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The Calm Before the Storm! By
Anthony Skinner 16
October 2006 |
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I have amended my lists to take into
account that Reiterate doesn’t work with Storm, so you can’t use it effectively
on the Dragonstorm! Apologies for any confusion
caused! Tony
The deck I would like
to talk about today is the Dragonstorm deck doing the
rounds at various internet forums. Now when I first made a little list up and
added it to my gauntlet I was thinking that it would be bad! Having loaded it
on Workstation and tweaked it I found it to be depressingly consistent! I say
depressingly as I remember the season of playing versus endless Tooth and Nail
decks and the lottery that created. All things considered, if your opponent
does not know about the deck, then you are at a serious advantage.
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Dragonsong By
Anthony Skinner |
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Spells |
Creatures |
Sideboard |
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4 Dragonstorm |
4 Bogarden Hellkite |
3 Gigadrowse |
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2 Grozgroth |
2 Hunted Dragon |
4 Defence Grid |
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4 Sleight of
Hand |
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4 Giant Solifuge |
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4 Telling Time |
Lands |
4 Trickbind |
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2 Truth or Tale |
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4 Rite of Flame |
4 Steam Vents |
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4 Lotus Bloom |
4 Shivan Reef |
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4 Seething Song |
9 |
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4 Remand |
5 Mountain |
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For those of you
unfamiliar with the deck, it works by using the first three turns to play
Lotus Bloom, Sleight of Hand, Telling Time and Truth or Tale to set up a
storm of mana acceleration on the fourth turn. This
culminates in a Dragonstorm for 4 or more Dragons,
which usually is game over as four Bogarden Hellkites hit the table. In the event you have drawn one
of your Hellkites or your opponent is on a higher
life total you can also fetch Hunted Dragon to fly in as a hasty 6/6. |
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The sideboard has
8 slots dedicated to defeating your opponents’ countermeasures. The most
difficult match is one where your opponent has a lot of countermagic.
It can overcome a small amount, such as Mana Leak and
Remand with its own Remands, however if your opponent is playing Cancel, Rewind
etc it is going to be difficult to combo out. For this reason Gigadrowse and Defence Grid come in. The idea is to cast Gigadrowse to tap them down enough to get Defence Grid
through countermagic, once the Gird hits the table it
is game over unless they stay alive long enough to reach five mana, the reason being that they will be unable to play any
spells in your turn without paying three mana more!
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This is the sideboard
which I am currently testing. The Defence Grids and Gigadrowse
come in against most decks (see below), the Giant Solifuges give you a plan B against controlling decks and
offer a surprise factor in games 2 or 3. Trickbind is
for the mirror match! Yes, it does seem what I thought was quite an obscure
deck is becoming very popular and trawling various internet sites, Dragonstorm is usually top of the new tech tree on
discussion forums. So it is quite possible you will be facing off against a
similar deck at least once during the tournament.
I have seen many
versions of this deck, some play green for Early Harvest and Utopia Sprawl, but
I feel drawn to sticking at two colours. If you go with the third you just give
yourself another way to lose and as this build is very consistent I see no
reason to change things.
When designing for
Champs it is very difficult as you start with a blank slate, the formats
defining decks are usually set by the fastest Beatdown
deck and the formats fastest Combo deck. Well, this combo deck clearly sets the
clock to 4 turns, which is very fast. For comparison, Tooth and Nail usually
clocked in at turn 5 without disruption. This means filling your deck with four
and five casting cost spells is a very risky proposition.
Beating the Storm
Assuming you are
not playing Dragonstorm what do you bring in from
your sideboard to deal with it? Let’s look at the Options
We can either try
to prevent the combo from going off or we can attempt to survive once the
Dragons enter play.
White
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Given the Gigadrowse/Defence Grid plan from the Dragonstorm
player we probably don’t want to be playing any instants, for example
Honourable Passage will cost 4W to cast with a Grid in play and will only be
any good then if a) You have five mana when they
attempt to combo and b) You can deal with the Dragons after they have hit the
board.
