[Free Article] Crafting Doomsday Piles in Legacy Storm Combo

[emidln]

Crafting Doomsday Piles in Legacy Storm Combo

This scenario was propsed recently on the Storm Boards. I'll be clear that this isn't a real game scenario, just a theoretical exercise (you'll notice the graveyards are completely unrealistic). Even so, situations like these can be valuable in learning how to pilot something as non-linear as NLS. I've had quite a few requests for information on playing Doomsday, so I'll use this as a walk through in storming out with Doomsday.

We'll start out with a list:


// NLS as suggested by cheeseburger
1 Tendrils of Agony
3 Burning Wish
2 Infernal Tutor
4 Mystical Tutor
1 Ad Nauseam
1 Doomsday
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Meditate
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
4 Sensei's Divining Top
4 Lotus Petal
3 Chrome Mox
4 Lion's Eye Diamond
4 Dark Ritual
3 Cabal Ritual
4 Duress
4 Polluted Delta
3 Bloodstained Mire
2 Volcanic Island
1 Underground Sea
1 Badlands
2 Bayou
1 Island

SB: 1 Tendrils of Agony
SB: 1 Empty the Warrens
SB: 1 Grapeshot
SB: 1 Infernal Tutor
SB: 1 Doomsday
SB: 1 Thoughtseize
SB: 1 Reverent Silence
SB: 1 Chain of Vapor
SB: 1 Hurkyl's Recall
SB: 1 Krosan Grip
SB: 3 Xantid Swarm
SB: 1 Helm of Awakening
SB: 1 Deathmark

We're playing in a game 2 against U/W Dreadstill. I would normally recommend boarding Helm of Awakening and Grapeshot against any opponent who shows UW or WG, but we'll assume for this time that you didn't do that (it makes things super easy) because you didn't suspect Meddling Mage or you overlooked it. My sideboarding for this situation will be something like:

+3 Xantid Swarm
+1 Deathmark
+1 Krosan Grip

-1 Ponder
-1 Burning Wish
-1 Infernal Tutor
-1 Chrome Mox
-1 Cabal Ritual

Note: This is not the optimal sideboarding, but the person who presented this scenario left Ponder in but did not bring in Helm of Awakening.

Fastforward to turn 4ish. You've exhausted your opponent of relevant resources. In the dust formed of double Force of Will and a Stifle hide a 12/12 trampler and a Meddling Mage chanting hard against Tendrils of Agony. The mage has been doing double duty and you're at 12 life. Your opponent is sitting tall at 20 life but has no cards to his name. He does have some blue mana available from his lands. (Remember when I mentioned this scenario didn't make sense in real gameplay?) As you enter your main phase you have the following hand:

Dark Ritual, Doomsday, Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, Brainstorm, Ponder, Underground Sea

You have a Polluted Delta, Bayou, and Badlands in play with Bloodstained Mire and Polluted Delta in the graveyard. I claim that this is a rather straight-forward win for you. To understand why, let's look at Doomsday and then our situation.

Doomsday, for those unfamiliar with it, is a triple black-costing tutor finding any five cards you can scrounge between your library and graveyard placed in any order you'd like for the bargain basement price of half of your life total, rounded in your opponent's favor, and everything you didn't use from the yard and library. Doomsday is a capable storm engine for those willing to brave its sometimes bewildering options to craft the perfect pile to win the game.

The basic components to a good doomsday pile start with a way to draw your cards and always ends with a way to win the game. Most of the time, this means a way to produce card advantage and a Tendrils of Agony, Grapeshot, or Burning Wish to find one of the former. Stacked inbetween are mana-generating spells to lessen your needed initial investment and utility to pull you out of the bleakest of situations. Due to its steep cost, you'll want to have a way to break into your pile the turn you play Doomsday in order to finish the game that turn. This usually means something like Brainstorm, Ponder, or Sensei's Divining Top, although cards like Meditate, Infernal Tutor, and Ad Nauseam can do in a pinch.

