jackbohlen
09-21-2011, 10:30 PM
SNT – Spanish Nauseam Tendrils
A new storm combo deck designed to have the same natural advantages against aggro as ANT and TES while also having greater game against the control and aggro-control decks that have traditionally proven extremely difficult for storm combo to defeat.
I posted an earlier version of this deck a while ago, just after New Phyrexia was spoiled. Although testing suggested that the concept had promise, there did seem to be a few issues, mainly to do with consistency. Since then I have refined the deck significantly, and have also goldfished it repeatedly in order to discover things like the average kill turn and the percentage of mulligans. In testing, however, it seemed that Mental Misstep was just too great an obstacle for this deck to reliably overcome – not that it wasn’t capable of doing so occasionally – but now with Misstep gone, I think this deck is very well positioned for the metagame.
The prompt for the creation of this deck was the interaction between Gitaxian Probe and Cabal Therapy: it seemed obvious that the two could be part of a powerful discard engine, and equally obvious that both of them would, theoretically, be at home in a storm deck. Both of them can be cast for 0 mana, thus building storm count, and both can help you work round countermagic in different ways. I then realised that Cabal Therapy could potentially be a more useful discard effect than Thoughtseize or Duress for storm combo: because you can cast it without paying mana, it should be easier to engineer a turn where you can strip their hand of countermagic and then go off, and because it can hit multiple cards, it can get you out of situations where any other spell would be useless. In particular, the ability to hit multiple Force of Wills or Brainstorms seemed like it could be game-changing.
Of course, for Cabal Therapy to be effective, the deck would also have to have creatures in it, not a particularly common sight in storm decks. So to understand how creatures could be successfully integrated into a storm deck, I turned to the Spanish Inquisition, a deck that most of you are probably familiar with that is built around draw spells like Infernal Contract and uses cheap creatures to fuel Culling the Weak, the centrepiece of its fast mana suite. Some variants of SI have also used Diabolic Intent as a sort of backup Infernal Tutor. Between these two cards and Cabal Therapy itself, I had a strong incentive to include creatures in the deck.
The actual draw engine of Spanish Inquisition decks though seemed unnecessarily inconsistent when Ad Nauseam is available. With this in mind, I set out to see whether Culling the Weak and Diabolic Intent could be put to use in a deck that aimed, much like ANT, to win through the overwhelming advantage generated by Ad Nauseam or by an Ill-Gotten Gains loop. Eventually, I was able to construct a hybrid deck that was able to incorporate the disruptive power of Cabal Therapy and the explosiveness of Culling the Weak into a consistent gameplan of resolving Ad Nauseam and winning easily from there.
Why play this deck over ANT? ANT has a very set game-plan of clearing the way with discard and then going for the kill. While a solid strategy, it often isn't enough to deal with decks heavy on countermagic. This deck, by contrast, while capable of extremely fast wins - at least 35% of the time you can win on or before Turn 2 - is also capable of slowing itself down, stopping any offense with Shield Spheres while digging for Cabal Therapies, then using them multiple times in a single turn to completely strip the opponent of countermagic. ANT can't really do this because each of their discard spells takes at most 1 piece of countermagic from the opponents hand, so the rate at which they find them can never exceed the rate at which the opponent finds countermagic.
Anyway, that's this deck's history and strategy briefly outlined. Here is the deck itself:
SNT – Spanish Nauseam Tendrils
Land
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Underground Sea
1 Swamp
1 Island
2 Dryad Arbor
Fast mana
4 Lotus Petal
4 Dark Ritual
3 Culling the Weak
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
Search
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
3 Gitaxian Probe
4 Infernal Tutor
3 Diabolic Intent
Disruption
4 Cabal Therapy
Creatures
4 Shield Sphere
Win Conditions
1 Ad Nauseam
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Tendrils of Agony
As with ANT, there are multiple routes to victory here. The easiest, but least reliable (only relative to the other plans, it’s still incredibly consistent), is to draw a tonne of cards off of Ad Nauseam. From a reasonably high life total – 15 upwards, say – you’re virtually guaranteed to win the game. Lower than that – down to 7ish I’d say – you still have a very good chance if, when you cast it, you either have mana floating or you haven’t used your land-drop.
A much more reliable way to win is through an Ill-Gotten Gains loop – note that the Cabal Therapies mean that you can often do this even against decks you wouldn’t traditionally have been able to (decks that will just recycle their FoWs if you give them the chance). A third way – although this comes up very rarely – is just to chain tutors until you hit Tendrils.