Now Angel’s Grace
is slightly better, for 3W you don’t lose and they can’t Remand
it either. You will absolutely need Wrath or some Mass destruction the turn
after though or you will just lose to combat damage.
Worship will work
in some situations, if you drop Soltari Priest,
Paladin En-Vec or even Order of Stars set to Red.
Then the Dragons can not touch you. Eventually you will have enough Pro-Red
creatures on the board to just walk on through and win the game. However, this
plan will not always be successful with a timely Remand screwing up the maths
and going second is more difficult. This option is more likely to be better in
combination with other options, for example with Angel’s Grace and or/ Circle
of Protection Red.
The Ivory Mask
will stop the Hellkites targeting you, but I would
only try this in Control, the reason being that you still have to deal with
twenty power of Dragons the turn after! This is very
easy to disrupt with a Remand.
Finally, this
brings me to the Circle, which on its own stands out to me as the best option
in White as it prevents the 20 damage to the head AND deals with the Dragons
once they are on the board. Again this plan is open to disruption and I imagine
Gigadrowse at the end of the turn would be this
strategy’s undoing.
In conclusion,
some combination of these options should be able to muster a strong fight
against the combo archtype. For example, Pro Red
creatures, Worship and Angel’s Grace together should stand a strong chance of
success. Turn 2 Priest, Turn 4 cast Angel’s Grace in response to the combo and
Turn 5 drop Worship is good game. A combination of Circle Red and Trickbind (see below) should be enough to save the
White/Blue mage.
Blue
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Blue has to play a
very different game and be mindful of the Defence Grids coming in, Boomerang and Spellsnare are
needed to deal with this threat. If you can deal with it then Trickbind takes out the storm and as long as you run
Confiscate, or some such creature control, you can deal with the one Dragon
which comes down. Voidslime will get the job done,
but watch out for Remand! There is not all that much you can do about Gigadrowse at the end of your turn, one answer may be to
run Teferi as your win condition and with some timely
Trickbinds you can hold them off. If you get to six mana with Teferi on the board and a full grip of counters including Trickbind I don’t see anyway you can lose.
Combining with the
White cards you can use Trickbind, CoP Red and Wrath to hold off the storm. If they Gigadrowse at the end of your turn you can Trickbind it, you should have at least one mana left with which to prevent one of the Dragons attacks.
You can then untap and cast Wrath for the win!
Red
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This is pretty
much the only plans open to you if you are heavily into Red. By using Ancient
Grudge on any Lotus Blooms appearing in the upkeep you should be able to keep
them off being able to achieve 9 mana.
With a package of Cyroclasm and Stone Rain or maybe
even
Black
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The strongest plan
I see in Black is aiming a huge amount of disruption at the Dragonstorm
player’s hand and beating them with a combination of Hyppie,
Dark Confident and the Rack. Black can also offer a solid beatdown
plan as well, so with a disruption sideboard it could be a major force in the
new standard.
Unfortunately
there is no Cranial Extraction type card, Jester’s Cap just isn’t fast enough.
You could also go
with White for Castigate and/or Conjurer’s Ban for more disruption as well.
Going with White also gives you access to Pro-Red creatures and Worship against
burn heavy decks.
Green
Green on its own
has very, very little it can do about this plan. The best being to Naturalise any Lotus Blooms in the upkeep that they are
played and put down a quick clock on turns 1-3.
Other Strategies
The other way to
try to survive is to have a life total that is too high to be taken out in one
hit. The maximum damage my version can do in a single turn is 32. Storming for
six Dragons is exceptionally tricky to do by turn 4 and usually you get four,
which will do 20-22 depending on whether you fetch Hellkites
or Hunted Dragons. Therefore if you can cast a Loxodon
Heirach on Turn 3 and some other life gain you can
get out of burn range. However you still need to deal with the Dragons on the
next turn!
I hope this has
helped to give you some idea of what to expect from a Dragonstorm
deck and how to beat it. In about two weeks time we should know just how
successful it is going to be.