There is a thread for this deck on MTGS here.
Intro:
This deck uses the basic concepts of Solidarity with one rather large difference: The deck is not instant speed. Although this means that the deck loses the amazing untapping power of Reset, it gains a far greater card pool, which in turn supplies the deck with more consistency, speed, and resiliency (A full comparison with Solidarity will be made later). The deck now goldfishes an amazingly consistent turn 3-4 win.
For those who don't know, the deck works by generating ridiculous amounts of mana through the use of High Tide(s) and multiple untap effects, drawing insane amounts of cards, and casting a huge Stroke of Genius and/or Brain Freeze for the kill.
My current list looks like this:
Main Deck:
4x Force of Will
3x Meditate
4x Ideas Unbound
4x Cloud of Faeries
3x Snap
3x Turnabout
4x High Tide
3x Cunning Wish
4x Merchant Scroll
4x Serum Visions
4x Sleight of Hand
4x Brainstorm
3x Flooded Strand
3x Polluted Delta
10x Islands
Sideboard:
3x Defense Grid
3x Disrupt
2x Brain Freeze
1x Stroke of Genius
1x Meditate
1x Turnabout
1x Mystical Tutor
1x Misdirection
1x Capsize
1x Echoing Truth
*SB slots can be metagamed pretty easily.
Card by Card Analysis:
Main Deck:
Force of Will-- Protection is a must!
Ideas Unbound-- Draw 3 for 2. In tight spots, it even makes a decent set-up card.
Meditate-- Draw 4 for 3. In the right situation, it even makes a great set-up card.
Cloud of Faeries-- Untap effect that cycles, works wonders with snap, and it’s part of the deck’s infinite combo (see Capsize).
Snap-- With Cloud of Faeries, it untaps lots and lots of lands while making a nice storm count. On its own, if your opponent has a creature, it still works as a decent mana generator. On top of all that, it functions as main deck bounce for annoying creatures like True Believer and Meddling Mage. Of course, this comes at the cost of allowing your opponent's creature removal to disrupt you. However, this issue has shown itself to be rather trivial in practice.
Turnabout-- Huge untap effect, fog, and semi-Orim’s Chant all at the same time. On a side note, this version even lets you cast it end of turn to tap out your opponent and untap before attempting to go off.
High Tide-- Kind of needed.
Cunning Wish-- Any combo piece, win condition, or bounce effect you could possibly need.
Merchant Scroll-- Demonic Tutor
Sleight of Hand-- This is one amazing little card. It digs 2 cards deep for a single blue mana, and is excellent at finding land.
Serum Visions-- These really help the deck to run on such a light mana base. Digging 4 cards for your next land drop at 1 mana is beautiful, and it works very well with other draw cards while going off.
Brainstorm-- Grab what you need, throw back what you don’t, add in one of 10 shuffle effects, and you’ve got one amazing card quality engine.
Polluted Delta/Flooded Strand-- Drawing land while going off sucks, and shuffling after a brainstorm is rather good. 6/10 split seems to work best.
Island-- Kinda need these ; )
Sideboard:
Defense Grid-- Gives some line of defense against Solidarity and helps against Aggro-Control decks as well as Control decks packing hate.
Disrupt-- Helps out against black discard, LD, and a few other things.
Brain Freeze/Stroke of Genius/Meditate/Turnabout/Mystical Tutor -- Wishable combo pieces. 2 Freezes so one can be sided in against Solidarity. Mystical Tutor is for those games when you just can't seem to find a High Tide (Cast on Upkeep, Draw it, Win).
Misdirection-- Wishable Force of Will, and a great way to reverse cards like Hymn to Tourach and Sinkhole.
Rebuild/Evacuation/Hibernation--to quote Carlos El Salvador, “Bounce the bad stuff back.” These would be metagame slots. I doubt you will need them though.
Capsize-- Returns anything and has buyback. It also Generates infinite mana with Cloud of Faeries after 4 High Tides (This happens a lot more often than one would think. It is rare that, when going off, the deck can't go infinite.).
Echoing Truth/Chain of Vapor-- Your basic bounce. Both also do fun things with Faeries. For the time being; play CoV if you wish, but space is tight.
Cards Not Included:
Sapphire Medallion-- It seems like a logical solution to lessen the deck’s reliance on High Tide, but it has proven itself to be unnecessary in testing, and actually slows down the deck, as casting it prevents early hand refinement. Not to mention it doesn’t do anything for a lot of cards in the deck, and would take the slots of other, more needed, cards.
