I am generally known for playing a lot of creatures. From Elves to Mono-Blue Devotion, I’m generally the person putting my cards into the red zone. But I’m no stranger to creature-light combo decks, especially Storm. Modern Storm has been relegated to the fringe since the banning of Seething Song, Rite of Flame, Ponder, and Preordain. If that seems like a lot of things to ban from one deck, you clearly weren’t around for the earliest days of Modern.
Still, as the metagame increases in speed and decreases in interactivity, Storm becomes much better. The real issue is in dealing with Jund and Abzan, which are omnipresent in the format and are both very tough matchups. The combination of discard spells, Abrupt Decay for Goblin Electromancer and Pyromancer Ascension, and a reasonable clock is too much to overcome. They even have Scavenging Ooze to disrupt Past in Flames.
Ancestral Vision was an interesting option to help these matchups, but why add a spell when you can add a creature that does the same thing!
Enter Bedlam Reveler.
If you are unable to combo on the first few turns of the game, Bedlam Reveler ensures you can gas back up and reassemble. The cards you discard to it can help fuel Past in Flames, and in a long attrition game, you can simply turn it sideways a couple of times and finish them off with a small Grapeshot.
The knock on Bedlam Reveler is how awkward it can be in multiples since they actively work against each other, but this deck fuels the card so well that it’s largely irrelevant. It may also seem to slow the deck down, but on your combo turns you typically generate a ton of red mana, allowing you to cast a Reveler with mana floating to continue the combo after drawing three cards.
The additional card draw could necessitate playing the seventeenth land, although I do like the addition of a Cascade Bluffs to help cast Bedlam Reveler. But come on, Dylan, pony up some money to get Scalding Tarns into the deck!
Dylan employs the Lightning Bolt / Thing in the Ice package that we’ve seen in decks like this one from the Top 8 of Grand Prix Guangzhou, which combines with Bedlam Reveler to give the deck an aggressive backup plan so it can win through discard and graveyard hate. [Copy Editor’s note: Don’t miss Sam Black’s take on a similar deck in today’s Magic Online video!]
That subtle transformation is important for Storm, which through sheer speed puts your opponents in a constant state of fear that makes them overreact to the combo. Sidestepping them just enough with Bedlam Reveler and Thing in the Ice could be the trick to bringing Storm back to prominence.
Creatures (8)
Lands (16)
Spells (36)
- 4 Sleight of Hand
- 4 Serum Visions
- 4 Desperate Ritual
- 3 Grapeshot
- 4 Manamorphose
- 4 Pyromancer Ascension
- 4 Pyretic Ritual
- 4 Gitaxian Probe
- 1 Noxious Revival
- 3 Past in Flames
- 1 Desperate Ravings
Sideboard
