Welcome back to If It’s Broken… my semi-weekly column, where, if it’s broken you are probably playing the right formats.

This week, I am going to talk about one of the more broken types of deck in the history of Magic the Gathering: storm combo. As most who are part of the competitive Magic community know, two cards were recently banned from Modern: [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card] and [card]Seething Song[/card]. While the exclusion of [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card] will not totally destroy the Jund archetype in Modern, Storm is very likely to be finished as a top-tier deck in the format. With that sad fact in mind, this article and the next will explore options for those not yet ready to retire the rituals and help them transition their storming ambitions to Legacy. This week we will focus on the more traditional versions of storm combo and the small variants in the decklists that create large distinctions in playstyle.

Making Mana

The first thing that any player trying to transition from Modern to Legacy storm has to realize is that our colors for the deck are almost definitely going to change or expand to include Black. [card]Dark Ritual[/card] is the best ritual ever printed; after all it gives plus two mana, a rate returned in red rituals only by [card]Seething Song[/card] or by [card]Rite of Flame[/card] cast with another in the graveyard, and it yields that return for the tiny investment of one black mana. In addition, the preponderance of tempo decks in most metagames strongly encourages the inclusion of two to four [card]Cabal Ritual[/card], as its ability to jump from two to five mana is very important and also allows storm players to largely ignore the common played “tax-counters,” [card]Daze[/card] and [card]Spell Pierce[/card].

In addition to upgrading our rituals, we also get to play the artifact mana that were banned from or not found in the Modern card pool. These include [card]Lotus Petal[/card], [card]Chrome Mox[/card], and [card]Lion’s Eye Diamond[/card], the most expensive non-land card in many of the decks and probably the largest fiscal hurdle for the combo player transitioning to Legacy. That said, [card]Lion’s Eye Diamond[/card] is a must-have for many flavors of storm combo and for those interested in the Dredge archetype. In addition to these powerful accelerants, occasionally players will play some number of [card]Mox Diamond[/card] or [card]Mox Opal[/card], though none of the lists I am going to share will include these features, as I believe they are less consistent compared to the more powerful mana artifacts.

Now we have established that storm decks have quite a large amount of fast mana; however, as in Modern, they also include a large number of one mana cantrips. In Legacy, these get to be upgraded once again from [card]Serum Visions[/card] and [card]Sleight of Hand[/card] to [card]Brainstorm[/card], [card]Ponder[/card], and [card]Preordain[/card]. I want to warn you now, once you have cast [card]Brainstorm[/card], put two lands back, and cracked fetch land to shuffle them away, playing Modern might lose some of its appeal. These cantrips, along with tutors like [card]Infernal Tutor[/card], [card]Burning Wish[/card], and sometimes [card]Grim Tutor[/card], make the Legacy Storm decks very consistent and powerful. It also makes them very skill intensive, as the cards you decide to keep or shuffle away with various cantrips on turn one and two may drastically affect your ability to win the game.

As always when talking about Legacy decks there are some rules that you should be aware of if you play this deck, and the tutors represent one such case. To illustrate this case we first have to understand that [card]Lion’s Eye Diamond[/card] (LED) has some changes from its printed text to its Oracle text. Namely, the Oracle text says that the ability of LED can only be activated as an instant. Why does this matter? As a result of this change you cannot use LED to pay for a spell in your hand because you cannot do something at instant speed between announcing a spell and paying the costs for that spell. So by the time you could use the mana from LED, you will have already discarded the spell you want to cast.

What use then is this poor [card]Black Lotus[/card] variant? Well, you can respond to the casting of your own spells by casting instants, or by activating abilities which can only be played at instant speed. So, if you are casting a tutor or an engine card that will allow you access to more cards, namely [card]Ad Nauseam[/card] or [card]Past in Flames[/card], you can maintain priority and activate [card]Lion’s Eye Diamond[/card] in response to have three more mana to use after that spell resolves. In a pinch you can even do this with cantrips.

One thing you should note, however, is that if you do not explicitly maintain priority to crack LED, and your opponent does not have a response to your spell you have no opportunity to activate. So remember, always state that you are using [card]Lion’s Eye Diamond[/card] in response to your spell, before asking your opponent if the spell resolves.

Dropping Bombs

Now for the win conditions and engine cards of the various storm decks: this actually takes up the smallest portion of our decklists. With a plethora of cantrips and tutors, we don’t need to clog up our deck with a bunch of copies of these spells to make sure we draw them. Our ability to move through our deck quickly to find what we need usually amounts to just one to two copies of our win conditions and engine cards.

To start, we should talk about the primary win condition: [card]Tendrils of Agony[/card]. Unlike [card]Grapeshot[/card], which requires an extremely high storm count or multiple copies, Tendrils generally requires relatively little to result in a win. In addition it gains life, which can be relevant if you can’t completely defeat an opponent but need to buy some time. A Tendrils with storm count of six still represents a life gain of twelve, and likely one or two more turns to find a way to deal the remaining damage. That said, especially in five color variants, [card]Grapeshot[/card] occasionally sees play as an alternate win condition that gets around [card]Gaddock Teeg[/card] and can also kill other hate bears.