Now that we have a grip on what Doomsday does, let's see what we have to work with. Dark Rituals and Cabal Ritual give us the ability to generate a lot of mana. Depending on whether or not we can swing threshold, that's either five or seven net black mana on top of our Underground Sea (U/B), Badlands (B/R), Bayou (B/G), and fetchland (U/B/R/G). We can safely count five cards (the two current fetches, our fetch in play, and both dark rituals) in the graveyard for the purposes of Threshold with Brainstorm, Ponder, and potential card draws still unaccounted for. That's putting us on five net mana added to our four lands right now.

So what can we do with nine mana? First off, we need to realize that we're automatically short BBBU which is going to be the cost of Doomsday and one of our cantrips. With that nine mana sitting at a real five, we need to figure out colors to work with. Bayou is a swamp in this deck for any purpose not related to Xantid Swarm, Krosan Grip, or Reverent Silence. Badlands can produce black for rituals or red for Burning Wish. Underground Sea taps for black or blue which can yield rituals or cantrips. Our fetchland can get us any color necessary. Do we have a preference?

The answer is yes. There is a Meddling Mage chanting against our most efficient storm engine and we need to get rid of that guy. That will cost us at least B, but possibly 1RB if we have Doomsday away our Deathmark instead of putting it in our pile. This probably won't be necessary since black mana is easier to come by than red (making the play of Wish breaking LED to get Deathmark mana much less likely). After we do that, we still need to win the game with Tendrils, costing 2BB. That's five mana, three of which needs to be black.

Adding in to this, we have to draw both Deathmark/Burning Wish and Tendrils. If we do this with Brainstorm we need some cards in hand which might be possible with what we have (or by using IGG) or by casting Meditate (the only raw card advantage in our deck). Given that our opponent has two Force of Wills and a Stifle to return if we cast Ill-Gotten Gains, we need to think about working with just what we have if we go the Brainstorm route or just using Meditate. Do we have the mana for Meditate? That's an additional 2U to add to our 2BBB from Deathmark + Tendrils not to mention the BBB for Doomsday and U for at least one Brainstorm/Ponder.

Let's run some quick math. Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual turns B from Bayou into BBBBBB. Meditate + Brainstorm requires at least UU which we can provide from Underground Sea and our fetchland. That leaves us with an additional B/R to work with. Right now, we have 4UUBBBBBB in costs for our pile with three slots determined. We currently have (B/R) + BBBBBBUU. That means we are at least five mana short of winning the game.

Can we make five mana with two slots? Yes. Here's what we have to work with in NLS:

Name: Dark Ritual
Cost: B
Provides: BBB
Net: +BB

Name: Cabal Ritual
Cost: 1B
Provides: BBB or BBBBB
Net: +B or +BBB

Name: Lion's Eye Diamond
Cost: 0
Provides: BBB, UUU, RRR
Net: +BBB, +UUU, +RRR

Name: Lotus Petal
Cost: 0
Provides: U, R, B
Net: +U, +R, +B

Name: Chrome Mox
Cost: 0, one card in hand
Provides: U, R, B
Net: +U, +R, +B

Right off, we see that Lion's Eye Diamond is our best mana producer followed by threshed Cabal Ritual, Dark Ritual, Lotus Petal, unthreshed Cabal Ritual, and Chrome Mox. Two Lion's Eye Diamonds would give us +6 mana, but the drawback is that it doesn't actually cast cards in our hand, only stuff we draw into or tutor for. Chrome Mox can be ruled out as it's worse than Lotus Petal in every situation where you could legally play Lotus Petal that wouldn't kill you except when you need to get Hellbent or you need to RFG something to be played with Lion's Eye Diamond that isn't already available in your wishboard. Cabal Ritual is worse than Dark Ritual and Lotus Petal after Doomsday since we can rarely get Threshold and it only produces black. That leaves our viable choices at Lion's Eye Diamond (if we can get around its drawback), Dark Ritual, and Lotus Petal.

Let's get a picture together of our Doomsday pile:

Meditate
Card X
Card Y
Deathmark
Tendrils of Agony/Burning Wish

When we cast Doomsday we'll have the following mana available: BBB + (B/R) + UU. We'll have Brainstorm and Ponder in hand to work with. We know that we'll be using U to play a cantrip and probably be using 2U to cast Meditate. If we use UUBB to cast Brainstorm/Ponder and Meditate, that would leave us with B + (B/R) with which to cast Card X, Card Y, Deathmark, and Tendrils/Wish.

