[Article] So you want to play Storm...

[Silent Requiem]

Our Legacy meta is still developing, so a bunch of us at our local game shop decided to write some articles designed to help new players get into the format. This is a link to my first effort. Being a Storm player, I naturally wrote about Storm decks. Nothing like as comprehensive as Voltron00x's recent effort, or Vacrix's fantastic article this summer, but perhaps a little less for a new player to take in all at once.

http://www.manaleak.com/beta/2010/12...torm%E2%80%A6/

Other than card links (which we are working on) let me know what you think. I'm also interested in knowing what kind of other articles new players might be interested in.

-Silent Requiem

PS. In making your comments, please keep in mind that we have no delusions of being Starcity Games, or even ChannelFireball, we just want to help grow our metagame.

[Vacrix]

I would have made a distinction between "Permanent Hate" and "Hate Bears". You only gave examples of bears, rather than mixing it between Thorn of Amythest, Chalice, Trinisphere, etc. As a Solidarity player, I know that you treat them as the same thing just because we usually bounce just bounce whatever is giving us shit with Wish --> Wipe Away.

Also, I don't see some of storm's toughest matchups, Stax and Counterbalance, even mentioned in the article. If you are going to talk about storm combo in general, I think you should include a general overview of the harder matchups (ie. CB vs. Aggro Control Variants vs. Landstill) because generally the decks that don't interact with you are just dropping a bear and pursuing the strategy they were going to pursue anyway while you try to play around the bear.

Overall, I think you wrote a good introduction to each deck but did not elaborate enough on the details. I know that you know the details and most of them are obvious anyway if you are familiar with the deck but exposing a new player to the general tactics of storm combo within the metagame is fairly important else you are just setting the expectations of the reader too high. It might draw you a new crowd of storm combo players (and playing Solidarity I'm sure that you want that lol) but storm combo vs control can be extremely frustrating to a new player. Its best that you cover the a few dynamics in the storm vs. control matchup so that a player is exposed to it before delving into learning possibly the wrong deck for that person's metagame, play style, or taste in storm combo. Its easy to learn a deck in a vacuum, but playing storm combo in real life is a completely different animal. Also, discussing these tactics are really the reason to play one storm combo deck over the other. There isn't one deck thats just better in every way; each deck has its good matchups and its bad matchups. By making this distinction you make clear to these new players/readers why each storm deck exists in the first place (ie. what kind of metagame its built to do well in).


All of these introductions to Storm Combo make we want to write one now. After finals, its going down.

[NiRVeS]

The article was fine, albeit a bit basic in terms of content - I think most Legacy players know most of what was mentioned, but if you're aiming for less people with less experience in legacy I guess it's fine.

Small nitpicks:
- When using decklists, I think you want to mention the pilot as well.
- The dutch tournament from which you got the ANT-list actually had 208 contestants, not 300+ (nitpick idd).
- Concerning cardlinks: One of the new deckcheck clones (http://mtgpulse.com/events.php) has a feature to let you embed decklists on your site. Might want to try that? E.g. http://mtgpulse.com/event.php?e=291&d=2431#2431 (Robbin De Boer's ANT-list) => check the little <e> symbol on the top right of the deck.

Grtz

[Silent Requiem]

Thanks for the feedback. I've corrected the ANT tournament numbers, and I have distinguished between hate bears and other permanent hate.

I agree that the article is quite basic, but my goal is to overcome the preconception that many Standard players have that Legacy is full of these broken, unbeatable turn 1 decks. My thought was that by actually discussing these decks, and offering some basic strategies against them, some Standard players might be tempted to test the waters.

I know that there are a couple of people locally that are interested in playing Storm combo, and when they settle on a particular deck, I might try putting together something a little more advanced that focuses on that particular deck.

-Silent Requiem

[Vacrix]

You aren't really overcoming this misconception of "broken unbeatable turn 1 decks". I think you are actually strengthening that misconception by avoiding the discussion of why each deck is played. The point you should really be stressing here is that each deck gets destroyed by something. Example: TES vs. CB (and then a comparison could be drawn to DDFT because it beats CB).

My take on the article is that storm combo is awesome because you win very quickly via different engines. I don't know why people choose different engines, different kills, protection, etc. Further, I have no conception of how a deck like these can lose when they are so fast. Force of Will is really the backbone of combo, when it comes down to it. The only reason everyone isn't trying to build a consistently fast, glass house, storm combo deck is because of Force of Will (and more recently Mindbreak Trap but thats purely SB material). I think it deserves to be mentioned more than twice without any description of why its the main reason that storm combo decks slow down and pack protection, cantrips, land, etc. Otherwise, why not just play SI?

A brief discussion of matchups would make many of the more complex realizations more intuitive now that the player has grasped what the deck has to do to win its difficult matchups, ie. Krosan Grip is in the board to deal with Counterbalance, or Carpet of Flowers is in the board in order to play around Daze and Spell Pierce, while also produce mana to fuel protection spells and the combo turn. Such realizations become obvious once you know which matchpus will give you trouble. Otherwise, most of the cards (in the maindeck, and probably everything in the sideboard) that don't directly contribute to or protect the engine won't make any sense, ie. why does Solidarity play Rebuild? This especially important when you realize that these players have not been exposed to Legacy; they are standard players. Simply dropping the name Force of Will or Mindbreak Trap probably isn't a sufficient explanation. I'm sure most of these Standard players don't even know what sorts of decks play the hate cards you are talking about, that is if they even know what the cards do. I agree with NiRVeS, you should probably have links to the cards.

[Silent Requiem]

Hmm. Food for thought. Perhaps I'll take another run at an article, but this time really focusing on how non-storm players can beat storm decks.

-Silent Requiem

[Vacrix]

Hmm. Food for thought. Perhaps I'll take another run at an article, but this time really focusing on how non-storm players can beat storm decks.

Really?? Some would consider that masochism, being that you are a storm player yourself. :P

I think your current approach was good if you are trying to attract players to Legacy. It just needs some fine tuning.

[Bryant Cook]

I love that you named dropped me as Byrant instead of Bryant. But I'll forgive you.

It was a decent article, I was expecting more deck breakdowns. Maybe a part two is in order.

[Silent Requiem]

Fixed - and apologies.

I've actually rather enjoyed writing this (very basic) article, and I think I now want to do a series of articles on Storm decks.

The first one would really be about the approach I think new pilots should take to learning how to play Storm - I've seen many players try playing Storm the wrong way, only to give up when it just doesn't work. I'd like to offer some guidance based on my own experience and observations of others.

Then I think I'd like to do an article that looks at a whole range of Storm decks in a bit more detail than this article, but still only an overview. The idea here would be to let a new pilot know what decks are out there, and help him make an informed choice.

After that, I could write articles that focused on each deck in turn. As I obviously don't play every Storm deck, I would hope to send these articles to veteran pilots for proofreading first.

The holidays are coming up, so I might have a bit of spare time (I go crazy with nothing to do).

-Silent Requiem

Edit: I've started to put card tags in, but I don't like the way they fade out the card name. I've contacted the website host to try and get this fixed. If nothing else, this article should help get the bugs worked out for the articles that follow.