Preamble

This deck began life as my upgraded Kalamax, the Stormsire precon. I'm not enjoying playing it at the moment, and haven't been of recent, as for all its opportunity to be copying cool instants, instead all it copies are forks to make Kalamax ∞/∞ and then support to make him unblockable. Which is cool, but I have enough big stompy decks that what I'm craving is stack interaction. So my Instants-matters deck wasn't playing in the area that I'm now craving - hence this complete rebuild of about 50% of the deck.

Deck Goals

1. Interaction on the stack.

This deck was built because my Kalamax Deck had no real interaction with cards on the stack. This isn't necessarily meant to be a permissions deck - it's not running enough counter spells to do so - but it's still more interested in Instants than it is sorceries

• Forks. The forks I left in are forks which don't have to copy your own spells - i.e. you can copy another player's spell. So if they're doing something cool, then you Reverberate it. Alas, not all the forks could stay, alas the cuts had to be made to make it get closer to that 100 card size.
• Counterspells. Easiest way to kill a creature is on the stack sometimes. With Lightning Greaves and Swiftfoot Boots so prevalent in the format, they're pretty cool in my opinion.
• Multi-Mode Spells. Despite being listed under Stack Interaction, this section is about choice, and having the card for the right moment. So while Insidious Will is a Fork, it's also a Counterspell and a Redirection, and so it isn't appropriate to put it in the other sections.

2. Burn faces.

A deck needs a way to win. This deck will finish off players with Burn spells that are copied from Overtime or doing extra damage, with chip damage along the way from the Burn Aid.

3. Big Mana

• Artifact making. The deck relies heavily on its commander, Galazeth Prizmari, to enable artifacts to tap for mana. No commander, no mana. I'll have to see how much of a hate target he ends up being, I may need to do more protection for him or something.
• X-Cost. You'll notice that many of the spells have an X in their casting cost. The idea was to keep the deck flexible, because the hope is that I'll get to a point when I just have an excessive amount of mana and I can put it all into a devastating Crackle with Power (for 12 mana, it does 15 damage to all 3 players, if you copy it, then it's 30 damage and probably lethal by that later stage of the game) or similar. That's the hope at least.
• Cheerios. As it stands, there's a number of 0 cost artifacts which are there to be reliable drops that can be tapped, in addition to the treasure and clue tokens. Remember that equipment that's equipped like Darksteel Plate can be tapped for mana too!

4. Stax

This deck has 4 stax pieces. I'll talk to my pod if they're okay to see these pieces appearing on the board. My meta doesn't have a lot of single target artifact removal, so 3 pieces like Static/ Torpor/ Winter Orbs may be very tough for them to get around.

Weak Points

• This deck struggles against go-wide decks of tokens, as it plays about 5 creatures total. I don't have a good way of getting lots of blockers, besides the Saheeli, Sublime Artificer token servos - which are probably going to be tapped for mana, not left up as blockers.
• This deck relies upon what's happening at the table. It interacts with the stack, and depending on the pilot, the other decks at the table, and their pilots too.

Possible Inclusions

These are cards I didn't add, for reasons

• Unwinding Clock. I do love the idea of ridiculous amounts of mana, but this deck doesn't have a lot of "whenever you cast a spell, draw a card" kinds of effects. Putting in this card suggests a play pattern of incorporating 2-3 tutors for artifacts to find just this one card, and a few more "big draw" spells. So basically I'd cut the entire stax component, which I'm honestly a bit more interested in playing - I already have other big mana decks, I upgraded the Simic commander deck of Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait, and I like my decks to be unique-ish from each other. Stax is just a concept I haven't played yet.
• Dockside Extortionist. This deck is about $300, of which I already own about half the cards. I'm not exactly looking to buy a $50 card right now - if WOTC ever reprints that card to oblivion, or I do a run of proxies, then yeah I'll add the little goblin boi in. Until that day then, he's just a bit out of reach.

Cuts of Note

I worked up to about 160 cards, then I cut cards from there. So some nice cards got the boot along the way. Here are the justifications for them, to help you with your own deck building experiences - you'll find these cards in the 'tokens' area, as that's where my last cuts end up. They're the cards that almost made it in, but just didn't make my top 100. They're not bad cards, they just weren't perfect for me;

• Myr Battlesphere. I checked the average CMC of the deck, this and Brass' Bounty were my most expensive CMC cards of my deck. Having the most expensive card be just a 5 mana ramp card, I didn't feel comfortable with. If I wasn't looking to cut 29 cards at this point, I'd perhaps reconsider. But I'll have to make more cuts, and harder cuts, between now and then.
• Blasphemous Act. It's a staple yes, but with 4 other board wipes in the deck, and other cards able to straight burn creatures, it felt redundant and clunky. I put in a counterspell instead for its place.
• Young Pyromancer / Deekah, Fractal Theorist do make creature tokens whenever we cast a sorcery/ instant, but there's no support for the tokens. They're literally just there for blockers as a passive deck. I want this deck to be proactive - even if that's potentially worse.
• Swarm Intelligence. Again, it's 7 mana. Which this deck WILL hit, but not for non-sorcery and non-instant spells as the main acceleration kinds of mana are from Galazeth Prizmari's ability to make us tap artifacts. 7 cmc is just a dead card until our last turn unfortunately.
• Sphinx of the Second Sun. A dope card, again, CMC 8 for a persistent Dramatic Reversal. Just not one for this deck.
• Epic Experiment & Mizzex's Mastery. These cards would have been epic once upon a time in this deck, alas, most of the cards are now either X cost sorcery speed (and so resolve with X=0 for Epic Experiment), or are dope counterspell things at instant speed. Not what you want to be hitting unfortunately - so it got cut because it belonged in a deck that no longer exists. If your deck is different, then they really have good potentia;.
• Pyroblast. It's got potential to be largely irrelevant most games in my pod, especially since I have enough other counterspells
• Torbran, Thane of Red Fell doesn't do much since they want lots of small damage triggers, whereas this deck puts out single big damage spells
• Padeem, Consul of Innovation. padeem doesn't do much since the artifact curve is low and this deck really only makes tokens
• Sublime Epiphany Sublime can only copy 3 creatures (archaeomancer, Archmage Emeritus, Storm-Kiln Artist) in the deck since the rest are legendary. Which makes the rest of the card less valuable for 6 cmc.
• Ionize was replaced with Counterflux
• Bonfire of the Damned & Draconic Intervention were cut as Fireball's, as the mana curve isn't high enough to get a lot of damage out with Draconic, and this deck has no top-deck manipulation to make the Miracle of Bonfire activate.
• Ral, Storm Conduit. I looked into making him go infinite, but I just don't have the same number of copies and forks anymore to make him a reliable alternate win condition.