The other day I was playing in the 8-man queues on Magic Online. I lost a match to the Hatching Plans storm deck, which I described last week. If you’re too lazy to click the link, the deck uses the Plans along with Perilous Research and Claws of Gix to draw an obscene amount of cards, and then finish with a Rite of Flame or Seething Song-powered storm spell such as Empty the Warrens or Ignite Memories.
The interesting thing about that match was that the Hatching Plans deck had Torchling in its sideboard. I was pretty well prepared for the Storm plan, but there was next to nothing I could do about a turn 2 pseudo-Morphling. I won game 1 and lost the next two to knock me out of the queue. I was intrigued by the Torchling tech, so I asked the deck’s creators (“Ravenous Baboon17” and “Wreyth1”) for their decklist, and they were kind enough to supply it and give me permission to write about it.
Thanks, guys, and I hope my next declaration won’t sound too harsh — the deck just isn’t working out for me very well. I wish I could tell you what exactly was wrong with it. However, this happens from time to time: a deck will just not seem good and I can’t figure out why. Here is the decklist I was using:
Lands (18)
Spells (42)
- 4 Sleight of Hand
- 4 Seething Song
- 4 Claws of Gix
- 4 Hatching Plans
- 3 Mishra's Bauble
- 4 Perilous Research
- 4 Rite of Flame
- 4 Chromatic Star
- 4 Empty the Warrens
- 3 Ignite Memories
- 4 Lotus Bloom
Sideboard
This is a modified version of the original deck that was sent to me — that version had sixteen lands! Now, I’ll play land-light decks if I think I can get away with it, but sixteen is simply too much. I originally had Gigadrowse in those Bauble slots, but as I played the deck I realized I was rarely afraid of countermagic; you’re more afraid that they’ll have blanks in hand for Ignite Memories or they’ll have some sort of way to answer your Goblin tokens.
I have yet to win a duel in the queues with this deck, and I couldn’t even beat homebrews in the Tournament Practice room. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s a “bad” deck per se — it’s had its share of Premiere Event top 8s, I’ve lost to it when I was piloting other decks, and generally when the Hatching Plans deck beats you, you feel like you never had a shot in the entire game.
However, I was not having any of those blowout games, and I’m not sure why. There are some possible reasons that I’ll spell out here, so that you may consider them when building your own storm decks:
1. It’s not that easy a deck to play. The thing about Dragonstorm is the card-drawing spells that it plays actually make it very easy to assemble the combo. Sleight of Hand and Telling Time, while offering less raw card advantage than any other Blue cards that you could have in those slots, help you pick and choose what you need amongst the lands and superfluous mana cards that you have in the deck. In a Dragonstorm deck your mulligans, followed by Sleight and / or Telling Time on the first two turns, will usually set you up to combo out on a subsequent turn when the Lotus Blooms you see come into play. Knowing when you expect to win then lets you plan accordingly.
If the Hatching Storm deck mulligans correctly and has a good draw, however, its corresponding curve will go turn 1 Sleight, turn 2 Hatching Plans, and at that point the game is really just starting. You might have seen a Lotus Bloom and suspended it, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll combo out on the turn it enters play. Sometimes you’ll want to run your Claws of Gix out there right away to sacrifice Hatching Plans, and sometimes you’ll want to save them as a storm-pumping spell for your giant combo turn.
So the Hatching Plans combo is not a simple path to twenty damage. However, I don’t think that completely explains why I was doing so badly with it; after all, I did work with Mind’s Desire in Extended two years ago, last year, and this year. I have some experience with difficult storm combo decks.
2. The manabase is awkward. Last week, in the forums for Richard Feldman article, Mono79 wrote:
“If you’re looking for room in the main deck [of Dragonstorm], I’d start with the lands. The [Makahito Mihara deck from Worlds] has 22, which is just too many for this deck considering the filtering it does and the low land count actually needed.”
Maybe it’s been that way for Mono79 in his testing, but when I’m designing for a big event like Regionals I tend to hold to a different rule, which I learned from this old Mike Flores article: don’t betray yourself with mana. If you have a room full of 200 people and you think that you have the playskill to finish in the Top 8 among them, why give yourself a chance to be manascrewed? In my opinion, the reasoning should not be “if I have all of these Blue cards, I can run fewer land” but instead “all of these Blue cards will make my 22-land deck as efficient as if it had 24 or 25.”