So can we do it? Let's try with Dark Rituals. That would leave us with BBBBB + (B/R). If we cast Deathmark, that brings us to BBBB + B/R. This looks like it's enough, but what is our storm count? Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, Doomsday, Brainstorm/Ponder, Meditate, Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Deathmark, Tendrils gets us 10 copies of Tendrils for 20 lifeloss. This works for our situation, but what if our opponent was at more life. Could we get more out of our pile?

If we try with Lion's Eye Diamonds, we'll have B + (B/R), Death Mark, and a Burning Wish/Tendrils in hand after Meditate. As we can't use LED mana to pay for Wish or Tendrils, it seems that we're short with our format's Black Lotus. What about a combination? If we combine Lion's Eye Diamond and Dark Ritual, we can get there. Dark Ritual + LED would leave us with BBB + (B/R). If we assume we have Burning Wish, we can cast Deathmark and Burning Wish for Tendrils with enough mana to cast Tendrils if we crack LED with Burning Wish on the stack. That would yield 11 copies of Tendrils of Agony for 22 lifeloss. The only caveat here is that we need to crack our fetchland for a blue mana source before casting Doomsday.

This is the best way to approach this particular situation, but what happens if you play non-optimally? Say you don't see this path and you still want to win, what's the line of play? The scenario on storm boards suggests casting Ponder. In this situation, we play our Underground Sea and see Deathmark, Burning Wish, and Infernal Tutor.

So to recap from this point, we're facing down lethal damage and don't have the ability to currently cast Tendrils of Agony. We now have a fetchland, a Bayou, and a Badlands available to usage along with two Dark Rituals, Cabal Ritual, Doomsday, Brainstorm, and a card to be selected. I'm going to claim that we can win with each of these. I'm going to examine one line of play here and leave the other two as an excercise to the reader that will be explained in my next article.

Let's grab Infernal Tutor making our hand Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, Infernal Tutor, Doomsday, Brainstorm with (B/R) + B + (B/R/U) available. What lines of play do we have? Our graveyard is now 3 cards deep with two dark rituals and a fetchland guaranteed before a possible Cabal Ritual. Sadly this doesn't fully power our Cabal Ritual so we'd be looking at (B/R) + BBBBBB + (B/R/U). Is this good enough?

If we assume we are casting Doomsday and then Brainstorm into our pile, that'll leave us with (B/R) + BBB + (B/R/U). We can grab two cards off the top of our Doomsday pile thanks to Brainstorm and our seemingly worthless Infernal Tutor. This is good news because to produce raw card advantage all we have is the blue Meditate. If we want to play Meditate, we'll need to include blue mana in the form of Lotus Petal or Sensei's Divining Top and Lion's Eye Diamond. Let's explore SDT and LED.

If we start out pile with SDT, LED, and Meditate, we can assume that we still need a win condition. That leaves us with one slot after Tendrils/Burning Wish, a slot that probably should be Deathmark if we want to actually cast our win condition. With SDT + LED, we'd have the mana for Meditate along with (B/R) + BB with which to cast our win condition and Deathmark. This doesn't appear to cut it so we'll look at Lotus Petal as a means of casting Meditate.

If we Brainstorm into Meditate + Lotus Petal, we'd cast Meditate with (B/R) + B floating into Deathmark, Infernal Tutor, Tendrils/Burning Wish, and one card. Once we cast Deathmark, we'll have (B/R) to work with assuming LED, or (B/R) + BB to work with assuming Dark Ritual. Neither of these are good enough to cast a win condition so we have to find something else.

Can we ignore Meddling Mage? Grapeshot would require 19 storm + casting Grapeshot, but that is definitely possible in this deck. What are our storm-inflating options?

Cast Doomsday + Draw spell. Doomsday grants us five cards with which to further work with, cards we know will work. Double Doomsday piles aren't our of the question (they've been seen rarely in the wild, but they exist), but they do tend to require Sensei's Divining Top as a way of using Lion's Eye Diamond (your most efficient mana producer) and as a way to redraw into your new Doomsday pile. As we lack SDT, and these piles tend to be extremely mana-intensive, I'll skip this line of play.

