Welcome To The Dream World

I was all set to Storm this GP up until a couple weeks ago. I was judging a local Grand Prix Trial and did the obligatory “count to 60 plus 15” on each list before Round 1. I got about halfway through, paused at one list, and immediately stood up to go watch. Eight rounds, six wins, and two draws later that deck had won the event.

At our local event the next week I had a bad run with TES and thought things over again. When you are drawing what you need, that deck is unrealistically powerful, but sometimes you Ponder, shuffle, and draw for three turns without hitting a Ritual and die. I wasn’t quite comfortable enough to play a deck without a constant stream of card selection. I was sitting there, mulling over how tilted I would be if I just ran bad the day of the Grand Prix, and someone mentioned the following to me:

“You know the same deck that won the trial here also swept one the next day, right?”

Did I mention the guys playing it were twins?

The next week, I pulled together the deck and jammed it. I ended up crushing everything I came up against. The matchups all felt like they should be soft to combo, but the last match I played against Stoneblade had only felt close at any point because I mulled to five in game 1. I resolved to play the deck again and see what happened before making decisions. Once again, I crushed. The only match I lost was due to punting against RUG Delver. That time I took down Stoneblade three times, with only one match being at all close.

The final test came the morning of the Grand Prix. I had both TES and this deck sleeved up. The only fear I had was that the Maverick matchup wasn’t as good as I had been told. I ran into Drew Levin, who called in Maverick expert Jacob Kory (who ended up in 16th place). After six games, I felt extremely ahead. The two games I lost were extremely close and were won solely on the back of the criminally underrated Gaea’s Cradle and Jacob making every play I could see perfectly correct to get exact lethal through.

And Dream Halls it was.

Dream Halls combo has been around since the card was unbanned a couple years ago, but this list was designed by James and William Heslip. We all ended up with the same maindecks give or take a single flex slot and slightly different sideboards. The list I ended up registering was:

Heslip Halls

Ari Lax

197th Place at Grand Prix on 03-18-2012

Legacy

Creatures (4)

4 Progenitus

Lands (19)

Spells (37)

Sideboard

Let’s start with two big questions: Why this over High Tide or Hive Mind?

The first is easy. High Tide has a definite cap on when it can kill. You are at best winning on turn 3 with the nuts and usually need four lands to get going. Show and Tell means that this deck can just do its business on turn, working around a lot of random things that can occur. High Tide definitely has some more flexibility due to Cunning Wish and additional counters, but I think the ability to just kill someone helps you steal games in a lot of bad matchups. There’s also the fact you have serious issues with Counterbalance while Show and Tell just laughs it off.

The second is a bit more in-depth, but it comes down to the fact that five is significantly less than six. Dream Halls is a much easier card to just hardcast than Hive Mind is. You can easily curve out with three basics into an Ancient Tomb or City of Traitors and win the game on turn 4 without ever exposing yourself to Wasteland. Hive Mind needs five lands and a Sol land to naturally cast the namesake spell, forcing it to play extra enablers like Grim Monolith to support what becomes a three-card combo. By cutting this dependency, you gain extra slots to use on cantrips or protection. Your Emrakul analogue is also part of your ten combo slots, giving you more room to play with. Hive Mind does have Pact of Negation, but this deck could even play it if you wanted. In general, your deck is just more stable because of the added free slots and lack of reliance on a third enabler card to combo. This kill is also definite every time you resolve the spells, while Hive Mind can find itself having to play multiple Pacts if things drag on. The one edge Hive Mind does have is a resilience to Gaddock Teeg, Aven Mindcensor, and enchantment removal, which depending on the metagame might push it over the edge.

For those who aren’t familiar with the combo, here it goes. There might be a marginally more optimal line that gets you an extra card I’m not seeing, but I haven’t gone that deep with the deck yet.

In order to start you need to be able to get Dream Halls into play with a colored card and a Conflux still in hand.

Step 1: Resolve Dream Halls.

Step 2: Discard a colored spell to cast Conflux, finding three Progenitus, Conflux, and Force of Will.

