Good play with the Brain Freeze but I'm wondering why you have 3 Retraced Image 's in here. You only have 4 creatures, so I'm guessing it is for land ramping?

Correct. It can shorten the game by a turn, or turn dead Islands during the combo turn into very useful Islands.

I love it! +1

I usually tried to go off on turn 4 after getting at least one high tide and a search for another.

It looks really fun to play to me. It's just a shame it isn't Modern legal, lol!

I'm curious why you do not use Palinchron . It is a star in this deck in that it grants infinite mana with only 6 lands and a High Tide . It also grants infinite storm count for your Brain Freeze .

Are the only budget changes Time Spiral , Force of Will , and fetchlands?

and Candelabra of Tawnos of course

Essentially those are the budget cuts.

I know Palinchron could lead to infinite mana with 12 available (4 Islands and 2 High Tide is not difficult), but it's tough to find a spot to place him, even as a 1-of.

What would you cut?

I'm not sure. My lack of experience says maybe a Spell Pierce or a Cloud of Faeries . I can't really test the deck to its fullest potential because [[cunning wish] is near impossible to test with.

In my version I used card:Blue Sun's Zenith instead of Brain Freeze as my win. It lets you draw more cards if you don't quite have enough mana the first time around. I also used Palinchron which gave me infinite mana so...

You have reawakened my interest in this deck. I'm going to have to work on it again. What is your opinion on Snapcaster Mage in this deck? and with or without Time Spiral ?

i'd definitely cut a Cloud of Faeries or two, for the legitimacy of Palinchron .

I think Cloud of Faeries may be an okay cut. I'll test it out.

Snapcaster Mage has potential, but I think more for solidarity. It was actually covered today at SCG (click here).

Time Spiral gets a lot of praise, but I don't like the fact that it gives your opponent more opportunities for more outs. I might like it better if I had Force of Will s.

Additionally, if I could obtain Candelabra of Tawnos , I would definitely run card:Blue Sun's Zenith as my mainboard win condition.

I had actually just read that article after I posted my comment. Unrelated to deck: how do you do that type of link?

I'm going to work on my deck over the week. I'll post a link when I am happy with it.

i like the card:Blue Sun's Zenith idea, but the thing is you can't change the targets. with Brain Freeze , you can do 20 of them to one target, 20 of them to another, so forth and so on. which is nice for me cuz i play a lot of 3-6 player multiplayer.

What an amazing idea! +1

How about Mana Severance ?

You really need to mainboard a card:Blue Sun's Zenith, otherwise you don't really have a win condition for that mana.

In my testing it's been easier to generate a high storm count rather than a large amount of mana, so I prefer Brain Freeze . Additionally, Palinchron doesn't just provide infinite mana, but an infinite storm count.

also, may i point out, that if one enjoys multiplayer as much as i do, that combo is much more dangerous than card:Blue Sun's Zenith, because you can choose new targets for each copy. infinite mill is one thing. infinite mill to infinite targets is yet another.

I understand, but how do you generate the high storm count? Without Time Spiral , you run out of spells pretty quick. In my play testing, I could not get a storm count of more than 10, which only mills 30 cards. If you are relying on the infinite storm from Palinchron , then you need at least 3.

In my playtesting, I get to 15-20 rather consistently turn 4-5. Hm.

I'm asking what spells you use to do that.

Meditate is a big one. Here is one sequence I screenshot before: clicky

Two of the tokens are Cloud of Faeries that were snapped back, and the other is a Meditate I wished for. Note: this was before I started using Palinchron .

I'm just wondering, what exactly is Cunning Wish for? Like what do you super tutor lol

Really like this deck. +1 from me!

After a lot more play testing, it's only maybe 15% of the time that I had dead draws when trying to go off. So it's consistent, I just don't like that there is a chance to dead draw at all, but I suppose I see your point that if you had the infinite mana for card:Blue Sun's Zenith, a Brain Freeze would work just as well. I guess the consistency problems are all solved in the real deck with access to cards like Candelabra. This is still a very decent budget version, a great deck for beginners with little money and little interest in Standard!