It is the fourth round of the StarCityGames.com Legacy Open in Philadelphia this weekend. You are playing a teched-out Supreme Blue Counterbalance deck and you have fought hard to get your three match wins so far. Your opponent sits down and you begin the pre-game banter, the die rolling and the shuffling. Your hand is prepared for everything — a Ponder, Counterbalance, Force of Will and more.
Going first, you lay out an Island and pass the turn. The opponent Thoughtseizes you — he must be on some combo deck or Black aggro. He rips out your Force of Will and passes the turn. You Ponder on your turn, finding another Force of Will to surprise him. Sure enough, on his next turn he confirms your suspicions — a Cabal Ritual! He plays Doomsday and you briefly wonder whether to counter it; however, that Force of Will and Counterbalance will undo most of how he will try to combo you out, so you sit back, confident in the easy impending win.
You play your Counterbalance on the next turn and pass it back, and here is where things start to get weird. The opponent plays a Shelldock Isle, but it’s in Japanese, so you call a judge over to get the Oracle wording. Cute, he can trigger it thanks to Doomsday. The opponent puts a card under it and simply passes the turn back. Finding and sticking a Sensei’s Divining Top, you know you’ll be able to stop any further combo. Smugly, you end your turn.
The opponent draws a card, activates Shelldock Isle, and puts Emrakul, The Aeons Torn into play. You attempt to Force of Will it, but the opponent reminds you that it cannot be countered. You again ask for a judge to see if the Hideaway land actually casts the spell, and the man in black confirms that it does.
Your opponent takes another turn.
You sacrifice your board.
You shuffle up for the next game.
What now?
Storm combo has long been held in check by the blue CounterTop decks that can frustrate an opponent aiming to Dark Ritual into Tendrils of Agony. These decks can stop all sorts of little acceleration spells, countering that critical Ad Nauseam and winning from there. However, recent developments in Storm combo have created a true monster against blue decks: the Shelldock Isle — Doomsday combination.
The advantage of this combo is that it requires no storm to actually win. If the opponent has an Arcane Laboratory out, you can slow-roll the Doomsday and go from there. If they have a Mindbreak Trap, you can just dodge it. Most critically, you shift the opponent’s counterspells to Doomsday, where previously, they would be aimed at your post-Doomsday spells. Now, you can take a gamble and cast a Doomsday against an informed opponent and make them determine whether you plan to Storm them out or Shelldock an Eldrazi at them. If they counter the Doomsday, you can just go get another!
The Doomsday Scenario requires several sacrifices. For example, you cannot profitably play Ad Nauseam alongside it because you have too much life-loss to get through, and you have all sorts of adorable cards to hit with Ad Nauseam, like useless BBB sorceries or hey, this fifteen-mana card too. You must run cards like Sensei’s Divining Top to make Doomsday faster, and you also need Meditate. You have two or three mostly-useless cards in the deck, but if you happen to have drawn the Isle or Eldrazi, you can Mystical Tutor for a Brainstorm to put them back.
Against blue decks, you will want to just get the Shelldock Isle combination, which is stacked something like this, depending on how much mana you have available:
Brainstorm
Shelldock Isle
Duress
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
Doomsday
So then the next turn, you Brainstorm into the Shelldock Isle (or just stack it to put the Isle on top; this pile is, admittedly, greedy) and then play the Isle with Duress to rip out a Stifle from the opponent if it is necessary. Doomsday on the bottom allows you to recycle more cards into your deck if you must survive for more turns. From there, you unwind the combo.
You will be playing the deck as a traditional Storm deck against other opponents, however. Since the combination takes three turns to get going, absent a way to draw the Isle that turn, you rarely want to Doomsday against a Zoo deck, for example. They are capable of killing you outright in the interim time. A Merfolk deck, with Wastelands and Stifles, can also pose problems, though this deck can certainly dismantle the fish with its Shelldock combo. You can beat these to a certain extent with smart plays and calculated gambles (like if you have already seen one Wasteland). To counteract Wastelands, you could board a Twiddle to untap that Isle the turn you play it, but we both know that is a poor idea. Instead, you will just want to construct combo kills with Storm as usual.
Let me show you a list, then we can talk about how to make Storm kills:
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Brainstorm
4 Dark Ritual
4 Duress
4 Mystical Tutor
4 Doomsday
2 Thoughtseize
2 Infernal Tutor
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Wipe Away
1 Meditate
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
3 Cabal Ritual
1 Emrakul, The Aeons Torn
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
2 Bloodstained Mire
2 Underground Sea
1 Tropical island
1 Bayou
1 Swamp
2 Island
1 Shelldock Isle
Sideboard
3 Pithing Needle
2 Infernal Tutor
2 Krosan Grip
2 Xantid Swarm
1 Echoing Truth
1 Reverent Silence
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Cabal Ritual
1 Sadistic Sacrament
(I tried to find who originally posted this deck; if I knew, I would attribute it. If it’s yours, let me know!)
Some Shelldock Doomsday lists run some number of Show and Tell in the maindeck, since if you have drawn Emrakul, you can go get the sorcery and just drop him into play. I don’t think that’s an effective use of maindeck space, since you already have two incredible ways to win without needing to drop the fattie with Show and Tell. However, I could endorse putting some number of Show and Tell and extra copies of Emrakul onto the sideboard so you can board them in against decks like Zoo and Merfolk that might otherwise cause problems when you cast Doomsday.