Bosium Strip-- At first this card seemed to work amazingly in this deck, but all it really did was make the deck better at overkill. It did give the deck a way to keep comboing out without giving your opponent cards as well (Diminishing Returns), but it just had too many draw backs. The biggest problem with the card was the disruptability it created in the deck; artifact removal, stifle, baiting a Force of Will, graveyard hate, etc. inhibited your ability to go off. The second major problem with it was that by itself, it couldn't draw cards, so you had to have it AND a big draw spell or several smaller ones. The third problem was that it was slow; Six mana was often times just too much in the early stages of going off (even divided over 2 turns).
Future Sight-- This one gave me mixed results as well. In some cases it just allowed me to go ballistic and play my entire deck off of it, but sometimes I had to rely on it as my only big draw spell and it didn't pull through. It was also a very clunky draw spell at 5 mana, and was once again vulnerable to removal.
Impulse-- This card is very good at doing what it does; however, its mana cost has shown itself to be unexpectedly prohibitive to this deck. One of the biggest problems with the card is that unlike the other small draw cards in the deck, it won't permit you to keep an otherwise good 1 land opening hand (which will show up fairly often). It also decreased the deck's set up speed by preventing the other 1 mana costing hand refinement spells from being played. The last issue is that it breaks the golden rule of storm based combo decks '1 mana, 1 card' (The extra mana is more important in this deck than looking a little deeper.).
Sensei's Divining Top-- This isn't in the deck for the exact same reasons as Impulse; it is great at what it does, but is just too mana intensive. It is only really good when you have lots and lots of mana and are well into going off. In the early turns, it really stunts your hand development by eating your mana. In short, the redundancy of cheap hand refinement makes the top completely unnecessary.
Opt-- Opt is a rather weak card all around. The fact that it is instant speed is nice, but the fact that it will often dig only one card deep, and it's reliance on prediction make it a sub-optimal card choice for this deck. The deck is already running 12 strong one costing hand refinement spells and there is nothing in the deck worth cutting to fit these in; therefore, it doesn't make the cut.
Trade Secrets-- Against aggro, and non-instant speed combo, it will draw you 4 cards for 3 mana, thus making it an untutorable Meditate that can on occasion give your opponent burn cards, REB's, etc. Against control, if you cast this, they draw into every counter they have and you draw every threat you have (A good control player can usually fizzle you under these conditions.), or you gain a mere 1 card advantage. Against instant speed combo, they just go off in response. The deck has more than enough draw power as is, and the drawbacks more than cancel out the benefits.
Blue Elemental Blast/Hydroblast-- This deck is fast enough to race even the fastest of red decks on a consistent basis. I am aware that the 8 blast plan is threatening to this deck, but in all honesty, these really don’t help much as they force you to remove combo pieces, and the deck has other, more important, concerns than a few blasts. Also note that both Disrupt and Grid would be better options for this.
Palinchron-- Palinchron isn't in the deck for the same reason Brain Freeze isn't in the maindeck. It is useless until you've basically already won. If you have enough mana to get the Palinchron going, you don't need it. Also, the Capsize combo works a lot better as you can wish for it when needed (note that the deck's main win conditions are the draw X spells). Palinchron will be dead if he is in your hand when you need early combo pieces.
Intuition/AK-- In short, it is slow, takes up too many slots, and can't do anything the deck can't already do.
Twincast-- Situational as hell. It works optimally with too few cards in the deck, and forces you into large mana investments, which can be fatal. Also, and perhaps worst of all, it can not diversify your hand, so it will be functioning as an extra combo piece that you DON'T need a good portion of the time. Despite being relatively useful and doubling as a counter, it just doesn't cut it. Try it out and see for yourself.
Playing the deck:
Why should I play this deck?:
We all know the qualifications of Solidarity as a deck to beat at this point, so the question you should all be asking is "Why should I play this over traditional Solidarity?" I will list the pros and cons of this deck in comparison to Solidarity:
Pros:
*It goldfishes faster than Solidarity.
*It fizzles less than Solidarity.
*Better set-up cards can make bad hands good, increase your ability to fight through disruption, and find answers.
*Stronger draw power makes disruption less of a liability.
*More untap effects makes disruption less of a liability.
*Defense Grid is amazing.
*You can draw into your last land drop while going off.
*You can go off with as few as 2 lands in play.
*You don't give your opponent a chance to untap, draw, and cast those few extra spells while you're going off.
*Popular hate aimed at Solidarity is less of an issue.
*Turnabout/Meditate/bounce can be cast at end of turn in order to go off with a full untap and before you would have to discard from meditate.
*Main deck removal in the form of Snap.
*Going infinite allows you to beat a deck of any size.
*The fact that it can spend great lengths of time to go off can cause the opponent to scoop without knowing if you might fizzle in order to avoid having you drain the clock and win with a 1-0-0 record.