To prove that this deck was as consistent as ANT and TES, I goldfished 100 games and kept records of them. Further testing has confirmed my findings there: the average kill-turn, when the deck is pushed for speed, is 3.1. The Turn 1 kill percentage is just under 10%. If you’re not willing to slow your kill down at all, then you have access to, on average, about 1 Cabal Therapy a game.
Also of note is the fact that, with Mental Misstep gone, this deck can produce some of the least beatable hands in the format. I mean, how many Force of Wills does it take to beat a hand of Swamp, Shield Sphere, Cabal Therapy, Lotus Petal, Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Ad Nauseam? They’re rare, but these sort of hands do happen.
Now, some individual card notes:
Dark Ritual, Lotus Petal, Infernal Tutor, Lion’s Eye Diamond, Ad Nauseam – the part of the deck ported from ANT. This is the central engine of the deck, and all your other mana-producing cards and tutor-effects act as backup copies of these.
Ponder, Brainstorm – auto-includes. Tried replacing 1 Ponder with the last Probe but the fall in consistency just wasn’t worth it.
Diabolic Intent – backup Infernal Tutors. Note, however, that there are lots of situations where you’d much rather have one of these than an IT. They also serve a vital role in that they help make up for the fact that you only have 4 cards worth of disruption in the deck, since it will often be correct to use a DI to search for a Therapy.
Culling the Weak – backup rituals. These take the slots that would belong to Cabal Rituals in other storm decks. Obviously, these are a lot better in the early game than CRs are, so drawing one will often give you some real explosive power, letting you occasionally play a lot more like a belcher deck and less like ANT.
Cabal Therapy – One of the main reasons to play this deck. Superior to Thoughtsieze and Duress on so many levels: you don’t need to pay mana for it, meaning that you can use it more easily on the same turn you want to go off; you can cast it from your graveyard to get rid of any FoWs they return to their hand when you cast Ill-Gotten Gains; it’s much better against aggro than Duress or Thoughtseize, meaning that if you don’t know what your opponents on, you can keep hands with multiple Therapies but little digging action safe in the knowledge that your Therapies will buy you time to find what you need; it can take multiple Forces and Brainstorms out of their hand at once.
Gitaxian Probe - Obviously synergises with Cabal Therapy. It can also build storm count, but it's most important role is to let you know what mode you should be playing the deck in: it tells you when you should be assembling an unbeatable grip and when you should just go for the kill. Note that as tempting as it can be to cycle these asap, it’s often correct to hold them in hand for that last extra storm count you need when you’re about to go into an IGGY loop.
Shield Sphere – One criticism of the deck is that you have to run dead cards like these to take advantage of your Therapies, your CtWs and your DIs. However, I like to think of this card as sometimes a ritual, sometimes a tutor and sometimes disruption, all depending on what you have in your hand. Also, in a lot of matchups having a blocker is crucial for keeping your life-total high enough to safely cast Ad Nauseam – it’s perfectly possible for ANT to lose to something like Goblins if you keep a slow hand and they have a god draw, and Shield Sphere puts a stop to those shenanigans. Also, I know people look at this deck and think that having creatures makes it vulnerable to creature-kill where other storm decks would just shrug and laugh, but that isn't really true. If you suspect they have access to creature kill, you can just hold your Spheres and your Dryad Arbors in your hand until the turn you want to go off, at which point there isn't much you can do about it, since sacrificing for Culling the Weak and Diabolic Intent is part of the cost - it's not like Polymorph where they can just fizzle your spell by killing your guy.
Dryad Arbor - Possibly the most important card in the deck. Without these, there just wouldn't be enough room to fit in all the cool spells that want you to sac creatures and enough creatures to fuel them. Dryad Arbor, because it can be searched by fetches, lets you have 10 cards that all provide you with creatures, plus your Shield Spheres.
SIDEBOARD
I currently have two sideboards, one more radical than the other, and am undecided as to which is better. This is the first one, the more traditional of the two:
4 Green Sun’s Zenith
1 Xantid Swarm
1 Eternal Witness/Terastodon
3 Duress
3 Beast Within
2 Praetor’s Grasp
1 Tropical Island
The Praetor’s Grasps are a way of dealing with other storm decks without reducing your own consistency. The Duresses are for control decks where you want to load up on disruption and for when you know they’ll probably be bringing in hate and you want the ability to pluck it from their hands. The Beast Withins could be bounce spells like Chain of Vapor, but I prefer the ability to get rid of something permanently – either way, you need some slots devoted to dealing with troublesome permanents like Canonist, Teeg, Chalice, etc. The Xantid Swarm is to fight counterspells while the GSZ can find it for you. The Trop is necessary if you’re bringing in green spells.
