It’s States run-up time. There is at least one deck that can mill an opponent’s library away, or deal 100 damage – all on turn 4. That’s a God draw, to be sure, but it can be done. So, is the deck worth playing? Let’s see.
Here’s the God draw:
Turn 1: Forest, Birds of Paradise.
Turn 2: Island, Kodama’s Reach (put Forest into play)
Turn 3: Swamp, Heartbeat of Spring
Turn 4: Forest, Heartbeat, Eye of the Storm, Early Harvest, Tidings, Rampant Growth, Sleight of Hand, etc.
At this point, unless you manage to draw something like nine land in a row, you will draw most of your deck and create a huge amount of mana. Let me explain what’s happening, starting with the critical card:
A player plays an instant or sorcery – including choosing targets and paying all costs. Then Eye triggers, removing the spell from the game. That player then may play any and all spells removed from the game by Eye of the Storm, including the new spell, and play those in any order.
Quick example: Eye of the Storm is in play. It has already removed Early Harvest (untap all basic lands you control) and Sleight of Hand. I cast Telling Time. Eye removes Telling Time from the game and allows me to make copies of any of the three removed spells. I choose to put my copies of Telling Time, Sleight of Hand and Early Harvest on the stack, in that order. Then I tap all my lands for mana. Early Harvest untaps them, Sleight lets me stack my deck, then Telling Time lets me draw another instant or sorcery, so I can do it all again.
The heart of the combo is Eye of the Storm and Early Harvest, which untaps basic lands. That means that the deck wants lots of basics, and only basics. That also means that it needs basic land fetchers – and the sorcery versions, not Sakura-Tribe Elders. Four Rampant Growths are necessary, as well as a few Kodama’s Reaches.
The next piece of the puzzle has to be the methods of assembling the engine and finding the kills. This means cheap card drawing and searching. Sleight of Hand is not Serum Visions or even Opt, but it is the best we have for one mana. Telling Time is a new version of Impulse, and is quite good. Tidings is very expensive, but once you cast one with Eye out, it is almost impossible to fizzle.
Finally, we also need a tutor. Diabolic Tutor is just too slow. Drift of Phantasms, however, can tutor for Early Harvest and Heartbeat of Spring, or it serves as a blocker against fast Hypnotic Specters. Both roles are good.
Drift of Phantasms also makes me want a three-mana draw spell to tutor for. Counsel of the Soratami is one option, but if the deck has Black, Consult the Necrosages has two advantages. First, it can also be used as discard, to clear an opponent’s hand. Second, it also allows you to target an opponent – meaning that, if you can mill them, you can kill them immediately without waiting for them to draw. Since some forums are talking about Reito Lantern, Junk Troller and so forth, so that might be relevant.
Once we have assembled the engine, the next consideration is the kill. I have tried several – but first, I’ll talk about the kill cards you do not want to use. As I was first toying with this deck, I made the following notes:
Blaze – nice, but only red spell worth considering. Can’t tutor for it. Mountain just for Blaze = bad. Psychic Drain – X mill, occasional life gain and so forth is much better – you can Drift for it.
Um – wrong. RTFC. etc.
With Eye in play, I can easily generate tons of mana, then cast a huge Blaze or a Psychic Drain. Then, Eye removes that spell from the stack and lets me play copies of Blaze and Psychic Drain – with X = zero. Blazing an opponent for zero is not tech. Neither is tutoring for a spell that mills zero cards – although I can, indeed, tutor for it with Drift of Phantasms.
Those of you testing Eye of the Storm decks that kill with Blaze might want to rethink that. Early Harvest decks without Eye might work, but that’s a different deck.
The Red kill cards that actually work might include Lava Axe, Shock or Char – but they all seem clunky. Black works better. First, Glimpse the Unthinkable is an instant and combos nicely with Eye of the Storm. As a fallback, I also play Maga, Traitor to Mortals. Maga is an x-spell in creature form, so it is not affected by Eye of the Storm.
Finally, I am also experimenting with including a graveyard recursion spell into the mix. I have been playing with Sins of the Past. It is slightly more expensive, but allows you to play cards from the graveyard for free. Sins combos nicely with Eye – Eye removes both Sins and any cards cast with Sins from the stack immediately, well before Sins can do so. This means that you can cast Sins every time you cast an instant. However, Recover probably works just as well. Sins just seems cooler, and the mana acceleration is slightly relevant for the second and third cards played, if you don’t have an Early Harvest already removed.
Here’s the current version of the deck.