Cons:
*Less instants means less control of the stack (It still has a lot of instants, just not as many).
*The deck Needs to resolve a High Tide to win.
*The deck has difficulty in the Solidarity mirror.
*Weaker untap.
*Since you go off on your turn, you usually can’t use your opponents spells to up the storm count.
*You have to predict when your opponent can kill you/drop hate.
Mulligans:
Perhaps the most important decision you will make with this deck is the decision of whether or not to mull. Of course, this is dependant to a certain extent on the match-up (For example, if you fear Stifle, you obviously don't keep a 1 land hand with a fetchland), but I would like to provide some guidelines for mulliganing. I will list the number of lands in the opening hands, list the odds (rounded to the nearest 100th of a percent) of getting such a hand starting with a 7 card hand and progressing to a 0 card hand, and I will list some basic guidelines to keeping the hand.
0: 9.92%->14.10%->19.88%->27.84%->38.70%->53.45%->73.33%->100%
Throw it out for obvious reasons.
1: 29.24%->34.71%->39.77%->43.46%->44.23%->39.77%->26.67%->0%
Keep only if your hand is particularly strong otherwise and contains at least two cheap (1 mana) hand refinement spells (The odds of a 1 land hand meeting the above requirements are listed below.).
29.26%->25.65%->20.90%->15.27%->9.26%->0%->0%->0%
2: 33.74%->32.54%->29.10%->23.28%->15.43%->6.78%->0%->0%
Pretty ideal; just make sure you have something to work with.
3: 19.68%->14.81%->9.70%->5.05%->1.64%->0%->0%->0%
Once again, pretty ideal; just make sure you have something to work with.
4: 6.24%->3.44%->2.93%->2.24%->0%->0%->0%->0%
If the business spells in your hand are diverse and/or flexible, you should keep it. Otherwise, toss it.
5: 1.07%->0.38%->0.08%->0%->0%->0%->0%->0%
Usually, this gets thrown back.
6: 0.09%->0.02%->0%->0%->0%->0%->0%->0%
Out it goes, and shuffle better.
7: 0.00%->0%->0%->0%->0%->0%->0%->0%
...yeah...
Drawing a Brainstorm and a shuffle effect can make a lot of hands almost auto-keepers. The odds of seeing Brainstorm and a shuffle effect in an opening hand are as follows.
29.62%->23.99%->18.40%->13.02%->8.12%->4.00%->0%->0%
You should be keeping hands roughly according to the following percents:
70%->60%->45%->65%->60%->45%->100%
For those of you who don't like subtraction, you should be throwing hands back roughly according to the following percents:
30%->40%->55%->35%->40%->55%->0%
Goldfishing:
Due to the nature of how this deck plays (It does not seek to go off ASAP, but rather as late as it possibly can in order to maximize it's odds), I will list the trials by the turn I was aiming to win on, and whether I was playing or drawing.
Playing:
5th Turn: 48/50 96% success rate
4th Turn: 44/50 88% success rate
3rd Turn: 35/50 70% success rate
2nd Turn: 3/50 6% success rate
Drawing:
4th Turn: 45/50 90% success rate
3rd Turn: 39/50 78% success rate
2nd Turn: 6/50 12% success rate
Match-ups:
(These will be quick and basic...Except Solidarity >_<)
Solidarity-- I'm going to have to be a little more detailed for this one:
They have more control over the stack, the ability to go off without casting High Tide, and maindeck Brain Freezes, so this will be a rough game, but you have some tricks up your sleeve as well.
If you get a great goldfishing hand either game and If you are going first, it is often a good idea to attempt to go off turn 3 (Just don't do anything fancy. Don't play extra tides if you don't have to, and don't play a draw spell with a lethal storm count if you can avoid it. Just grab your wish/freeze and win), as they will have one hell of a time going off with only 2 lands in play; Understand that there is some risk in this plan, and that it takes experience to pull off, but it can definitely pay off if used correctly.
If this doesn't happen, use the following strategy:
Scroll/Wish up Counters and/or Freezes to slow them down. After you have found these answers, the game becomes a race to the perfect hand.
During this race it is a good idea to start probing your opponent with eot Turnabouts, as if you can resolve one, you can set up an uninterrupted win on your turn (However, if you need the instant speed untap power, hold onto it).
Somewhere during this stalemate, it can be a good idea to cast a Cloud of Faeries for 2 reasons: 1) it makes your snaps into instant speed untap power. 2) It functions as pressure on your opponent which can push your opponent into attempting a win and walk into a Brain Freeze or a forced fizzle. I would only attempt this if you have an 8 card hand, and sufficient land to defend yourself if they attempt to go off in response.