The last slot is still up in the air between Eternal Witness and Terrastodon. Basically, I wanted a way to make GSZ not only a source of disruption but also a potential win-condition: against control decks, combo decks need plenty of both. Eternal Witness lets you rebuy key cards that have been countered, whereas Terastodon means that should you end up with lots of mana and a Zenith you can turn it into a powerful offensive weapon. It’s probably too cute and I should probably just go with the Witness, but it’s an idea at least.
This is the second sideboard (note that if you run this, you also need to replace 2 Shield Spheres in the maindeck with Ornithopters):
1 Batterskull
4 Dark Confidant
2 Savannah
1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
4 Stoneforge Mystic
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
2 Thoughtseize
When I first had this idea, I thought it would end up as a bizarre joke. It turns out that, for this deck, this transformative sibeboard plan is actually really powerful. Basically, you side in the whole thing (although note that the Dark Confidants and the Thoughtseizes can both be brought in on their own against certain matchups) and take out: 2 Shield Spheres, 1 Dryad Arbor, 4 Infernal Tutor, 1 Tendrils of Agony, 1 Ill-Gotten Gains, 1 Culling the Weak, 4 Lion’s Eye Diamond, 1 Ad Nauseam.
Now, you’re a fish-style deck that powers out the 2 best creatures in the game while disrupting the opponent with discard, filtering through your cards with cantrips and tutors (Diabolic Intent) and gaining mana advantage with rituals before putting the game away, if you need to, which you often don’t, by tutoring up Sheoldred, saccing your creatures to Culling the Weaks and then casting her.
Although it looks like you’re just resting on the inherent power of the cards here, and you are to a large extent, there’s actually a tonne of synergy involved: Stoneforge finds you equipment that you can then attach to the flying Ornithopter, Rituals give you mana to cast Batterskull, Batterskull gives you a recurring body you can sac to CtW, DI or Cabal Therapy, Sheoldred brings back the creatures you sacrificed for various effects, etc.
Certainly the deck will feel clunky after boarding, and you wouldn’t design a deck like this to be played in Game 1 situations, but it does have a lot of raw power, and does a good job of sidestepping any sideboarding plan your opponent might have against storm combo.
So, that's the deck, and two possible sideboard plans. It's certainly not strictly better than ANT, but it does have some distinct advantages. Let me know if you have any questions about it, and I'd appreciate any feedback.
A new storm combo deck designed to have the same natural advantages against aggro as ANT and TES while also having greater game against the control and aggro-control decks that have traditionally proven extremely difficult for storm combo to defeat.
I posted an earlier version of this deck a while ago, just after New Phyrexia was spoiled. Although testing suggested that the concept had promise, there did seem to be a few issues, mainly to do with consistency. Since then I have refined the deck significantly, and have also goldfished it repeatedly in order to discover things like the average kill turn and the percentage of mulligans. In testing, however, it seemed that Mental Misstep was just too great an obstacle for this deck to reliably overcome – not that it wasn’t capable of doing so occasionally – but now with Misstep gone, I think this deck is very well positioned for the metagame.
The prompt for the creation of this deck was the interaction between Gitaxian Probe and Cabal Therapy: it seemed obvious that the two could be part of a powerful discard engine, and equally obvious that both of them would, theoretically, be at home in a storm deck. Both of them can be cast for 0 mana, thus building storm count, and both can help you work round countermagic in different ways. I then realised that Cabal Therapy could potentially be a more useful discard effect than Thoughtseize or Duress for storm combo: because you can cast it without paying mana, it should be easier to engineer a turn where you can strip their hand of countermagic and then go off, and because it can hit multiple cards, it can get you out of situations where any other spell would be useless. In particular, the ability to hit multiple Force of Wills or Brainstorms seemed like it could be game-changing.
Of course, for Cabal Therapy to be effective, the deck would also have to have creatures in it, not a particularly common sight in storm decks. So to understand how creatures could be successfully integrated into a storm deck, I turned to the Spanish Inquisition, a deck that most of you are probably familiar with that is built around draw spells like Infernal Contract and uses cheap creatures to fuel Culling the Weak, the centrepiece of its fast mana suite. Some variants of SI have also used Diabolic Intent as a sort of backup Infernal Tutor. Between these two cards and Cabal Therapy itself, I had a strong incentive to include creatures in the deck.
The actual draw engine of Spanish Inquisition decks though seemed unnecessarily inconsistent when Ad Nauseam is available. With this in mind, I set out to see whether Culling the Weak and Diabolic Intent could be put to use in a deck that aimed, much like ANT, to win through the overwhelming advantage generated by Ad Nauseam or by an Ill-Gotten Gains loop. Eventually, I was able to construct a hybrid deck that was able to incorporate the disruptive power of Cabal Therapy and the explosiveness of Culling the Weak into a consistent gameplan of resolving Ad Nauseam and winning easily from there.