Step 3: Discard a Progenitus to Conflux, finding two Conflux, Force of Will, and two Progenitus (the replacement effect shuffles the discarded one in before Conflux resolves).

Step 4: Discard a Progenitus to Conflux, finding Force of Will, Progenitus, Beacon of Immortality, and False Cure.

Step 5: Discard a Progenitus to cast False Cure.

Step 6: Cast Conflux discarding Progenitus for two Progenitus and a Force of Will.

Step 7: Cast Beacon of Immortality targeting the opponent with all your Forces back. They gain life equal to their life total, then lose life equal to their new life total.

Combo Notes:

The first Conflux can also just find two gold cards, Beacon, and False Cure. This helps you play around multiple Mindbreak Traps or a Flusterstorm as you can pass the turn then upkeep kill them.
If you have to discard one of the two combo pieces, you can still just make a Progenitus with a ton of Forces (and possibly a bounce spell) backup. If you have the Beacon still in library and this happens, you can also just Beacon up a ton of life as well.
Once Dream Halls has resolved, remember you can use it to cast Force of Will. It doesn’t cost life and Progenitus goes back to deck.
Surgical Extraction should not do anything to the combo unless you Intuitioned beforehand. After each Conflux resolves you immediately have priority, so you always get to cast Conflux again before they can extract the one in graveyard. If they respond, the one on the stack just gets the Beacon and False Cure for lethal.
There are a couple other two-card win packages. Beacon of Immortality plus False Cure has to target them but has instant speed options, kills from any life total, and has the added utility of Beacon as mentioned above. Magister Sphinx plus anything that domes for ten works and lets you Show and Tell in the Sphinx as a threat, but also targets and can be beat by lifegain. Sorin’s Vengeance is probably the best option here to ten them as you can gain life and Progenitus them if you discard the Sphinx. The other pair we considered was Prismatic Omen plus Coalition Victory, which notably doesn’t target. The issue we had was that it opened me up to random things like Engineered Explosives on two or Pernicious Deed with two to four mana open, as well as both pieces being almost 100% dead otherwise. It would be cute to Show and Tell in a Prismatic Omen and natural Conflux out the combo, but that isn’t remotely realistic. There were also the marginal issues of them being able to remove Progenitus in response some random way and you only getting to have double Force backup at the end instead of triple (if I counted right), but realistically those are super marginal.
If you have no Conflux but instead have Intuition and another extra colored spell, you can go off by discarding that spell to cast Intuition for Confluxes then discard another card to Conflux.
If your opponent has something like Leyline of Sanctity that lets you chain Confluxes but not target them, you can get Echoing Truth or Wipe Away somewhere along the line and bounce it.
If someone makes you play it out and you want to put someone on tilt, you can do the following (based on real life events). After your third Conflux, slam False Cure and Beacon and make a show of messing up the stacking so Beacon resolves first. Tank, write down the life total change, and shuffle the Beacon in. Then Conflux for it again and just kill them.

As for the rest of the maindeck, it was extremely solid. Rather than do a breakdown by numbers, I’ll cover some key points.

The main thing that distinguishes this list from previous ones that failed is the mono-color manabase. I’ve always been a massive advocate of never losing to Wasteland if you don’t have to and this deck does just that. I’ve did some research on the deck after deciding it was an option and found the main splashes were black for Lim-Dul’s Vault and red for Burning Wish. First things first, finding combo pieces is a non-issue with eleven cantrips and four Intuitions. The black disruption was a nice touch, but in general the additions were unexciting for the risk you added.

In addition, both of the off-color search options open up a vulnerability to Spell Snare. Look at this list. What is your opponent targeting with Spell Snare? Are they opting to discard a card while paying for Daze? Do they actually have the quad conditional counter to beat all your Forces once you Conflux chain and then enough left to beat a 10/10 Hydra? How often are you actually needing to Echoing Truth against a Snare deck, especially when you can just get the Wipe Away post-board for a Leyline of Sanctity?

