When Wizards of the Coast decided to reprint a “fixed” version of a three-mana black noncreature that’s restricted in Vintage for the second time in Magic’s history, I sat up and paid attention. Initially, I was going to talk about Past in Flames as Just Another Card in my set review. My initial assessment, of course, was very far off.
My set review model for Innistrad was flawed, and for that I apologize. Although Innistrad has no shortage of role players—Stony Silence, Nevermore, Purify the Grave, and so on—it’s fairly clear what they’re there to do. You don’t need to know what Zoo can do with Coffin Purge or what Enchantress can do with Meddling Mage or Null Rod. That’s not what interesting set reviews are about. Set reviews are about exploring the depth and flexibility of the cards in a new set. There are three major players in Innistrad, and while I talked about Snapcaster Mage at length last week and will talk about Liliana of the Veil at length next week, I want to give Past in Flames its own article. Such an incredible card deserves nothing less.
Past in Flames is a clear tip of the hat to Yawgmoth’s Will. As noted above, it’s a little worse—you can’t replay artifacts, creatures, enchantments, or lands; it’s red; and it costs one mana more. The thing is, we went through this before.
Necropotence was proven to be an incredibly broken card for years after its printing. It’s one of the top five black cards of all time. A few years after printing Necropotence, Wizards made a “fixed” version at twice the mana. The ability was tweaked to take place immediately, cutting out much of the guesswork of Necropotence. Yawgmoth’s Bargain proved to be even better than Necropotence, spawning a whole slew of combo decks.
Innistrad has brought us a reimagining of Yawgmoth’s Will, the best non-ante black card ever. Yawgmoth’s Will and Bargain both asked us to lean on Dark Ritual heavily, and I have no doubt that Rite of Flame will be an equally huge part of our game plan. How best to go about this game plan, though, is a very different sort of question.
Storm in Legacy is a touchy subject. There are entire discussion boards dedicated to nothing but threads on how to best leverage the Scourge mechanic to kill people. People have looked at a lot of different ways to generate mana, abuse the graveyard, abuse the stack, tutor for cards, and kill people. To start out on common ground, let’s lay out the cards that we’re absolutely playing:
That’s it. I know that I want to play Lion’s Eye Diamond in every single version of the deck because Past in Flames makes it come very close to being an actual Black Lotus, whereas LED’s “drawback” is something that traditional Storm decks have to work to mitigate. With this deck, there will be times where we actively want to discard our hand. Finally, one of the drawbacks of Past in Flames is that you need mana available after the spell’s resolution for it to do anything. Since you can’t replay mana artifacts, you will need ritual mana or artifact mana to start flashing things back.
From there, we can select cards based on how far along the power-consistency spectrum we want to be. When building Storm decks, the term can be adjusted to contrast speed versus protection. After all, people who play Belcher are planning on killing you by turn two or three at the latest, but if you have Force of Will, their plan is to hope that you cast it on the wrong spell and/or that they have Empty the Warrens. On the other end of the spectrum, Time Spiral decks aren’t killing until turn three at the earliest and more often on turn four or five, but they have a toolbox of answers through Cunning Wish and Merchant Scroll as well as broad maindeck protection in Force of Will. One of them has Chrome Mox, Tinder Wall, and Lotus Petal, while the other has Meditate, Turnabout, and Ponder. All of these are defensible inclusions in Storm builds, but they don’t all play well together.
The reason why I want to build around Past in Flames is that, with a little bit of work, it can win you the game where no other card can. It allows us to play a broader range of cards, since we can use our life total as a resource. After all, if we aren’t going to be casting Ad Nauseam, the last point of life is the only one that matters. I don’t want our deck’s power to be affected by the Wild Nacatl on the other side of the table.
Furthermore, we don’t have to worry about flipping more expensive cards, so we can cut down on zero-mana artifacts. That will probably be preferable in a number of Past in Flames builds, since they don’t play well with the namesake card. Past in Flames lets us bide our time and set up for a big turn culminating in either a lethal Tendrils of Agony, a huge Brain Freeze, or several Grapeshots. Lotus Petal doesn’t do a ton to help us here.