Why play this deck over ANT? ANT has a very set game-plan of clearing the way with discard and then going for the kill. While a solid strategy, it often isn't enough to deal with decks heavy on countermagic. This deck, by contrast, while capable of extremely fast wins - at least 35% of the time you can win on or before Turn 2 - is also capable of slowing itself down, stopping any offense with Shield Spheres while digging for Cabal Therapies, then using them multiple times in a single turn to completely strip the opponent of countermagic. ANT can't really do this because each of their discard spells takes at most 1 piece of countermagic from the opponents hand, so the rate at which they find them can never exceed the rate at which the opponent finds countermagic.
Anyway, that's this deck's history and strategy briefly outlined. Here is the deck itself:
SNT – Spanish Nauseam Tendrils
Land
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Underground Sea
1 Swamp
1 Island
2 Dryad Arbor
Fast mana
4 Lotus Petal
4 Dark Ritual
3 Culling the Weak
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
Search
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
3 Gitaxian Probe
4 Infernal Tutor
3 Diabolic Intent
Disruption
4 Cabal Therapy
Creatures
4 Shield Sphere
Win Conditions
1 Ad Nauseam
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Tendrils of Agony
As with ANT, there are multiple routes to victory here. The easiest, but least reliable (only relative to the other plans, it’s still incredibly consistent), is to draw a tonne of cards off of Ad Nauseam. From a reasonably high life total – 15 upwards, say – you’re virtually guaranteed to win the game. Lower than that – down to 7ish I’d say – you still have a very good chance if, when you cast it, you either have mana floating or you haven’t used your land-drop.
A much more reliable way to win is through an Ill-Gotten Gains loop – note that the Cabal Therapies mean that you can often do this even against decks you wouldn’t traditionally have been able to (decks that will just recycle their FoWs if you give them the chance). A third way – although this comes up very rarely – is just to chain tutors until you hit Tendrils.
To prove that this deck was as consistent as ANT and TES, I goldfished 100 games and kept records of them. Further testing has confirmed my findings there: the average kill-turn, when the deck is pushed for speed, is 3.1. The Turn 1 kill percentage is just under 10%. If you’re not willing to slow your kill down at all, then you have access to, on average, about 1 Cabal Therapy a game.
Also of note is the fact that, with Mental Misstep gone, this deck can produce some of the least beatable hands in the format. I mean, how many Force of Wills does it take to beat a hand of Swamp, Shield Sphere, Cabal Therapy, Lotus Petal, Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Ad Nauseam? They’re rare, but these sort of hands do happen.
Now, some individual card notes:
Dark Ritual, Lotus Petal, Infernal Tutor, Lion’s Eye Diamond, Ad Nauseam – the part of the deck ported from ANT. This is the central engine of the deck, and all your other mana-producing cards and tutor-effects act as backup copies of these.
Ponder, Brainstorm – auto-includes. Tried replacing 1 Ponder with the last Probe but the fall in consistency just wasn’t worth it.
Diabolic Intent – backup Infernal Tutors. Note, however, that there are lots of situations where you’d much rather have one of these than an IT. They also serve a vital role in that they help make up for the fact that you only have 4 cards worth of disruption in the deck, since it will often be correct to use a DI to search for a Therapy.
Culling the Weak – backup rituals. These take the slots that would belong to Cabal Rituals in other storm decks. Obviously, these are a lot better in the early game than CRs are, so drawing one will often give you some real explosive power, letting you occasionally play a lot more like a belcher deck and less like ANT.
Cabal Therapy – One of the main reasons to play this deck. Superior to Thoughtsieze and Duress on so many levels: you don’t need to pay mana for it, meaning that you can use it more easily on the same turn you want to go off; you can cast it from your graveyard to get rid of any FoWs they return to their hand when you cast Ill-Gotten Gains; it’s much better against aggro than Duress or Thoughtseize, meaning that if you don’t know what your opponents on, you can keep hands with multiple Therapies but little digging action safe in the knowledge that your Therapies will buy you time to find what you need; it can take multiple Forces and Brainstorms out of their hand at once.
Gitaxian Probe - Obviously synergises with Cabal Therapy. It can also build storm count, but it's most important role is to let you know what mode you should be playing the deck in: it tells you when you should be assembling an unbeatable grip and when you should just go for the kill. Note that as tempting as it can be to cycle these asap, it’s often correct to hold them in hand for that last extra storm count you need when you’re about to go into an IGGY loop.
