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Video: Pyromancer Storm In Legacy

While we wait for Theros Standard, take some time to watch championship deckbuilder Sam Black try out his unusual combo deck in Legacy with Young Pyromancer and Dark Prophecy.

I wanted to try to build something fun this week while we take a break from Standard in anticipation of Theros. I originally intended to do some work on Young Pyromancer and Opposition, but Drew Levin has really claimed the content on that, so I figured it’d be better to do something else. But I still wanted to use Young Pyromancer.

I decided to see if I could combine it with my other love from M14 (not Opportunity . . . ), Dark Prophecy.

In Standard and Modern I’ve been using Dark Prophecy for value as an attrition engine, but when I first saw the card, I thought it would have the most potential as a combo enabler, so I decided to turn to Legacy to see if I could make that work.

I’ve come up with this as a first draft:


It’s done some sweet things in goldfishing, but it remains to be seen whether it can stand up to a real opponent. I think we should find out together.

Well, I think I might be on to something with this transformational sideboard, but as I mentioned it probably needs more lands. Let’s rework the deck moving forward to try to plan better for this:


Well, for some reason my attempt to save my deck with the changes didn’t go through, so I was playing with the old build, but it all worked out. Though it wasn’t necessarily how I drew it up, it was certainly one of the intended draws of this deck that against people who just want to shred Storm’s hand I can just transform a little and grind them out.

Not casting that Faithless Looting from my graveyard before playing Tendrils was just unforgivably bad. I still likely would have lost, but there were a lot of draws that would kill him or force him to use his counter there and put me in a much better position going forward. I’m not entirely sure I would have won game 2 if my opponent didn’t spend all those resources fighting a losing battle against Bloodghast. In game 3, I probably shouldn’t have kept that hand since there were only seventeen lands in my deck.

Also, I should admit that my mana is clearly wrong. I only own three Badlands on Magic Online and just decided to play a Blackcleave Cliffs over the fourth, thinking it wouldn’t matter, but obviously once I bring in more fetch lands and try to go long I risk running out of duals. It’s possible the deck actually needs four Badlands and a Blood Crypt to make sure it can always fetch while having plenty of lands that produce both red and black, but paying two life is pretty bad in this deck. Still, there will be a lot of times when it can be fetched painlessly.

Well, I guess we know that people are probably playing the right Storm deck.

I doubt this deck can be stable enough to work against an actual opponent since it needs more things to go right because its cards are trying to work together, but I always feel like the combo decks with more different kinds of pieces are more fun to build. Unfortunately, the combo decks where every card is basically the same tend to be a bit better. Still, if you’re in the market for a fun side project or an unusual combo deck, this might be a good starting point.

Thanks for watching,

Sam

@samuelhblack on Twitter
twitch.tv/samuelhblack