Now that we have gone from a Storm substitute, to a dedicated Storm deck, we will look at the truest form of Storm, black based Necropotence and Yawgmoths Bargain Storm. Instead of Paradoxical Outcome as our main source of card advantage, we are playing these two black enchantments to allow us to turn life into cards.The recently unrestricted Yawgmoths Bargain gives you cards as soon as you ask for them. Necropotence is a bit cheaper for a very similar effect, but you have to wait until your end step to get the cards, and your discarded cards go straight to exile. Both enchantments stop you from naturally drawing cards, but that should not be too much of a problem.
Necropotence is pretty intensive on your mana, costing three black mana, and Bargain is a 6-mana card, which is quite a lot for Vintage play. Luckily, we get to cheat on mana, more so than we did with Paradoxical Storm. Dark Ritual and Cabal Ritual help net us early mana and can let us have Turn 1 Necropotence. We also have a lot of artifact mana since we need 4 generic mana for Bargain. Black Lotus, Lions Eye Diamond, Moxen, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt and Vault, and Lotus Petal all help to accelerate our mana. They also can help us ramp up storm if we have Tendrils in our hand and are ready to kill our opponent.
Since we are black based, we are not running Force of Will or Time Walk in this deck. We are still running Ancestral Recall, Brainstorm, Ponder, Preordain, and Gitaxian Probe as they are too good to pass up.Our draw sevens in this deck are a bit fewer than in Paradoxical Storm, however we still run Wheel of Fortune, Timetwister, Yawgmoths Will and Memory Jar. Because we are running Jar, we might as well run Tinker, and at this point you should know that we are going to have a one of Blightsteel Colossus.
Tinker is not just for Jar and Blightsteel though. We are still running a pair of main-deck Defense Grids because we are not going to be holding up much counter magic. We also have 4 main-deck Duress to strip those pesky counterspells out of our opponents hand. And just like Paradoxical Storm, we have a Chain of Vapor to help out with troublesome permanents, and a Hurkyls Recall to get rid of all of our Shops opponents boards. Being based in black lets us keep our traditional Demonic and Vampiric Tutors while allowing us to play 2 copies of Dark Petition, which is essentially Demonic Tutors 2 and 3 if you have 5 mana up front and Spell Mastery (hint, you will almost always have Spell Mastery in this format). These can get our enchantments for card advantage or get our Tendrils payload.
Our mana is very dissimilar to the other decks we have discussed today. We are running a 2-3 split of Bloodstained Mire and Polluted Delta to fetch out our 3 Underground Sea or our singleton Badlands. Additionally we play one Swamp and one Island to keep us somewhat resilient to nonbasic land hate. Tolarian Academy and Library of Alexandria round out the lands, with our artifacts we can rely on Academy tapping for at least 2-3 mana, and Library will generally be able to draw us a card given the draw sevens and our enchantments.
The sideboard again shares some similarities with the previous lists. Defense Grid, Flusterstorm, Island, Hurkyls Recall, and Empty the Warrens all fill the same roles in this list as the previous. Our graveyard hate is a bit different this time, since we are not terribly concerned with Oath (we tend to be significantly faster) and we want all of our mana each turn so Grafdiggers Cage is our in favor of Ravenous Trap and Tormods Crypt.
If you havent already, check out the deck tech for Paradoxical Storm here: Paradoxical Storm
Or if you were in the mood for solitaire magic but not Storm, check out Espers Paradox here: Esper's Paradox