As I mentioned last week, eleven cantrips makes your deck feel completely different than eight. It’s almost like cheating. During the first couple turns of the game you get to select your hand from a set of twenty or so cards, and if things go deeper you see at least twice as many cards a turn as your opponent. A local player ended up transplanting a Hive Mind kill into the shell of this deck for the Grand Prix and almost cracked Top 8, and I’ve got a list to throw up later that also features this. Preordain just makes everything better.

Nine fetchlands is the number that comfortably allows you to Brainstorm or Ponder and shuffle at will. ANT always wanted more because of Cabal Ritual, but if you aren’t gunning for threshold you can skim one off the top. Eight might be enough as well, but I think I only ran out of fetchable lands once.

The four slots dedicated the Daze and the Echoing Truth are the only slots I am still debating. The list started on four Daze, but all three of us noticed that you never really wanted two of that card and that three copies of that card was more correct. The last card could have either been a Spell Pierce, bounce spell, or the fourth Preordain. I opted for the bounce spell as I wanted a bit more play to my deck and had concerns about maindeck Sulfuric Vortex or Solitary Confinement interacting with my kill.

As for Daze in general, nothing else was as well-rounded as it. It gave you a way to interact with a lot of the early threats where Spell Pierce wouldn’t. It let you stop a Hymn to Tourach, unlike a Pact of Negation. Depending on what you care about, these slots can be shifted around to fit a more representative counter base, but start on Daze. We boarded it out a lot for something that was better in that matchup, but we felt it was the best game 1 option against the field. It also doesn’t hurt that if you side it out they keep playing around it.

I went off last week on ANT playing the singleton bounce, but it makes sense here as a lot of the maindeck cards you want it against are ones that let you Conflux chain into it. Storm doesn’t care about Sulfuric Vortex and has the “just kill you” plan to beat a Solitary Confinement, but you don’t always have that luxury because of how Show and Tell works. You can also afford to draw the bounce spell as a blank much more. Instead of needing to milk every last card for storm or mana, this deck often just wants any colored spell as the last card in your hand or a blue one to pitch to Force of Will. There is also the fact you are slower than Storm and more often find yourself unable to just kill them before they do anything, and Echoing Truth can actually just stop a clock. That all said, we might switch to Wipe Away so that you can mise out Maverick players who set up Gaddock Teeg plus Mother of Runes.

Progenitus is a million times better than Emrakul right now. I know it doesn’t matter here as this deck needs the five-color spell, but I would replace Spaghetti Monsters with Souls of the World in things like Hive Mind. Yes, they can race him, but almost every deck in the format you could easily beat with a monster has Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Knight of the Reliquary for Karakas. The other huge reason is that if he is sitting in your hand you can pitch him to cast Force of Will when you actually combo. Make your cards do things!

Finally, Show and Tell is one of the five most broken cards in the format when used right. Just putting a giant dude into play is cute, but when you start using it to put in one of the instant win cards it gets absolutely absurd. The reason for this is that the cards you are cheating into play are legitimately castable, turning Show and Tell from your combo finisher into an absurdity. The card changes from your endgame spell you need to protect into a Duress plus Dark Ritual. If they have the counter, you just keep playing and go off a turn or two later knowing their counter is gone. If they don’t, they die on the spot.

Aside: For those wondering what the others in the top five busted cards are, my current list is Lion’s Eye Diamond, Entomb, Brainstorm, and probably Narcomoeba. In my mind arguments can be made for Delver of Secrets or replacing Narcomoeba with a ton of other Dredge cards. Other runners-up include Time Spiral and Dark Ritual.

In terms of matchups, the main reason we played this deck is we felt very favorable against the big three: RUG Delver, Maverick, and U/W Stoneblade. RUG Delver is probably as good as you are getting with a non-green deck against it. You feel significantly ahead in game 1, and games 2 and 3 only get difficult if you have to face down Spell Pierces and Red Elemental Blasts. Admittedly that is about half the lists, but even then it just goes from easy to having to actually think about things. Sometimes they just get you, but Delver is Delver. Maverick and Stoneblade felt like complete byes most of the time. Maverick you can usually just stall with Force of Will and kill, while Stoneblade has no real clock and you can just set up perfect hands to win with.

