Preamble

I apologise, for this is about the 4th time I've tried writing this description, but it keeps getting deleted frustratingly enough. As such, this is a bit sparse.

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.

This deck isn't down to 100 cards yet, and it probably won't be for a good week (i.e. until Sunday probably), just because the set isn't out yet and prices are pretty volatile and part of the considerations for the deck's final construction.

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

• 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!

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. This section is also about $60 US, and so may just get cut for budget reasons as I don't own any of these cards in my personal collection yet.

Weak Points

• This deck struggles against go-wide decks of tokens, as it plays about 4 creatures total. There are 4 board wipes in the deck (Blasphemous Act, Bonfire of the Damned, Draconic Domination, Starstorm).
• 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.

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;

• 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.