First, this deck can win with straight storm combo. This is mostly through Ill-Gotten Gains and Infernal Tutor. Consider this line of play:
Cast Lotus Petal
Cast Dark Ritual
Cast Lion’s Eye Diamond
Cast Infernal Tutor, sacrificing the Diamond in response for BBB (BBBB floating)
Get Ill-Gotten Gains and cast it, getting back Lion’s Eye Diamond, Dark Ritual and Infernal Tutor.
Use Lotus Petal for a black mana, cast Dark Ritual and replay the Diamond. Cast Infernal Tutor, sacrificing the Diamond in response again.
Get Tendrils of Agony and cast it; this results in nine storm. With another card like Ponder along the way, you can easily make lethal damage. Thanks to Sensei’s Divining Top, you can also slow-roll the kill by selecting lots of lands to draw and using the Top to ensure you’re drawing more acceleration. This combination can work on the first turn with a great hand, but it remains playable through the rest of the game as well.
You can also kill with Doomsday stacks. Here is a basic stack:
Meditate
Dark Ritual
Dark Ritual
Ill-Gotten Gains
Tendrils of Agony
If you have a Top out, you can draw the Meditate that turn and cast it. This requires BBBBU2, which is intensive, but bear with me. You then cast both Dark Rituals, then Ill-Gotten Gains to get back both Rituals again, alongside your Tendrils. This generates eight storm, provided that you cast Doomsday in the same turn. It otherwise generates seven storm; if you cast a Dark Ritual to get things started on your turn, you make nine, and you can easily see how this can be integrated upward if you cast a Duress beforehand.
There are many, many permutations of Doomsday piles that you can experiment with. The best resource for this is the incredible article “Doomsday Piles,” written by Brandon Adams (emidln) and Michael Seubert (cheeseburger) from The Source. You can find the article here. I suggest you print out a copy that you can keep while goldfishing and playtesting so you can get a sense of how to start constructing piles. My other advice for learning how to make the stacks is to just start playing; you will, in your first ten games, get a bit of sense about whether you can go off and what you need. In those next ten games, you will pull off the Doomsday win half the time and fizzle the rest of the time, because you probably counted things wrong. Later on, you will find how Doomsday changes when you have Brainstorm in hand or a Top on the field.
You can easily generate a lot of storm by combining methods. Consider the play with Infernal Tutor that I discussed. If you have the spare mana and a Sensei’s Divining Top, you can use that final Infernal Tutor to go get a Doomsday instead, stacking a pile that you can draw instantly for four more storm copies. This can be easier if you run an Infernal Contract over Meditate; both have their advantages and disadvantages. Meditate does not eat a further half of your life, but is harder to cast. If you are playing against Zoo, then Doomsday and Infernal Contract could put you in the opponent’s sights if they have a Fireblast, for example. Largely, it depends on your risk adversity and play style as a combo deck pilot. It is not a huge decision to make, but you cannot profitably run both and you will likely lose a game here and there to having your Draw-Four be one card instead of the other.
For the sideboard, you have a lot of great options. The deck above plays green for Xantid Swarm and enchantment hate, but you can also play it straight blue-black. If you are going this route, I cannot endorse Teferi’s Realm highly enough. It phases out hate bears like Gaddock Teeg, takes out artifacts like Trinisphere and even Enchantments like Runed Halo (which will also remove the Realm from play until your next turn, which breaks the symmetry of Realm and completely frustrates Enchantress players). You can phase out that Counterbalance or Pithing Needle for long enough to make your deck hum.
You will note that the sideboard also increases the counts on Infernal Tutor and Cabal Ritual. If you are playing an opponent where your best bet is to just combo quickly, then playing an Ill-Gotten Gains deck postboard is a great plan. You can also use them as general catch-all cards to bring in when you want to take out something like Duress in a game where it is not useful. Also, Sadistic Sacrament is a fine card for the combo mirror, and there are times, though rare, where you can actually kick it for Total Humiliation wins. It is useful against decks like Enchantress that run two or three win conditions, too. If you fear Wasteland hitting your Isle — if your metagame has a lot of Merfolk or other aggressive decks with the land, then you can run a Pithing Needle and include it in your Doomsday pile to fight it.
This deck is not straight-up superior to Ad Nauseam Tendrils or any of the Next-Level Storm variants floating around, since you are more vulnerable to black disruption spells and the like. You cannot do a total reload with Ad Nauseam, nor do you have Force of Will backing up your spells, like some storm decks pack. The Shelldock option lets you bring a real fight to CounterTop decks, which many of the other storm decks just cannot do without something awkward like Orim’s Chant to back it up. Against opponents who are unfamiliar with the Shelldock pile, you can play right through their counterspells with Doomsday. Against informed opponents, you can still bait them with the sorcery to draw out counters with little cost to your plan, as you can easily restock with a Mystical Tutor later.
I suggest you give this deck a whirl and see whether it fits your style. If you previously liked constructing Doomsday stacks, this deck gives a great upgrade against those opponents with counters. In no way can I claim credit for this deck myself — it was the result of a lot of constructive discussion from people on MTGSalvation and The Source, who have been pushing the deck forward and tinkering it to make it better. I want to thank them all for a pretty cool deck and give a special shoutout to Brandon Adams, who has been especially dedicated to the deck and regularly posts his testing results.
Until next week…
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