I’ll be willing to bet there isn’t a single mechanic in the game of magic that causes Wizards R&D to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat more than ‘Storm’. To hear it directly from Mark Rosewater and company, the history of Magic has been filled with many design attempts to somehow circumvent traditional casting costs through various means, and almost universally, these attempts have always ended in a mad scrambling for the ban-hammer. However, when WotC dropped the Scourge expansion on an unsuspecting population in May ’03, even they might not have imagined what a powerful effect they had created.

From the Official Magic: The Gathering Comprehensive Rules:

502.30. Storm

Storm is a triggered ability that functions while the spell is on the stack. "Storm" means "When you play this spell, put a copy of it onto the stack for each other spell that was played before it this turn. If the spell has any targets, you may choose new targets for any number of the copies."

If a spell has multiple instances of storm, each triggers separately.

Scourge gave combo players a new lease on life with the printing of two Storm cards: Mind’s Desire and Tendrils Of Agony. The former, possibly the strongest combo enabler since Yawgmoth’s Will, allowed a player to literally play out cards from their deck for free, while the latter gave an impossibly efficient kill card. It didn’t take long for players in every format to figure out how strong these cards were; Desire was restricted in Vintage before ever seeing the light of day, and Tendrils has since gone on to be the foundation of nearly every major combo deck it is legal in. Vintage has seen many decks in the “Long.dec” vein come and go, and Legacy has seen the rise of similar combo in decks like “Iggy-Pop”. As of late, Extended has seen the rise of “TEPS”, which again seeks to try to win via Tendrils after playing as many free spells as possible off the back of Desire, and we’re starting to see this deck filter into Classic Online.

Use the Card pool, Dammit!

In Classic, we have a unique opportunity to abuse these cards in ways that simply don’t exist in other formats. The lack of any restrictions or bannings in the format means that the sheer power of the Storm combo deck can be made much faster and far more resilient than anything else out there. To put it bluntly, there isn’t a single faster deck available in Classic, and with a proper build, there are few decks that can put up a fight before storm ends the game.

First off, a current list:

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s break it down into pieces.

THE MANA:

I think it’s important to notice the lack of Invasion sac-lands. While these are great in Extended, TEPS plays a different game than Burning Tendrils does. TEPS uses the best of what it has for mana acceleration in these lands and Lotus Bloom to set up a devastating win…on turn four. Burning Tendrils wins on turn one or two; thus, it simply can’t sit around and wait on a comes-into-play-tapped land that may or may not even be producing the right colors. This brings up the second point, as well as the fast mana:

THE ACCELERATORS:

The accelerators in Classic just scream “Win Now!”, and are leaps and bounds stronger than the corresponding pieces in Extended. It’s a fairly easy occurrence to be able to produce eight-plus mana within a turn or two of the start of the game, and to a point, it’s even necessary. Affinity will win on turn four. Control decks will have you locked under Orim’s Chant/Isochron Scepter or Counterbalance, and aggro decks will have run out Glowrider and True Believer by then. Even other combo decks can animate a Worldgorger Dragon or a Protean Hulk before your Bloom hits play or your second sac-land untaps. This is why it is crucial that your mana base can produce any color it needs immediately. You may not get a fourth turn. As well..

PROTECTION:

...You also need to be able to snap off your protection in your first few turns. For a combo deck, there is no stronger play than first turn Duress when facing down a control deck. You want to be able to bounce Chalice Of The Void or Meddling Mage on your opponent’s end step right before you go off. Post-board, you want to table Xantid Swarm immediately. In Classic, this is absolutely necessary to be competitive. All of this adds up to a need for the availability of at least four different mana colors on any given first turn. Thus, the rainbow color-base is crucial. Also, note the full eight slots. This is important, as you’ll see further on.

TUTOR/ DRAW:

It looks simple, but there are several important things going on here. Before proceeding, however, it’s important to understand the deck design theory I refer to as the ‘Resiliency/Eight’ theory.

Simply put, Magic is a game of averages. You have a 1-in-60 chance of pulling a given card off the top of your freshly-shuffled deck. If you run a playset of four, you have reduced these odds to 1-in-15. If you could run eight, you would have a 1-in-7.5 chance of pulling a given card from your deck- In other words, you’ll essentially have one of the eight cards in your starting hand on average in nearly every game.

Burning Wish and Infernal Tutor both run the same game plan in this deck 99% of the time- Finding Mind’s Desire. The Wish runs a secondary game plan as well; either to grab some answer from the sideboard or to grab a win condition after the second copy comes up mid-Desire. Infernal Tutor more often is just grabbing the Desire (after sacrificing one of the LEDs to Hell-Bend itself into a Demonic Tutor), although it can also serve as a source of mana (via grabbing a second Rite or LED) or as a source of Storm count (via using a Hell-bent Tutor to find another one).

Referring to the rule, you’ll have one of these in your hand at the start of each game.

Strangely enough, the Vampiric Tutor and Serum Visions play a similar role as well. First off, without a ton of draw or shuffle effects in the deck, the Vamp isn’t the instant-speed tutor it can be in other decks, and you’ll often be using one of these cards to set up your next turn. Often, you’ll be looking at a hand that has lands and acceleration but is missing the crucial tutor, or lands and a tutor but not quite enough acceleration, or some combination of the three. These two cards both serve to set you up to draw that necessary piece on your next turn so that you can win on the spot. Note that the lack of shuffling and draw in the deck is the reason these cards are included over Brainstorm; hitting a bad Brainstorm and having to put back two dead cards basically equals giving your opponent a pair of free Time Walks in this deck, so you want to either be able to find the exact card you need (Vamp) or get rid of anything that looks lousy altogether (Serum), all for the price of one mana. Remember, this deck has a critical turn of two on average, so you can’t afford to wait for a second source to come up before you set up to win.

Per the rule, you’ll have one of these in your starting hand every game too.

To sum up the rest, you run three Mind’s Desire main-deck. This is your win card, the one you’ll most frequently tutor for to win. Aim to have an average of five Storm copies off of this card, and you’ll rarely come up short. Your Desire will find you a bunch of free mana and a way to tutor for the win, as well as putting your Storm count up to a lethal number. A single Tendrils Of Agony is the main-deck win condition, with access to another one in the board, or alternately, Empty The Warrens to get around un-targetability effects. Sins Of The Past acts as a Jack-of-all-trades utility card, finding Desire if it has been discarded or played, or to get a Burning Wish to grab the side-board win condition among other utility functions.

Looking at the numbers, any given opening hand should contain:

• One to two permanent mana sources (11 lands plus 4 Chrome Mox, or 1-in-4 cards)
• One Tutor (8 cards, 1-in-7.5)
• One Draw/Fixer (8 cards, 1-in-7.5)
• One Protection card (8 cards, 1-in-7.5)
• Two Accelerators (16 total, 1-in-3.75)

Summing it all up, this deck should be called “TCPH”, or ‘The Classic Perfect Hand”.

Summing It Up

Burning Tendrils truly embodies the best of what the Classic format can do. It runs the best mana accelerators available, giving it unparalleled speed. It runs a very concise, resilient construction to guarantee you have exactly what you need to get the job done when you need it. It offers a fantastic protection suite that is both robust and quick, giving combo a flexible and potent set of answers. Lastly, and possibly best, it abuses the most broken of broken cards to offer a lightning-fast combo win.

Stay tuned for part two, which will detail some example draws, sideboarding strategy and theory, and match-ups.

--DJ