On top of those three, you absolutely crush all the other fair decks. Sometimes a Hymn to Tourach deck can steal a game with a ton of discard, but you can easily dig back with cantrips and just Progenitus them. Burn can just kill you on four randomly, but that isn’t typical. U/R Delver Burn is the only non-combo deck I’m afraid of at all. The definite clock and disrupt make things much closer than the Tempo Thresh-based lists.

The main sacrifices you make compared to something like Storm are in the combo mirrors. You can win them, but you are definitely a dog. Storm is just faster and can easily beat Force of Will plus Daze, Dredge is again faster, and High Tide can actually just combo you out via your own Dream Halls (though admittedly less than when they were Solidarity). You can definitely still win if you trip them up with Force of Will or just kill them fast, but these decks are able to ride that out well enough that you are not favored. Reanimator is even worse than any of those decks, but the other combo decks always lose to that matchup. You can win, but you have to fight over their Entombs to force them into having to dig for a graveyard enabler and the right target.

I have no idea how things actually function against Hive Mind, let alone who wins. I think you are the more reliable deck but Showing in Dream Halls is risky because if they make a Hive Mind you can’t Conflux off.Â The one time you have a big edge is against Sneak and Show, which is just the worse deck in the mirror. They can never Show and Tell as you just make a Dream Halls and win and your decks are almost exactly the same otherwise.

I also assume you are fine against Belcher and SI as you have Force of Will, Daze, and a clock. You should be fast enough to beat an Empty a reasonable percentage of the time. Let them roll the dice against that and see what happens.

As for the sideboard we played, it was a little loose but there were some nuggets of truth.

Dispel was absolutely outstanding. It gave you another real counter to just break Delver and Stoneblade. It sometimes was even better than a Force of Will as it only cost you one card when you have to Show in a Dream Halls. Show and Tell, Dream Halls, Force of Will, blue card, Dispel, colored spell, and a Conflux is a convenient seven to set up. Doubles can be a bit strenuous on mana and is almost impossible to use two copies without a Show and Tell, so three is the ideal number.

Gigadrowse was a last-second idea to punch through all the counters that cost mana. Defense Grid was also considered, but the reliance on colored spells and vulnerability to Spell Snare kept pushing us away from it. The Fog effect it provided was also useful, so it got slotted in. If I ran the deck again, I would almost certainly cut it. The interaction we failed to realize ahead of time was that Gigadrowse loses to uncracked fetch lands. If you try to tap them down, they just fetch in response and keep counter mana up while the copy of Gigadrowse fizzles.

Leyline of Sanctity was an all-star against Hymn decks and Burn, letting you turn favorable but losable matchups into hard locks. Instead of other mediocre cards you would ship with cantrips anyways, you get four cards that free roll game wins the 40% or so of the time you have it in your opener. That said, if you expect significant amounts of other combo I would shift to Flusterstorm or Spell Pierce. These both fill similar roles while being better at stopping others from going degenerate. Note that I wouldn’t board these extra counters in against blue decks. Games can stretch on past the point they are good, and when you have all these Dispels that also cost mana you can get choked on your ability to play spells. You just want them as an extra way to be defensive.

The Heslips started with a full set of Echoing Truths as bounce, but I defaulted the industry standard of three from Storm. I can’t say if I wanted four or not, but all three of us wanted a Wipe Away after the event. Just having access to that effect is nice. The reason to play these over Chain of Vapor is the latter is awkward with a Dream Halls in play. I would actually be inclined to lean towards more or all Wipe Aways in the future for Mother of Runes and to keep blanking Spell Snares. I would probably leave in one Echoing Truth so I could Conflux for it as a single deck slot against multiple Leyline of Sanctity, but the others would have split second.

I was really happy with the split of graveyard hate I had over Leyline of the Voids. Surgical Extraction was a nice miser card against other Intuition and combo decks, and the ability to cantrip into Ravenous Trap made up for the loss of power relative to Leyline in my book. Again, you want all colored spells to pitch to cast Conflux. That said, four was not enough. Over half our losses came to Reanimator or Dredge. I would likely up it to a full set of Traps and a second Surgical, bringing the count to six hate cards. For the record, Trap is terrible against Reanimator, but I want to board Dispels and fight their Entombs anyways rather than muck around with graveyard hate that doesn’t double as answers for their Force of Wills.