Cast Ill-Gotten Gains. This provides additional cards in hand, specifically cards you've already used or rid yourself of in the form of stuff from your graveyard. This is probably not good enough here because our opponents can gain Force of Will and Stifle to stop our efforts cast Ill-Gotten Gains.

Loop Sensei's Divining Tops. This is most efficient with Helm of Awakening, but even without Helm, two SDTs can provide storm linearly with mana invested (1 mana for 1 storm). We don't have any SDTs so we'd need to stack two SDTs as well as X mana to get to our 19 storm + grapeshot. If we assume that we have Ponder, Dark Rit, Dark Rit, Cabal Rit, Doomsday, Brainstorm, SDT, SDT, and Grapeshot, that only leaves 11 storm, at least a couple of which could probably come from further Dark Rituals or Lion's Eye Diamonds. Unfortunately, as we only have two slots, we could maximally provide eight storm with 2 LED + the 6 mana they provide. This is of course assuming that we get to draw 4 cards for free to get SDT x2 and LED x2, which probably won't go over too well with your opponent.

Burning Wish into Burning Wish. This isn't quite as efficient as Sensei's Divining Tops, but it does have the added benefit of only requiring one slot in our Doomsday pile. Sadly, this only provides 1 storm for every 2 mana, so our two Lion's Eye Diamonds would only get us 5 storm with Burning Wishes, although we could increase that with another LED and some of the mana used to play the initial Sensei's Divining Tops. Even so, this falls short of lethal using Grapeshot in our situation.

After going over our options, it looks like we probably do have to remove Meddling Mage to win the game. This will bring us back to other lines of play. There are several that we haven't explored yet. Let's list them:

a) Brainstorm to get rid of Doomsday and try to win with Infernal Tutor into Ad Nauseam or Tendrils (depending on exact storm count).

b) Infernal Tutor for Dark Ritual

c) Infernal Tutor for Cabal Ritual

d) Infernal Tutor for Brainstorm

e) Infernal Tutor for Doomsday

We can immediately eliminate (d) and (e) due to not having multiple blue mana and not having a second Doomsday in the deck.

Let's look at (a). If we Brainstorm, we'll be shuffling our deck first with a fetchland and we'll look at three fresh cards. To win the game off our three cards we'll need to find Ad Nauseam, more acceleration in the form of Dark Ritual/Cabal Ritual/Lion's Eye Diamond/Lotus Petal, or Deathmark. If we don't find Ad Nauseam, more acceleration would get us the ability to Ad Nauseam and possibly draw us out of our situation by finding a way to remove Meddling Mage or a way to generate more storm thus winning with Grapeshot. This isn't guaranteed at 12 life, but certainly possible. If we found Deathmark, we could likely just cast it on Meddling Mage and Infernal Tutor directly for Tendrils or indirectly by way of Burning Wish to up the storm count. The caveat here is that if we don't draw well off our Brainstorm (i.e. we draw more than 1 card that we can't cast or get rid of (like via Chrome Mox; e.g. 2 lands)) we won't have hellbent for Infernal Tutor. This isn't a guaranteed win so we'll want to skip this here and come back to it if we can't find something better.

(b) presents some interesting questions. If we Infernal Tutor for Dark Ritual, we have a mana neutral play as Infernal Tutor costs as much as another Dark Ritual would net. However, when we do this, we add cards to the graveyard and increase storm count while removing a card in our hand that we don't want anyway. If we do that, we can have, at max, BBBBBBBB + (B/R) + (U/B/R) available to us with Doomsday and Brainstorm both accessible. Can we win the game with that?

At first glance, we might be able to win, but upon further inspection we'll find that we lack the ability to draw both Deathmark and a win condition. This is because our Card Advantage source needs blue mana (Meditate) and we'll be spending our only possible blue on Brainstorm. So we've failed on this line of play, but what if we don't get our maximum mana?