Also, keep in mind, that during the Early turns, it is not a bad idea to try to resolve a Meditate on your opponents turn in order to put you at an advantage in the race to a perfect hand. Later on, its not a good idea, as your opponent can actually go off on their turn, and you usually want to hold on to Meditate anyway, since it is part of that "perfect" hand.
The match-up is both draw and skill based, and is generally in their favor. Just try to out think them and hope to draw the right cards to overpower them.
Game 2+3 you get Defense Grid as well. Should you get one early, you should be able to push through a quick win. Should you get it later, it will handicap them significantly none-the-less.
Disrupt may be a good option to hinder their early development, but it requires testing.
Fast Combo (X Land Belcher, Nausea, Iggy PoP, etc.)-- These match-ups seems like they should suck for you, but are actually pretty even. This is where you take advantage of your 3rd turn win percentage. The odds of goldfishing them are usually in your favor if you can go off turn 3. Even if you can't go off turn 3, you have 4 Force of Wills and 4 ways to tutor for one, and since these decks tend to rely on 1-2 crucial spells. Disrupts are often helpful here as well games 2 and 3. Keep a look out for cards that help you as well (Helm), but if you choose not to counter them, make absolutely sure you can win next turn, and if they try to win that turn you can stop them.
Slower Combo (Solitaire, etc.)-- Just goldfish them; plain and simple. Keep in mind you have Force to buy you that last turn.
Control (Landstill/BBS/WUBS/Hulk/etc.)-- Control has never been a bad match-up for Solidarity, and it is even better for this version. The draw, untap, and tutor power of this deck makes it extremely hard for them to stop you. They just can’t stop everything, and they usually won’t have a fast enough clock to take you down before you wear them out of counters. It may seem like the deck’s reliance on High Tide would make it easy for the control player to stop you, but if they are trying to counter the High Tides, they can’t counter the draw. If they don’t counter the draw, you just overpower them. Also, keep in mind that an end of turn Turnabout takes out a great deal of their counter power, and that catching them off-guard with a fast win while they are tapped out is often quite successful. Games 2-3 depends on what their sideboard looks like, as enough hate can turn the odds in their favor, but you should still maintain at least a decent chance of coming out on top. Bring in Grids to protect High Tides and limit/completely stop the number of counters they can play after the Tide resolves.
Fast Aggro (Vial Goblins, Sligh, Burn, etc.)-- These match-ups are generally easy game 1. You can goldfish them with relative ease. Games 2 and 3 depend on how much hate they have. However, this hate usually slows them down as well, and you should have answers. Beware of cards that can disrupt you in the maindeck though (Fanatic, Incinerator, etc.).
Slow Aggro (Angel Stompy, Survival Advantage, etc.)--Game 1 should be a piece of cake. Games 2 and 3 depend on how much hate they have. However, you will likely only ever need to answer 1-2 of these spells. Also, it is fairly likely that you can just goldfish them before it ever becomes a factor.
Blue based Aggro-Control (Threshold, Madness, etc.)-- These match-ups are generally in your favor. They can disrupt you and beat you down, but their disruption will be weaker than that of a conventional control deck, and their clock slower than pure aggro, so it won't be as bad as it seems. Build up the best hand you can (read: counter back-up, multiple draw/untap effects) and try to overwhelm them the turn before they kill you. Games 2 and 3 should be pretty much more of the same, except for those lovely Defense Grids which really shine against many of these decks. The only real problems in these match-ups are cards like Meddling Mage which can shut you down, but bouncing them shouldn't be too difficult (Just watch the time they buy!).
Resource Denial Aggro-Control (Deadguy, Sui-Black, Pox, Stax, etc.)-- These will suck. Try to go off as soon as there is an opening. Disrupt and Misdirection are often quite good here though.
ATS-- They have no real clock and the counters they have are few and weak. This match-up should be fairly easy. Just watch out games 2 and 3 for troublesome enchantments.
Welder Survival-- Just try to goldfish them and try to keep Survival/Welder off the board if you can. It isn’t a bad match, but it’s no cakewalk either. They can get the nuts and just go crazy on you, so treat this match as you would a fast aggro deck.
Conclusion:
I honestly feel this deck is superior to Solidarity, simply because it doesn’t lose match-ups that it shouldn’t due to fizzling, or just drawing a hand that is too slow. It also has a better match-up than Solidarity did against many of it’s problem decks like aggro control and other combo decks (It is consistently faster than Solidarity, has more ‘must counter’ spells, and it’s tutors allow it to adapt better to disruption.). Anyway, I have run my mouth off for long enough. Discuss!
P.S. I have updated this many times, so some of the early posts may refer to a list that no longer exists.