Some random boarding tips:

Again, Dazes come out. A lot.
One bounce spell beats a Leyline of Sanctity or Sulfuric Vortex. There is no need to board more when that is your only concern.
Boarding out a land against combo is solid. Boarding out an Ancient Tomb against Burn is as well.
You can easily go to ten cantrips post board without a major functionality change. Nine is pushing it.
If Progenitus is not going to be enough, you can cut one and still go off. Same with Intuition if it is going to be too slow or if you know they are loading up on Surgical Extractions.

If I could run this event back tomorrow, this is the 75 I would sleeve up:

Heslip Halls

Ari Lax

Test deck on 03-18-2012

Legacy

Creatures (4)

4 Progenitus

Lands (19)

Spells (37)

Sideboard

The fourth Spell Pierce or Flusterstorm is really an undecided slot, but I figure it can’t hurt to be a hater. It’s the same as it always has been. The combo decks are real powerful, and if your opponent is good you have to mean it to win.

I would definitely recommend this deck moving forward, and I fully expect Dream Halls to take a step up from its current status as an obscure combo deck to a true portion of the mess of combo decks you can always expect. That last part might sound dismissive, but in Legacy combo terms, it’s as close as you can get to the big time without being good enough to get banned.

Again, major props to James and William on this one. Don’t be fooled by the goofy eight mana sorceries and bulk Onslaught rares, this deck is the real deal.

Bonus Storm List!

Storm

Ari Lax

Test deck on 03-18-2012

Legacy

Lands (14)

Spells (46)

Sideboard

After my last article, I put some time thinking about how I could update the variety of Storm I was used to and how to solve the issues TES has with finding mana from time to time. I didn’t have nearly enough time to test this list enough to want to jam it at the Grand Prix, but in theory it has a lot of answers to the problems you would run into with both.

Seven gas spells was always enough with ten cantrips post board in ANT, so I could afford to shave on Tutors if it meant getting Preordains in there. With ten cantrips, getting mana is almost incidental.

Cabal Ritual was also a big part of the mana production of ANT that was lost in the shift to Rite of Flame. The issue was that having a strong Ad Nauseam was so huge in this format and this in turn meant running Chrome Mox to go off reliably from Ad Nauseam with zero floating. Chrome Mox and Cabal Ritual are not good friends. One wants you putting cards in your graveyard, the other eats a card from your hand that could otherwise have been binned and takes deck space away from fetchlands. I had found this an unsolvable dilemma until I stumbled upon some technology reading random tournament reports on The Source.

I decided to pull up a report on a Storm deck called Grinding Station based around just naturally casting ten spells from hand with no big enabler. I noticed a semi-forgotten Urza’s Saga uncommon, and it got me thinking.

Rain of Filth fills a couple of key roles. The big one is ramping to threshold on Cabal Ritual, letting you run Chrome Mox with less trepidation. It’s also another one-drop Ritual, which means more turn two kills and better Ad Nauseams. It isn’t good in multiples, but that’s why there are only two.

Seven Chant effects is a result of the loss of Gemstone Mines. You need to cast your Chants, and one of the ways to do that is to imprint another Chant on a Mox. Silence is also superior here as you have fewer white sources.

I didn’t have time to put in my usual extensive testing with these decks, so I didn’t consider it for the Grand Prix. There are a lot of big questions to be answered still. Is five spells that cost three or more too many to Ad Nauseam? Will I have to cut Ill-Gotten Gains or the Grim Tutor? Do I want the Grim Tutor to be something else wild, or could I even just cut it? Do I want some number of Duress? What special plans do I want in the board? I currently have the ability to board into Dark Confidants and Tendrils of Agony to natural dome out a Counterbalance and the ability to board back to more lands and cantrips against big control, but I have no idea if that is at all what you want. Do you need Dredge hate against the new lists given how much faster they are, or is just Silencing them enough?

I don’t have the answers now, but maybe I will in a few weeks. Stay tuned for more.