As for the engines, [card]Past in Flames[/card] serves a very similar function in Legacy as it did in Modern. However, because of lower cost and higher power of our rituals and cantrips and the ability to run fewer of our relatively expensive win conditions, we can also run [card]Ad Nauseam[/card]. This is the closest any non-Vintage format can get to the most broken days of combo when we had access to either [card]Yawgmoth’s Bargain[/card] or [card]Necropotence[/card]. [card]Ad Nauseam[/card] has a powerful effect, but it is important to be constantly thinking during its resolution about how to win the game with the cards drawn so far. I have seen countless Storm players kill themselves with their own [card]Ad Nauseam[/card] or leave themselves exposed to an opponent’s [card]Lightning Bolt[/card] by going losing more life than necessary to [card]Ad Nauseam[/card]. We need only nine spells cast in one turn and the ability to find and cast a Tendrils to win. Once that has happened, as much as it might be fun to do more, we should just win the game.

Protecting the Goods

Now we have talked about the various parts that allow storm decks to win, we should talk about the ways that they ensure that their opponents cannot stop them from doing all these things. The protection suites of these decks help distinguish them from each other and have a large impact on the colors that the decks end up playing.

Traditionally, discard effects have been the bread and butter of the protection suite of these decks, as they are already committed strongly to black, and the effects give us information about what our opponent is able to do. The most common discard spells are [card]Duress[/card], [card]Thoughtseize[/card], [card]Inquisition of Kozilek[/card], and [card]Cabal Therapy[/card]. In my experience [card]Cabal Therapy[/card] is the most powerful of these cards, but it is also the hardest to play correctly, as it requires a deep knowledge of your own deck and what hate cards you can play through, alongside a large knowledge of the format, both to suss out what deck the opponent is playing and to determine what individual cards they might have. After all, if we are trying to win turn two on the play with protection, we may have seen only an opposing fetch land before we cast [card]Cabal Therapy[/card].

This lack of knowledge is oftentimes countered by including [card]Gitaxian Probe[/card] to have information about our opponent before casting Therapy. However, Probe has the same major problem as [card]Thoughtseize[/card]. [card]Thoughtseize[/card] is the easiest discard spell to play correctly, but it contains the big downside of costing two life in a deck aiming to trade its life total for cards later in the game with [card]Ad Nauseam[/card]. [card]Inquisition[/card] and [card]Duress[/card] obviously have their downsides too, namely limiting what you can take.

Generally, some mixture of discard spells is included; however, some storm decks manage to include additional colors to support other protection spells in the form of [card]Silence[/card] or [card]Orim’s Chant[/card], which allow for an unmolested turn of casting spells, or even [card]Xantid Swarm[/card], which provides effect continually. Note that for the most part, people play [card]Silence[/card] over [card]Orim’s Chant[/card] because it cannot be Misdirected. Additionally, the while the kicker of [card]Orim’s Chant[/card] would sometimes be relevant, storm decks usually have a pretty tough time achieving two white mana, even in five-color builds.

The final option, usually paired with some number of discard effects, is the inclusion of [card]Red Elemental Blast[/card] and [card]Pyroblast[/card], which are great options in a primarily Blue metagame, but very frustrating to see in your opening hand when an opponent plays a turn two [card]Hymn to Tourach[/card] or [card]Thalia, Guardian of Thraben[/card], that an [card]Inquisition of Kozilek[/card] would have handled easily.

Looking at Specifics

As is true for most Magic decks, the choices we make regarding the variants of these decks is largely dependent on the metagame that we expect at a given tournament, so let’s look at a few decklists, and I’ll point out their strengths and weaknesses based on various metagame considerations. Any of the following decks can be viable, however, and are good starting points for people looking to make the transition to Legacy storm combo.

3rd place at SCG Open Las Vegas
[Deck title=”The Epic Storm, or TES by Jacob Kory”]
[Artifacts]
3 Chrome Mox
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
[/Arfifacts]
[Instants]
1 Ad Nauseam
4 Brainstorm
4 Dark Ritual
4 Silence
[/Instants]
[Sorceries]
3 Burning Wish
4 Duress
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Infernal Tutor
4 Ponder
4 Rite of Flame
[/Soceries]
[Lands]
1 Bloodstained Mire
2 City of Brass
2 Flooded Strand
4 Gemstone Mine
1 Polluted Delta
2 Underground Sea
1 Volcanic Island
[/Lands]
[Sideboard]
2 Xantid Swarm
2 Abrupt Decay
3 Chain of Vapor
1 Diminishing Returns
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Grapeshot
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Past in Flames
1 Tendrils of Agony
2 Karakas
[/Sideboard]
[/Deck]