When I started brewing Past in Flames decks, the first deck that I wanted to put Past in Flames in was a European special—Doomsday Fetchland Tendrils, or DDFT. The name is very descriptive for a Legacy deck name—you play a cantrip + fetchland mana base, meaning you’re at the top end of the “protection” end of the speed-protection spectrum, and you cast Doomsday.
The problem, of course, is that Doomsday is literally the hardest card to cast in Magic. In fairness, it’s a card that lets you tutor five times and stack your deck, so it’s also really good, but the resolution of the spell is going to either win or lose you the game. Given how many different situations can come up for a Storm deck—different counts of differently colored mana, having a Sensei’s Divining Top or a Brainstorm or a Ponder or any of several tutors in hand, having a given storm count upon casting Doomsday—casting Doomsday on the fly is probably the most computationally-exhausting Magic task I can imagine.
Of course, there is also the issue of being able to lose certain games before you build your deck—should you include Infernal Contract or Meditate? What protection should you include?
The deck is a masterpiece, to be sure, and I have nothing but admiration for those who choose to learn its intricacies. That said, it’s very easily the hardest deck to correctly pilot in the format, and I won’t pretend to be qualified enough to dispense advice about it. If you’re interested in sinking countless hours of your life into learning a very complicated Legacy deck, here’s an initial list.
Lands (17)
Spells (43)
Should you decide, after playing enough games with it to cast Doomsday proficiently, that it wants Past in Flames, I’d love to hear from you.
The most naturally obvious home for Past in Flames is in Bryant Cook TES, which is another name for five-color Storm. Jason Golembiewski took 3rd place with it in Indianapolis while showcasing its capacity for turn-one kills along the way. His list, for reference:
Lands (14)
Spells (46)
Most people would be content to cut Ill-Gotten Gains for Past in Flames and justify it by saying, “They’re both four-mana cards that let you abuse your graveyard with mana floating to rebuy cards and kill them!” The problem with this line of reasoning is that the deck is built to take advantage of Ill-Gotten Gains by setting up game states with Lion’s Eye Diamond and Dark Ritual, using IGG as a way to gain four storm for no net loss in mana. The interaction, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is:
(Have two storm and two mana available from a Lotus Petal and a land or something similar)
Cast Lion’s Eye Diamond
Cast Dark Ritual, four mana floating
Cast Infernal Tutor and crack Lion’s Eye Diamond in response, five mana floating
Find and cast Ill-Gotten Gains, one mana floating
Return Dark Ritual, LED, and Infernal Tutor
Cast Dark Ritual
Cast LED, three mana floating
Cast Infernal Tutor, break Lion’s Eye Diamond in response
Find and cast Tendrils of Agony for 20.
The problem with having Past in Flames in that spot is that it requires red mana and doesn’t really abuse Lion’s Eye Diamond. In that spot, it doesn’t net mana. It definitely synergizes with Infernal Tutor, as you will empty your hand before casting Past in Flames and won’t put any new cards there, meaning that Infernal Tutor will be Demonic Tutor with flashback when you get around to it. The problem is that TES is not a deck that is going to be able to have a huge Past in Flames turn. All of its cards are on the table—Lotus Petals, Lion’s Eye Diamonds, Chrome Mox, and the Cabal Ritual imprinted on it, and so on. Past in Flames is probably a fine Burning Wish target in the deck, but it’s certainly not something I would just jam in the deck and expect to work out.
Let’s start brewing, then. If we don’t have to play Ad Nauseam, we get to play Force of Will. If we’re playing Force of Will, we don’t have to play Duress. If we’re not playing Duress and Ad Nauseam, what happens if we don’t play black? For that matter, why not just play Time Spiral?