Shield Sphere – One criticism of the deck is that you have to run dead cards like these to take advantage of your Therapies, your CtWs and your DIs. However, I like to think of this card as sometimes a ritual, sometimes a tutor and sometimes disruption, all depending on what you have in your hand. Also, in a lot of matchups having a blocker is crucial for keeping your life-total high enough to safely cast Ad Nauseam – it’s perfectly possible for ANT to lose to something like Goblins if you keep a slow hand and they have a god draw, and Shield Sphere puts a stop to those shenanigans. Also, I know people look at this deck and think that having creatures makes it vulnerable to creature-kill where other storm decks would just shrug and laugh, but that isn't really true. If you suspect they have access to creature kill, you can just hold your Spheres and your Dryad Arbors in your hand until the turn you want to go off, at which point there isn't much you can do about it, since sacrificing for Culling the Weak and Diabolic Intent is part of the cost - it's not like Polymorph where they can just fizzle your spell by killing your guy.
Dryad Arbor - Possibly the most important card in the deck. Without these, there just wouldn't be enough room to fit in all the cool spells that want you to sac creatures and enough creatures to fuel them. Dryad Arbor, because it can be searched by fetches, lets you have 10 cards that all provide you with creatures, plus your Shield Spheres.
SIDEBOARD
I currently have two sideboards, one more radical than the other, and am undecided as to which is better. This is the first one, the more traditional of the two:
4 Green Sun’s Zenith
1 Xantid Swarm
1 Eternal Witness/Terastodon
3 Duress
3 Beast Within
2 Praetor’s Grasp
1 Tropical Island
The Praetor’s Grasps are a way of dealing with other storm decks without reducing your own consistency. The Duresses are for control decks where you want to load up on disruption and for when you know they’ll probably be bringing in hate and you want the ability to pluck it from their hands. The Beast Withins could be bounce spells like Chain of Vapor, but I prefer the ability to get rid of something permanently – either way, you need some slots devoted to dealing with troublesome permanents like Canonist, Teeg, Chalice, etc. The Xantid Swarm is to fight counterspells while the GSZ can find it for you. The Trop is necessary if you’re bringing in green spells.
The last slot is still up in the air between Eternal Witness and Terrastodon. Basically, I wanted a way to make GSZ not only a source of disruption but also a potential win-condition: against control decks, combo decks need plenty of both. Eternal Witness lets you rebuy key cards that have been countered, whereas Terastodon means that should you end up with lots of mana and a Zenith you can turn it into a powerful offensive weapon. It’s probably too cute and I should probably just go with the Witness, but it’s an idea at least.
This is the second sideboard (note that if you run this, you also need to replace 2 Shield Spheres in the maindeck with Ornithopters):
1 Batterskull
4 Dark Confidant
2 Savannah
1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
4 Stoneforge Mystic
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
2 Thoughtseize
When I first had this idea, I thought it would end up as a bizarre joke. It turns out that, for this deck, this transformative sibeboard plan is actually really powerful. Basically, you side in the whole thing (although note that the Dark Confidants and the Thoughtseizes can both be brought in on their own against certain matchups) and take out: 2 Shield Spheres, 1 Dryad Arbor, 4 Infernal Tutor, 1 Tendrils of Agony, 1 Ill-Gotten Gains, 1 Culling the Weak, 4 Lion’s Eye Diamond, 1 Ad Nauseam.
Now, you’re a fish-style deck that powers out the 2 best creatures in the game while disrupting the opponent with discard, filtering through your cards with cantrips and tutors (Diabolic Intent) and gaining mana advantage with rituals before putting the game away, if you need to, which you often don’t, by tutoring up Sheoldred, saccing your creatures to Culling the Weaks and then casting her.
Although it looks like you’re just resting on the inherent power of the cards here, and you are to a large extent, there’s actually a tonne of synergy involved: Stoneforge finds you equipment that you can then attach to the flying Ornithopter, Rituals give you mana to cast Batterskull, Batterskull gives you a recurring body you can sac to CtW, DI or Cabal Therapy, Sheoldred brings back the creatures you sacrificed for various effects, etc.
Certainly the deck will feel clunky after boarding, and you wouldn’t design a deck like this to be played in Game 1 situations, but it does have a lot of raw power, and does a good job of sidestepping any sideboarding plan your opponent might have against storm combo.
So, that's the deck, and two possible sideboard plans. It's certainly not strictly better than ANT, but it does have some distinct advantages. Let me know if you have any questions about it, and I'd appreciate any feedback.