TES is the fastest variant of storm combo we are going to look at today, and it utilizes [card]Duress[/card] and [card]Silence[/card] as its protection spells. It is so fast in fact that it completely eschews [card]Cabal Ritual[/card] in favor of [card]Rite of Flame[/card], as [card]Cabal Ritual[/card] will almost never be cast with threshold. It is the most vulnerable to [card]Wasteland[/card] of any of the decks we will be looking at, but it tries to mitigate that issue by winning very quickly. It also is among the worst of the variants against non-Blue disruptive decks if it doesn’t win immediately. While it can race Thalia or [card]Gaddock Teeg[/card], if they resolve it is in worse shape.

8th place at SCG Invitational in Los Angeles on 2012-12-16
[Deck title=”ANT by Adam Prosak”]
[Artifacts]
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
[/Artifacts]
[Instants]
1 Ad Nauseam
4 Brainstorm
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Dark Ritual
[/Instants]
[Sorceries]
2 Cabal Therapy
4 Duress
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Infernal Tutor
1 Past in Flames
4 Ponder
4 Preordain
1 Tendrils of Agony
[/Sorceries]
[Lands]
2 Island
1 Swamp
2 Gemstone Mine
4 Polluted Delta
3 Scalding Tarn
2 Underground Sea
1 Volcanic Island
[/Lands]
[Sideboard]
3 Carpet of Flowers
4 Abrupt Decay
2 Chain of Vapor
2 Slaughter Pact
1 Cabal Therapy
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Tropical Island
1 Karakas
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

The more traditional ANT deck is sometimes just UB or UBr, but this recent version splashes green and red for a powerful sideboard that includes four copies of [card]Abrupt Decay[/card] to deal with all of the hatebears TES can have problems with. In addition, it gets to run a much more stable mana base with seven fetch lands and three basics, which allows several turns of casting spells without being hampered by [card]Wasteland[/card]. In addition, the sideboard of this deck gets to run three [card]Carpet of Flowers[/card], one of the best cards against tempo-style aggro-control decks, like RUG and BUG Delver. It also forgoes [card]Burning Wish[/card], so its sideboard has room for more matchup-relevant cards.

That said it runs far fewer win conditions and no [card]Chrome Mox[/card], which will generally mean it is about a full turn slower than the TES list. This is a more stable list, but definitely a less powerful one.

1st Place at GP Ghent
[deck title=The Legacy Laser by Timo Schünemann]
[Lands]
2 Underground Sea
1 Volcanic Island
1 Badlands
4 Polluted Delta
2 Scalding Tarn
2 Bloodstained Mire
1 Swamp
1 Island
[/Lands]
[Spells]
1 Chrome Mox
4 Lotus Petal
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Dark Ritual
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Infernal Tutor
2 Duress
1 Inquisition of Kozilek
3 Burning Wish
1 Ad Nauseam
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Past in Flames
[/spells]
[Sideboard]
4 Dread of Night
2 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Duress
3 Grafdigger’s Cage
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Grim Tutor
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Pyroclasm
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

This list is a hybrid between traditional ANT and TES; it runs only three colors to better support the inclusion of [card]Burning Wish[/card] while maintaining a rock-solid mana base. This is a turn-two or -three deck that never wants to open itself up to being the target of a [card]Wasteland[/card] during critical early turns. This allows for early use of cantrips and discard without having to stretch the mana base for extra protection spells, and the deck has the full eight tutors to find a win condition or engine quickly. It also has one unique feature that I have not yet discussed: it has a tutor in the sideboard specifically to allow [card]Burning Wish[/card] to serve as a tutor for any card in the deck.

I think this is one of the stronger versions of storm available; however, the sideboard is out of date for the average Legacy tournament today, as it is tuned to beat a metagame full of Maverick, which has largely fallen off the radar. As a result of having no access to [card]Abrupt Decay[/card] or [card]Silence[/card], this deck probably has its worst matchups against Esper Stoneblade or decks containing [card]Counterbalance[/card], as their diversity of counters is less susceptible to [card]Cabal Therapy[/card] and [card]Gitaxian Probe[/card] and [card]Silence[/card] cannot simply mute your opponent.

Any of these decks would be good choices for Modern combo players looking to transition to combo in Legacy, and the added bonus is that everything besides the mana base and [card]Lion’s Eye Diamond[/card] are not so expensive. The dual lands and fetch lands played in these decks are also the same as those seen in many of the tempo decks currently popular in the format as well, so investing in them opens your options considerably in the Legacy format. So if you miss Storm combo, or if you want to see it as its most broken (when it doesn’t have to compete with [card]Mishra’s Workshop[/card] and [card]Lodestone Golem[/card] as it would in Vintage), then I strongly encourage you to try out one of these decks in your local Legacy scene or online.