Eye of the Storm
Creatures:
4
“>Birds of Paradise
3 Drift of Phantasms
Kills:
1
“>Maga Traitor to Mortals
2 Glimpse the Unthinkable
3
“>Eye of the Storm
4
“>Early Harvest
3
“>Heartbeat of Spring
4
“>Telling Time
2 Tidings
4
“>Sleight of Hand
4 Rampant Growth
2
“>Kodama’s Reach
1
“>Sins of the Past
1 Consult the Necrosages
Goldfishing the deck is a lot of fun. Like any combo deck, the first thing to learn is how the deck goes off, and when to mulligan. That takes a lot of play testing and goldfishing. Start there.
The deck also requires some careful mana management. I would recommend using colored glass beads, or something like that, to track the amount and colors of mana in your pool. Both color and type can be constraints as you start going off – learn to keep very accurate count. You don’t want to develop sloppy habits and have them bite you during States, when all your opponent has to do during your final turn is to watch you for errors.
Okay, that’s the deck. Decklists, by themselves, are useless. Let’s talk matchups.
Any playtest results are meaningless unless you can also evaluate the decks I am playing against, so I will start each section with mini decklists. Note that my playtest decks are not necessarily the most tuned versions of each deck. Where a particular slot is in dispute, I will play two of each card, so that I can see how they perform and how important they are. For example, people are debating Char and Devouring Light in White Lightning. I play two of each in the gauntlet deck.
White Lightning / White Weenie
My test version of White Lightning has 16 fliers, 3 Isamaru, 2 Hand of Honor, 4 Lightning Helix, 4 Shock, 2 Char and 2 Devouring Light. It also has 2 Hunted Lammasu and a Hunted Dragon – and sometimes the reverse. The deck does not currently run Suppression Field or Jitte, but neither of those have a significant impact on this matchup.
White Lightning is fast. It can, occasionally, just run you over before you can go off – especially if you mulligan on the draw. However, that is not the worst problem. White Lightning also packs a bunch of instants. Imagine this scenario: You have started to go off. Eye of the Storm is in play, and has Early Harvest, Tidings and a Sleight of Hand already removed. You cast your first Glimpse. In response to the Eye triggering, your opponent casts Shock. That opponent gets to stack Shock, Sleight, Tidings and Early Harvest. Odds are very good that the opponent can find another instant burn spell in the top six cards, then do it again. They can often burn you out completely before that Glimpse ever resolves – even if you are at close to 20 life.
When the deck was unknown, I could win more than half my games. (I switch decks with my opponent after ten games during playtesting – and provided the deck tutorial then. So unknown = first ten games.) Once both players became familiar with the matchup, White Lightning was winning maybe two-thirds of the pre-board games. It would be even worse with 4 Char instead of 2 Char, 2 Light. Devouring Light can only hijack the stack if you are attacking with the Birds of Paradise….
I should also note that Heartbeat of Spring is a gift that you rarely want to give any deck, including White Lightning. It does help you go off, but you only want to cast it if you are certain you are going to go off the next turn – and even then it may bite you in the backside. That’s why I cut the number to three – they are such a double-edged sword.
My gauntlet decks have oversized sideboards – everything we think decks might bring in. White Lightning has a few relevant options, including Tempest of Light and Kami of the Ancient Law. Tempest of Light is particularly annoying. In the above example, assume that the player plays Tempest of Light. It is removed from the game, and the player can stack the Early Harvest, Tidings, Sleight and so forth as that player wants. The player can untaps lands, draw cards and plays more instants – all keeping them above Tempest of Light. Once the player finally decides to let Tempest resolve, Eye of the Storm will be disenchanted. Once Eye of the Storm is disenchanted, the cards removed from the game all lose that “removed by Eye of the Storm” tag and are no longer accessible. However, the trigger to remove Glimpse of the Unthinkable from the game is still on the stack, and it will still remove Glimpse.
Ivory Mask is another possible sideboard card for White Lightning, although it is more likely in White control or Enduring Ideal decks. White Lightning does not really want Ivory Mask – just an instant and some open mana. That’s better. However, for decks that can run Ivory Mask, it is a real problem. You can run Naturalize to deal with it – but if they can hijack the stack, then they can use the Naturalize on Eye of the Storm.
Sideboarding strategies for Eye are difficult. You cannot take out much or the combo fizzles. The best options I have come up with try to prevent the opponent from hijacking the stack – if they don’t, and you don’t give them Heartbeat mana, you can often win the race. Defense Grid and Dosan are one set of options. Blackmail is another – White Lightning generally does not have a lot of cards in hand – this can usually clear out the instants. If you need to bring in creature removal, Last Gasp is a good option.
Overall, the matchup is unfavorable and gets marginally worse after sideboarding.
White Weenie is like White Lightning, but much less likely to steal the stack without the burn spells. I don’t expect to see much pure White Weenie – White Lightning is just better.