With that in mind, the Hatching Plans deck is put in a difficult position. Originally I tried a major overhaul of the Baboon / Wreyth1 list, boosting its land count up to 22, but then I was getting mana flooded. You draw so many cards so quickly with that deck; it would not be unusual for me to run Hatching Plans + Perilous Research and draw three or four dead cards. So I grudgingly cut it down to 18 land, which makes me nervous. The deck has Sleight of Hand, yes, but you’re asking it to do a bit too much when you want it to straighten out your mana and find your combo parts at the same time.
The thing is, Hatching Plans needs card selection spells even more than Dragonstorm does. If Dragonstorm is mana-flooded, it can always just play its namesake spell for only two copies; dealing ten damage and having two 5/5 fliers left over will decide a lot of games. If you’re really starved for action cards, usually you can just summon a Hellkite the hard way. Hatching Plans does not have this feature: Empty the Warrens is just a terrible card for only one copy, and two copies isn’t much better if the opponent can muster a blocker. So Hatching Plans needs to make two mana on turn 2, and three mana soon afterward, pretty badly. However, it also needs to avoid mana flood in the pre-combo turns by running low land counts. And finally it needs to have quite a bit of mana available on the final turn, to maximize the storm count. Even with Lotus Bloom, this deck’s mana would seem to have a hard time meeting all of those demands over the course of nine rounds.
However, this issue doesn’t exactly explain why I’ve done badly with the deck because I’ve never actually been manascrewed with it. I’ve always had sufficient lands for the turn 2 Hatching Plans, at least so far. However, I may have been keeping poor hands as long as they had sufficient mana; I don’t really recall and I haven’t saved any replays of the deck, as I didn’t plan to write about it until a couple of days ago.
3. The win condition is not resilient. Empty the Warrens may be able to bring forth a boatload of guys, but they still have to wait a turn to attack, same as most folks. A lot of things can happen in that one turn, let me tell you. I personally have had Pyroclasm strike and Bogardan Hellkite take out six men at once; Future Sight brings Ichor Slick as a possibility; while watching Premiere Event replays I have also seen Wrath of God, Damnation, and a Project X build that dropped Orzhov Pontiff (God, what a blowout! I got the chills just watching it).
Ignite Memories is even tougher; so much has to go right for you to win with it. I saw one PE replay in which the Hatching Plans player fumbled with his combo and finally did an Ignite for six on the turn before he was about to die — and he immediately scooped as he realized his opponent had emptied his hand the turn previous. In one game where I was playing my U/R Tron deck against Hatching Plans, I kept five lands, a Signet, and a Repeal in game three — my reasoning was that I had no shot against the Goblin plan anyway (I wasn’t running Wildfire), but that hand would be spectacular against the Ignite Memories plan. Sure enough, his Ignite for seven hit the Repeal once and lands the other six tries. Future Sight may help with this, thanks to Storm Entity, except for one little problem: Storm Entity can be countered.
This factor doesn’t really explain why deck isn’t working for me, because it has worked against me many, many times. Here’s an example: on Sunday night I was giving it a go in the 8-man queues with the U/R Tron deck again. A Hatching Plans deck won a game 1 in which my lackluster hand couldn’t beat ten goblins on turn 4, and then it made eighteen goblins late in game 2. Thing is, I was actually still hopeful I could win. In order to build up to such a huge turn he had endured several beatings from my Sulfur Elemental and Bottle Gnomes — he stood at five life and I was at 20 (effectively 23 thanks to the Gnome in play). I had Repeal and Electrolyze in hand, and an Aeon Chronicler suspended, so I had at least five draws to find a Bogardan Hellkite or Demonfire … except he then made ten copies of Ignite Memories.
It was time to go in the tank and do a little math. Eventually, I used my Electrolyze because the odds were good of drawing a cheaper or equal-costed card; I drew a Bottle Gnomes. I decided not to use the Repeal as the odds of drawing a cheaper or equal-costed card were not so good there. Thus the average amount of damage from ten Ignites is 20, I had the Gnome to put me at 23 life … and then he flipped the Gnome a couple times too many and I accumulated 24 damage. The end.
This is why the Hatching Plans deck’s failure is stumping me: it can make a PE Top 8, and in the process it can look completely unstoppable doing so. The so-called big three decks (Gruul, Dragonstorm, and Dralnu) all struggle against it because they can’t disrupt it very well. As I said last week, it’s the sort of deck where watching a single game win can make you want to play it… but I also said that losing one game with it will make you want to abandon it forever.
Why? Wish I knew. My list might be bad, my play might be bad, or my luck might simply be bad. I can’t really say. It’s inexplicable.
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