Let's say that we Infernal Tutor for Dark Ritual, but we don't cast both Dark Rituals immediately. We'll still have Threshold for Cabal Ritual, but we'll only get BBB + (B/R) + (U/R/B) after Doomsday. This does let us Brainstorm into Meditate + Lotus Petal, but do we have enough gas left afterwards? Let's build this pile:

Meditate
Lotus Petal
Card X
Deathmark
Tendrils of Agony/Burning Wish

If we Brainstorm into Meditate + Lotus Petal, we put back Dark Ritual and Card X. That leaves our deck in this order:

Dark Ritual
Card X
Deathmark
Tendrils of Agony/Burning Wish

If we cast Lotus Petal and Meditate, we'll have B + (B/R) floating with Dark Ritual, Card X, Deathmark, and Tendrils of Agony/Burning Wish in hand. This lets us cast Dark Ritual for BBB + (B/R), Card X (which we can assume as acceleration in the form of Dark Ritual, Lotus Petal, or Lion's Eye Diamond (if we use Burning Wish to increase storm)), Death Mark with BB + (B/R) + mana from Card X, and finally our win condition. This works with Dark Ritual/Lotus Petal as Card X with Tendrils of Agony as our fifth card or with Lion's Eye Diamond as our fifth card with Burning Wish into Tendrils of Agony.

So there you have it, a step-by-step analysis of navigating Doomsday piles when playing a legacy storm combo deck. I plan on doing a follow up article where I explain the same Ponder scenario drawing Deathmark or Burning Wish. I encourage you to try to figure out these scenarios before the article to test your knowledge. If there is interest, I can try to put together something from real game scenarios playing against more interactive hate.

Thanks go out to the BZK crew, Bryant, cheeseburger (who I stole the scenario from), and storm boards for all the help.

- Brandon Adams <emidln@gmail.com>

[GreenOne]

That will cost us at least B, but possibly 1RB if we have Doomsday away our Deathmark instead of putting it in our pile.
(...)
Burning Wish into Burning Wish. This isn't quite as efficient as Sensei's Divining Tops, but it does have the added benefit of only requiring one slot in our Doomsday pile.

DON'T TRY THOSE AT HOME AFTER M10.

Those tricks doesn't work anymore, now that we're exiling things instead of removing them from the game.
Obviously same thing happens for wishing for a removed card with Chrome Mox.

Strange list you're playing, but interesting nonetheless.
You chose the right time to write an article about doomsday, cause some combo players might want to start playing it now that AN has not the LED+Mystical trick anymore to work with.

The article shows how's working with Doomsday is going to be challenging and complicated, but with huge payoffs as well. I mean, winning on the back of 1 card, a bunch of mana and a draw spell is not bad when facing a Meddling Mage. A lucky AN aside, this is the only card that saves you.

Keep on doing those articles and we'll keep on doing math: storm combo needs to be covered better by writers and more people needs to actually play it.

[JeroenC]

I love the list. I was looking to update my own DDFT a little bit and this looks damn fantastic. I don't have time to read through the entire article now (study break is almost over) but I certainly will. Storm combo seems like the prime deck for me to play at the moment and if it's got Doomsday, it's got me playing it.

[TrialByFire]

Also you can't wish for anything exiled because of Doomsday. I understand that Exile being part of the in game area opens up new design space, but why couldn't they just errata the wishes to work how they used to? It's only 6 cards

[erwin.zeez]

I think I prefer the bouncelands myself

[Ciberon]

DON'T TRY THOSE AT HOME AFTER M10.

He boarded out a Burning Wish, so it's alright.

[emidln]

This is still an okay guide for learning how to play Doomsday, but please don't look too closely at an ancient NLS list.

Also, some notes on this article:

You can't Doomsday away stuff then Burning Wish for it anymore. This is what was meant by don't try this at home. One of the lines of play I explored was Doomsday removing Deathmark then using Burning Wish + LED to net me the mana necessary to cast Deathmark. This isn't possibly anymore unless you had a Deathmark already in your sideboard.

The Burning Wish into Burning Wish play still works in this example, but only because Burning Wish was sided out. This means you can only do it once. If you don't have a Burning Wish in your sideboard (from deck construction or sideboarding), this line of play wouldn't be open to you.

Edit:

I think I prefer the bouncelands myself

"Gentlemen, which brings me to my next point: Don't Smoke Crack."