Gifts
My Gifts build was pretty much a standard Kamigawa block, triple-Kagemaro version with a Grave-Shelled Scarab, Gleancrawler and better lands wedged in. The matches went long because of discussions about options, and I’m not sure we are really proficient with the matchup. However, the Gifts deck does not have a ton of instants (other than Gifts) and the anti-creature suite only kills Birds. Just remember not to give them Wear Away, if you can possibly avoid it. (Since some decklists don’t even run it, so that is fairly easy.)
In playtesting. Eye was beating Gifts, but take that with a grain of salt. Gifts was late in the gauntlet. At this point, we are probably more proficient with the Eye side of the matchup. However, Eye is a fast combo and Gifts is a slow, board control deck. In theory, Eye has an advantage.
I don’t have good sideboard results for Gifts. Gifts does fantastic if you side in the worst case board of 4 Naturalize, 4 Cranial Extraction and 4 Blackmail (Eye hates discard), but who would play that sideboard? However. the Cranial Extractions are probably enough by themselves. Cranial Extraction should name Early Harvest – if that resolves, the game is over. For that reason, Eye also brings in Cranials, and names Cranial first.
Note, Cranial Extraction is one card that might justify Recover over Sins.
Eye has won the majority of the games to date pre sideboard, and seems to split post sideboard. However, I have not played against a really gifted (pun fully intended) Gifts player, so I’m unsure of these results.
The Rock / B/G Aggro
My Rock builds always feel like Gifts without Gifts – and I’m not enthralled. After a few games, we stopped playing this matchup. Grave-Shelled Scarab is a fine creature, and Plague Boiler is a fine board sweeper, but way, way too slow to matter. We switched to B/G aggro, which seems more relevant for this deck.
My gauntlet B/G Aggro deck is the one Pekken used to win a Magic-League tourney. It runs Birds, Elves of Deep Shadow, Hypnotic Specter, Ravenous Rats, Nezumi Graverobbers, three Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni, plus Blackmail, Jitte, Putrefy and Last Gasp. It is quick and brutal.
I played Eye against Ingrid a lot. Big mistake – Hyppies love Ingrid. She was dropping a turn 2 Hyppie game after game, and could invariably “randomly” pull the one business card out of a six-card hand. (And it isn’t because of my bad tells – we always roll a die to determine which card is randomly discarded.) Even when Ingrid was not playing the Hyppie side, the combination of discard and speed gave Eye fits.
To be generous, Eye was pulling out maybe 40 percent pre sideboarded. Post sideboard, when B/G aggro can bring in Cranial Extraction and Naturalize to replace the Putrefies and Last Gasps, it only gets worse. Eye does not have great sideboard options – the best seem to be Putrefy, Last Gasp or Hideous Laughter against Hyppies, or Cranial to battle Cranial. Bad all around.
All the Rest
I have also playtested with a Dark Confidant deck and a Dimir milling deck. I’m not sold on the decklists for those, but I am fairly confident of the results.
Against the Dark Confidant decks, their speed and discard cause some problems. The can also hijack the stack with instants – but unless they run Boomerang, Naturalize or something like that, they usually cannot kill you as a result. Eventually, they surrender the stack and you can finish killing them. Even if you both mill each other out, they are going to have to draw first. Fifty-fifty with the fastest versions, Eye has an advantage against slower versions.
The same is true of the Dimir decks – if you are going off during your turn, it does not matter if you both have your libraries milled away – they will be decked first. However, if you suspect that they might have some anti-decking tech, then you can consider using Consult the Necrosages. Be careful, though: if they have counters, they can turn that around.
Overall
I would not take this deck to States. In the early rounds, when most opponents have no idea what you are doing, you should win. Your only real problems are the good players who can figure out the interactions – and are playing White Lightning instead of Gifts. However, even then you might drop a game or two to mana screw or flood – and then lose a post sideboarded game to anything bringing in Cranial Extraction. Nonetheless, it would not be unreasonable to go 4-0, with just a little luck.
Assuming you win your first four rounds, now not only will you be paired up against the better players but people will almost certainly be talking about your deck. Once that happens, people will figure out how to hijack the stack. At this point, your odd drop significantly. People will know how to beat you, and you will not steal any more games.
In the last five rounds, you can expect to lose game one once or twice to mana screw, mana flood and bad draws. However, it will be a lot harder to steal games two and three in the later rounds. If your States goes to eight or nine rounds, this deck is unlikely to make Top 8.
Sorry.
However, it is a lot of fun. Proxy it up, and when your playtesting grinds, pull it out for a couple games. It will at least liven things up – and it will provide some experience in case you get paired against someone who loves weird combos more than winning.