Inalla Storm
Branched from my original Inalla Twin list, this is a study into composing
Bonus Round
and
Thousand-Year Storm
with established Inalla canon to produce exponentially increasing line-of-play trees that lend incredible flexibility for dealing with challenging and/or complex board states and pulling wins seemingly out of nowhere.
For background, it's worth restating the first principles outlined in the original listing:
Inalla First Principles
-
Her Eminence ability allows all your wizards to double up on ETB triggers for without ever needing to cast her. Got a
Trinket Mage
coming into play? Pay an extra and grab an extra mox.
Spellseeker
? Two instants to hand seems good. Etc.
-
Her Eminence ability triggers on ETB not on cast. So things like
Flash
,
Reanimate
,
Essence Flux
etc, not only get an ETB at a discounted rate, but also open the door to throw on an extra for another ETB and a temporary body to go with it.
-
Her Eminence ability bestows Haste upon the temporary copy. This is the really broken part. Got an
Apprentice Necromancer
in play and
Magus of the Mind
in the yard? Let your opponent go infinite. You can just pop the Magus into play at the right moment, pay the extra for the hasty copy that can be activated right there. to
Mind's Desire
as an instant without actually casting any spells? Yes please. (In this case the original has Haste too because of the Necromancer, but you get the idea!)
FILO: First In Last Out
The original non-storm list was already rife with intimidating stack management demands given the complex sequences of Inalla triggers and Wizard ETBs exhibited in many of its lines. This incarnation takes stack jockeying to a completely different level. In the days long before
Aetherflux Reservoir
and
Sentinel Tower
existed, storm players leveraged
Remand
and
Unsubstantiate
to exploit the way cards like
Tendrils of Agony
behaved on the stack in order to double up on Storm triggers and create much larger effects than would otherwise have been attainable.
In the old days, the
Remand
trick was of course a very powerful tool, but everyone knew it was only a one-shot to double up on some given storm spell. Enter
Bonus Round
and
Thousand-Year Storm
. We now have the ability to imbue
Remand
and
Unsubstantiate
with storm-like behavior themselves. Therefore, instead of bouncing some other storm spell back to hand as a one-time effect, these spells can bounce themselves back to hand at the same time. When we couple this with the power to bestow storm-like behavior on other spells that don't normally have storm (
Snap
,
Frantic Search
,
Shallow Grave
,
Mission Briefing
,
Dramatic Reversal
,
Demonic Tutor
, etc) the results quickly become absurd.
Stashing
Over the years, lots of time has been spent discussing effective ways to exploit the various zones available to you in a game of Magic. Reanimator strategies and Yawgwill strategies break open the graveyard to cheat on mana costs and generate card advantage. Birthing Pod and Survival of the Fittest strategies establish toolboxes by using their entire libraries as their 'hand'. Ad Nauseam and Necropotence strategies sacrifice their life resources in order to establish unfair numbers of cards in hand to ensure the ability to storm or combo off.
This list builds its core strategies around a less often discussed zone and resource:
The Stack.
Just like the cases of reanimation and Birthing Pod, where a huge part of the value proposition comes from 'cheating' on mana costs, most avenues for copying spells on the stack tend to be extremely mana efficient. But to an even greater extent, they wind up being card efficient. Why cast a spell over and over when you can just leave it on the stack and use a repeatable copy effect to reuse it as much as you'd like? Why limit yourself to a single spell, when you can instead throw multiple spells on the stack at the same time and copy them in different sequences to implement your win con? I call this practice 'Stashing' and it's the engine that makes everything in this deck work.
Notes
There's a lot of detailed discussion incoming to cover the strategies and tactics to keep in mind to pilot successfully, but in the meantime, some notes:
- Giving all your instants and sorceries storm-like behavior creates a huge amount of bookkeeping for spells that have targets. Of course, you can do some very wild things with the flexibility, but keep in mind that copies need to have targets at the moment they're placed on the stack. For example, if you put a number of copies of
Essence Flux
onto the stack all targeting the same creature, only the top copy will resolve. The rest will be targeting a game object that no longer exists and they'll fizzle. So plan carefully.
- Alternatively, giving all your instants and sorceries storm-like behavior makes spells that don't target exceptionally powerful. Part of this is because you aren't giving away 'targeting' information for your opponents to plan their responses. Thus, your plan isn't revealed once it goes on the stack and it can even adapt along the way as interactions take place. Got four copies of
Mission Briefing
? It's entirely possible that none of the four cards you wind up casting from the yard were actually in your yard when the
Mission Briefing
s went on the stack.
- In keeping with the original version of this list, cheap instant effects like
Flash
,
Shallow Grave
,
Essence Flux
, etc make up the backbone of how we wring value out of the Wizards in our lineup. Even without any storm-like cards in play,
Remand
,
Unsubstantiate
, and
Venser, Shaper Savant
dovetail perfectly into this framework, allowing us to embellish the already rich set of options at our disposal. The fact that Unsubstantiate and Venser can target not only spells, but permanents as well gives us freedom to go ahead and use our
Dualcaster Mage
s and friends without feeling the need to hold them idly in hand waiting for just the right moment.
-
Shallow Grave
has some fun properties for applying creativity, whether it converts
Plaguecrafter
into an asymmetric, instant speed board/hand wipe or instead approximates an asymmetric, instant speed
Living Death
for that gives all the reanimated creatures haste. Or interleave
Culling the Weak
effects to net mana and re-Reanimate certain creatures multiple times. Don't forget each Wizard will prompt an Inalla trigger as it enters, so don't sweat sacrificing intermediate instances.
- Why did I leave out
Isochron Scepter
? Because here
Sigil Tracer
is almost always better. (I'll come back to unpack that later)
- You won't find
Yawgmoth's Will
or
Past in Flames
in this list for reasons similar to
Isochron Scepter
.
Izzet Chemister
and
Mission Briefing
lend themselves much better to supporting reuse.
Lots more to come...
