[Legacy] 8 Ball (8 Tutor Tendrils) by Zachariah Henzel

[z0180]

8 Ball (8 Tutor Tendrils)

I present to you my vision of the new Storm deck in Legacy. 8 Ball Tendrils - right to the dome!  Look out the window right now. It's a little gray and, you know, it could just be that a Storm is a brewin'.

Our business: 1 Tendrils of Agony to kill with and 1 Past in Flames to build our Storm-count. These are 2 of the most broken cards in Legacy. Everyone is trying to abuse Dig Through Time. Cool. We're going to kill you with many, many Drillz before you can ever cast it. We play 9 spells and then fire off a big, fat, juicy, lethal Tendrils of Agony. Always remember your Storm trigger, folks!

Our Power : 8 Tutors. This is something new for us in Legacy. With Origin's Dark Petition we now have 2 on-colour Tutor spells. It's true that Infernal Tutor is still our most powerful Tutor because it costs a mere 2 mana to cast, but with a second Tutor we now are more consistent than ever. And consistency is power. From >5 mana we can begin a Past in Flames kill with Dark Petition. It will also net us 6 mana when combined with a single LED from 5 mana, which is good enough to either begin a Past in Flames loop, or simply grab Infernal Tutor for Tendrils of Agony. Simply put, we are not only more consistent and more powerful, but we have more options than before.

It should be not ignored that we get to use Brainstorm and Ponder and to lesser extent Preordain to speedup, re-draw, hide cards, improve our hand, and build storm - all for the low, low cost of just 1 blue mana. We are storm, we have the ability to turn Brainstorm into Ancestral Recall and can just go off from almost nothing. Our Ponders are better than any other Ponders. A Peordain can just win us the game outright. These powerful draw spells or cantrips are the glue that hold our power together, supplementing an elegant array of 4-ofs in our deck.

Our Gasoline :  4 Dark Ritual and 4 Cabal Ritual. Rituals are spells that are temporary mana accelerators, and fuel our deck into overdrive. These are the best 8 fast-mana spells in the format - 8 ball again! They are instants and net us a bunch of mana on the cheap. You will cast some number of these in just about every game. Most importantly, they are all black in colour. No red or green here - just smooth, quick, dark, black mana.

4 Lion's Eye Diamond and 4 Lotus Petal. That's another 8 ball! These seemingly goofy 0 mana artifacts can kick us into high gear, while building storm. Infernal Tutor in concert with Lion's Eye Diamond is Black Lotus and Demonic Tutor (just please remember to retain priority and activate the diamond at mana speed!). Lotus petal is 1 mana and 1 Storm - and that is what is know as a two-for-one. The reason Storm is so brutally fast, hard to stop and resilient has a lot to do with these fast-mana artifacts. They're a lot like our rituals, but they will give us mana of any colour of our choosing. Usually, just 1 mana of a colour that is not black will do the trick. You will be abusing these cards with regularity on our fundamental turns or, in some cases, to play around permission.

4 Polluted Delta and 4 Non-Polluted Delta fetchlands of your choosing. 8 Ball means 8 fetchlands and here's 8 reasons to play an octet of these lands:

1.) to pair with Brainstorm so that we only draw the cards we want
2.) to fix our mana
3.) to pair with Ponder so that we only draw the cards we want
4.) to pair with Preordain so that we only draw the cards we want
5.) to thin the deck, which ups our spells-to-lands ratio by a non-zero amount
6.) to make sure we have access to basic Island
7.) to make sure we have access to basic Swamp
8.) to achieve 7 cards in our graveyard to Threshold for Cabal Ritual

I hope this convinces us that 8 is the magic number!

Our Interaction : 4 Gitaxian Probe, 3 Cabal Therapy and 3 Thoughtseize. Since New Phyrexia, Gitaxian Probe has been a must-have in Storm. Free spells are good. Card draw is great! And INFORMATION is even better. Now we're playing combo; so why not combo Probe with Cabal Therapy? Normally Cabal Therapy can have a miss rate and a hit rate depending on your experience, but Gitaxian Probe changes all of that. Pants your opponent and then strip them down until they have nothing less. It may sound sexy, and it is. There's a very good reason we're running this suite of sweet cards. Finally, 3 Thoughtseize are here because we are an Ad Nauseam deck no longer! This means we can throw our life total right into the wind. And it's important for us to be able to steal cards and turns and games from our opponent. That's precisely what Thoughtseize is for, and it is a huge upgrade from Duress or Inquisition of Kozilek.

Sideboarding should be crafted with a premeditation of bumps along the road you might encounter during your tournament matches, and as such, you need to have a plan in place so that you can put the petal to the metal.

Now go forth! Drop a big fat 8 ball on everyone next time you play Legacy. Tendrils the you-know-what out of everyone! Remember your Storm triggers and don't forget to retain priority with your Infernal Tutor on the stack with Lion's Eye Diamond. You're playing with power! Thanks for reading.

Zachariah Henzel 8/18/15