Lands (18)
Spells (42)
This deck has a lot going on. I knew when I saw Past in Flames that I would want to Intuition for it, but very few combo decks in Legacy can realistically play Intuition. Most spells that you spend three mana on in this format have to win you the game or, at the very least, not lose you the game. Here’s an Intuition stack that should win you the game in most situations:
The reason I wanted to play Past in Flames in this sort of shell is that where most Storm decks struggle against BUG, Time Spiral has been historically more successful than other Storm decks against the three-color menace. Meditate and Time Spiral give the deck a lot of recovery, whereas decks with Chrome Mox and Lotus Petal are often dead from the first Hymn to Tourach. A higher land count and high basic Island count means that Wastelands are going to be a fairly ineffective plan against you, whereas Wastelanding a City of Brass in TES can be game-ending, depending on their draw.
A major appeal to playing Past in Flames at all is that it is inherently strong against discard-heavy strategies. Given how incredible Hymn to Tourach is in the Legacy metagame right now, I have no doubt that a successful Storm deck will have to be built with discard strategies at the forefront of their thought process. Let me walk you through my thought process in choosing the cards I did.
You want to play a High Tide mana engine instead of an incremental Rite/Ritual shell because games where you will be able to cast Past in Flames are going to go long(er) anyway. It’s not like Past in Flames is cheap—it “costs” five or six mana, given that you have to have mana available when you cast it for it to do anything. It doesn’t work in the way that we’re used to Ad Nauseam working, where we cast our spell, wait a minute, and then cast a bunch of spells and kill them.
Since the game is going to the third, fourth, or even a mythical fifth turn, High Tide will be much better than Rite of Flame. On the fourth turn, High Tide is the same as a Dark Ritual in terms of mana production. If you cast Turnabout, it gets much better than Dark Ritual. Given how well High Tide interacts with slower storm deck cards (Meditate, Intuition), it seems to be a pretty clear winner. With that said, Intuition-ing for Rite of Flame is a pretty strong play when you take into account your plan to flashback all of your Rites and that Intuition. There may be a way to fit both into another sort of deck…
You can afford to cut Cunning Wish because you have a ton of redundancy between Intuition and Merchant Scroll. You don’t need a ton of options in a game-one situation because, with the exception of Trinisphere, pretty much everything can be answered by Grapeshot or Brain Freeze.
Lion’s Eye Diamond looks odd at first until you realize that Past in Flames makes your graveyard your hand. Given that we’re expecting to be Duressed a ton, Lion’s Eye Diamond lets us get a ton of initial mana in a deck that has very few ways to kick-start its engine.
Time Spiral is both an expensive card and doesn’t play well with Past in Flames, yet it’s still good enough that we’re going to want to play all four. In a deck that plays this many lands, there isn’t a better card for the deck. Put another way, this is Time Spiral’s team, and Past in Flames is the new free agent.
Still, High Tide is a little slow, a little ponderous, and doesn’t always draw what it needs off of its Meditates and Time Spirals. There are, after all, problems with having 18 land in a spell-based combo deck. There is another way to abuse Past in Flames, though. We even get to play Dark Ritual. This is far from a tuned, battle-tested list, but the concept is one that excites me to no end:
Lands (16)
Spells (44)
The concept is pretty simple: Entomb functions as a tutor for Past in Flames. If you have a Past in Flames, it becomes a Mystical Tutor. Pretty straightforward.
The thing that excites me the most about this interaction is that there are a ton of very reasonable flashback cards that could make the cut in this deck because their flashback cost is better than their prohibitively costed front end. I could even see the potential for a card like Silent Departure seeing play in this sort of deck.
Regardless of what you play with your Past in Flames, though, I’m more than happy to claim that it will be a major player in Legacy Storm decks a few months from now. It may take that long for us to figure out exactly how to use it and when to use it, but Past in Flames has a home in Legacy. I hope that this article will serve as a guidepost along the way to finding the right list. Enjoy the hunt!
Next week, I’ll be back to tell you whether or not Liliana of the Veil is the real deal in Legacy. If you’re going to be in Nashville, I can’t wait to get back to the SCG Open circuit. It’s really been too long since Cincinnati.
Drew Levin
@drew_levin on Twitter