudo-storm list first, since it leads nicely right into the next list. Now you might be asking, What do pseudo-storm mean? The deck, which I have decided to nickname Espers Paradox, is very similar to storm in that you get to play solitaire for a few minutes, and then find out if your opponent was main-decking Flusterstorms to decide if you win the game. However, in this deck we arent shooting for a lethal Tendrils of Agony. Instead, we are going with the infinite turns combo from my Grixis Thieves list.
You may now have a follow up question, Why play Vault Key over Tendrils? As it turns out, there are much better ways to get artifacts into play than tutoring them into your hand or drawing them. We are also already working with artifacts a bunch to get as much mana and card advantage from Paradoxical Outcome, so extending this to our win condition is not actually making us weaker to anything. Also, I like infinite turns.We are playing almost every broken mana artifact in Vintage, from Black Lotus to Moxen to Lions Eye Diamond, we are going to run it. That extends to Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Sol Ring, and Lotus Petal as well. We are also running a pair utility artifacts in the form of Memory Jar and Senseis Divining Top, because we can tutor out a draw seven with Jar, and it is a lot of fun to get to say In response, I Top. Of course, our artifact suite includes a copy of Time Vault, and two copies of Voltaic Key. We are running two keys here since they untap our Mana Vault to lead to some ridiculous amounts of colorless mana.
Since this is a blue deck, we have our mandatory includes of Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Brainstorm, Ponder, and 4 Force of Wills. Since we are playing a combo deck, we are running Gitaxian Probe and a pair of Preordains. Now we get to the namesake card, Paradoxical Outcome. For those who have never gotten to play with this card, I highly recommend it. You spend 4 mana (hopefully from your artifacts), and put all your artifacts back into your hands and draw that many cards. That can often net you additional mana, and you are fairly likely to draw into more draw spells or tutors to continue the cycle. We are also play one Hurkyls Recall in our main deck, since this allows us to spend two mana to essentially untap all of our mana rocks. It also can be used to allow you to beat Shops if they happen to play a bunch of Sphere effects. One of the most unordinary cards in this list are the 3 copies of Thoughtcast, which is often a 1 or 2 mana draw two. While it is certainly no Recall, it is card advantage.
We are playing the typical Demonic Tutor and Merchant Scroll for getting our draw spells or Hurkyls Recall in a tight spot against Shops. We are also playing some strange tutors since we are dedicated to trying to combo off as early as possible. Tinker is self-explanatory of you read my Grixis Thieves deck tech. Our 2 copies Enlightened Tutor will get any part of our combo and will also let us get a Black Lotus if were a few mana short of going off. This may seem just worse than Vampiric Tutor, but I found that they are basically the same in this deck except this saves life. It could be correct to have a split between the two, but this is what my testing seemed to imply was better. Transmute Artifact an attempt at being another copy of Tinker. To avoid some rules questions, Transmute Artifact has you sacrifice an artifact on resolution (not cast like Tinker), allows you to tutor and artifact into play, and if its converted mana cost is greater than the one you sacrificed then you pay the difference (mana color does not matter for this payment). We dont want to be fetching out Blightsteel Colossus (unless you somehow have that much mana), but it does a really good job of getting Time Vault or Voltaic Key.
Speaking of Blightsteel, it will make up half of our creature package. Just like Grixis Thieves, it is in the deck because sometimes a Turn 1 Island, Mana Crypt, Tinker into Blightsteel will just give you a free win. Our other creature is the recently restricted Monastery Mentor. Since we are going to be casting a whole lot of artifact spells in the process of comboing off, this will occasionally give us some additional free wins. Just be careful to remember your triggers and that you can actually win with damage thanks to this card.
The last two cards to mention in the deck are Yawgmoths Will and Balance. Yawgmoths Will fits nicely into our combo deck, allowing for a second round of Paradoxical Outcomes or Ancestral Recalls to fill our hands up again. Balance may seem odd to those who are not too familiar with the format, but it turns out that artifacts are the way to break the card. It may be called Balance, but this symmetrical effect is simply too much advantage to pass up. Imagine that you cast four artifacts on turn one, cast Balance making your opponent discard 5 cards if you are on the play (4 cards and sac a land if they are), then play a land holding a Paradoxical Outcome for next turn. Your opponent might just concede on the spot.
Our land base is simple, 6 fetchlands, split between Flooded Strand and Polluted Delta, 2 of each blue dual land, a single Island, Library of Alexandria and a Tolarian Academy. Academy is even more broken here than it was in Grixis Thieves, since we are playing more artifacts, and Library can be active at almost any time thanks to the fact that we will be returning our artifacts to our hand often.
We are a combo deck, so we need to do very little reacting to what our opponents are doing. That being said, this is Vintage so it is very possible that we just end up on the draw and our Shops opponent plays Tangle Wire and Sphere of Resistance before we make a land drop. The sideboard plan for this deck boils down to dont lose first. We finish off our playset of Hurkyls Recalls here to help against explosive Shops draws, and Fragmentize can kill that one sphere effect they may have in play to let you start to combo. Flusterstorm makes an appearance to help against opposing combo decks. We have a full playset of Grafdiggers Cage to help the Oath and Dredge matchups and being able to tutor for them is great. Also for the Dredge (and possibly Storm) matchup is two copies of Rest in Peace. We finish off our sideboard with a second Island because we are light on lands and an opposing Null Rod can be devastating for us.
Now that youve read up on Espers Paradox, check out the other deck techs for the Storm archetype here: Paradoxical Storm or Storm's Bargain
