I decided to play this deck for yesterday's Type 1 in Helsinki and I have to say it was an absolute blast to play. I have been working on similar decks, so even though I only got in something like 20 goldfishes of the actual deck before playing it, and no testing against other decks whatsoever, I'm still okay with my piloting of the deck (although it could obviously be better).
It was 5 rounds of swiss and then top 8. There were, unfortunately, only 17 players, a few of whom dropped after round 2, so this is not much to go by and 3-2 got me into the top 8. However, I had some luck. Here's a quick report:
Round 1: Stompy with blue splash for big blue. Also had a lotus and 2 moxes.
Game 1: I slow played for a turn 3 win.
Game 2: He gets a turn 2 Null Rod after I Wheel'd turn 1, and I won through the rod easily by dropping all my artifacts, rituals and an academy into a desire for 10.
Both games were won without needing Yawgmoth's Will.
Round 2: FCG
Both games, he got bad draws (lots of Skirk Prospectors, but not too much else). Second game he played a turn 1 Tormod's Crypt, but I comboed without the need for Yawgmoth's Will.
Again, as I remember, both games were won without Yawgmoth's Will.
Round 3: Control Slaver
Game 1: I mulliganed to 6, but didn't get enough gas. My first attempt at a Wheel of Fortune was FoW'd and a turn or two later, he slavered me.
Game 2: I had to mulligan to 5. I got a turn 1 Xantid Swarm, but failed to find enough gas before he drew lots of cards, walked, slavered me and then showed me his Yawgmoth's Will.
Both games lost to Mindslaver (or actually, mulliganing)
Round 4: Affinity/Crusher
Game 1: I played a turn 1 bargain and won on turn 2 - we had already figured he didn't have a chance since he had no disruption maindeck.
Game 2: He gets a turn 1 Chalice and followed up with a Trinisphere which I wasn't expecting. At some point, I eot consulted for Hurkyl's Recall, waited a turn, recalled him and went off.
Round 5: Fish
These were the most interesting and fun games I played all day. Superman has been playing Fish for a long time and he knows the deck very well. We were both already locked in for top 8, but played it anyway, since he mentioned that I always seem to beat him in tournaments and he knew he could get his revenge today
Besides, we wanted a good laugh, which we always seem to have when we (inevitably) get paired together.
Game 1: He went first. He gets a pretty good early lock by FoWing my opening lotus (which would have been used to cast a Mind's Desire for 4 along with a couple of rituals) and then getting a turn 2 Null Rod followed later by a second Null Rod (after I had death wished for a hurkyl's recall) and 3 Spiketail Hatchlings. I was locked by the spiketails and my own Cities of Brass and he Fire/Ice'd me when I went to 2 life off my cities, trying to Hurkyl's his Null Rods EOT.
Game 2: Things were looking bad again. I think there was already a Null Rod on the table, but I had drawn lands and he didn't have much pressure, so I accumulated some spells. Then I consulted for a duress, knowing there were 3 left in the deck. Those 3 were in the last 7 cards. However, I had a Twister and Tendils in hand, plus a couple of rituals. I duressed, ritualed, ritualed. Twisted into duress, duress, duress, ritual, consult, wheel, land. I played the land, duressed with the black in my pool, ritualed, wheeled for the exact 7 cards I had left, ritual tendrils for exactly enough. We both laughed about that situation.
Game 3: I'm a little sketchy about this game, but superman reminded me, so this is an edit (his report can be found here:
http://www.themanadrain.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20147). He did have 2 FoWs in his opening hand, one of which I pulled with a duress. I wished for Time Spiral, since I had a lot of artifacts and Academy. I then layed more artifacts and I Windfalled away 2 lands, Jar and Colossus, but the Colossus reshuffled before drawing my windfall hand. Naturally, I drew the Colossus and a Tinker, and with the Jar in my yard, I had no reasonable targets other than Lotus. I was forced to give the turn and he wasted my Academy and played Null Rod. I'm not sure what happened in between this point, but I drew for a few turns waiting for a land or _something_ and I eventually consulted for a Scryb Sprites on my turn after I was sure I was going to die the next turn
Both losses were basically due to Null Rod.
Top 8: Stax
Game 1: I got an excellent opening hand featuring both duress and ancestral and decided to duress turn 1, since I didn't know what my opponent was playing. He also had a great hand - Ruby, Vault, Ancestral, Wasteland, Smokestack, Wheel, TFK. I took the Wheel and passed. He played the Ruby and Vault and passed. I went off somehow on turn 2.
Game 2: He opens with Mox, Shop, Trinisphere. This is followed by a chalice for 2. Then multiple Tangle Wires, another Trinisphere, a Chalice for 3. At one point, I chain of vapored his only untapped Trinisphere and layed out a bunch of artifact mana, but I couldn't do much else and after he got a welder out, I conceded.
Game 3: I didn't have a bad opening 7 - it contained a few lands, a petal, and a Hull Breach, so I decided to keep it and bank on going off a bit slower. Unfortunately, his opening hand was mox, mox, mox, chalice for 0, trinisphere. I killed the trinisphere with the hull breach, but he proceeded to get out chalices for 2 and 3 in addition to the one for 0 after drawing his academy. I played it out for a few more turns, but he had an active smokestack and when the next trinisphere finally came down, I gave up.
Both losses were to Chalice + Trinisphere.
What I can note about this experience:
- there are certain matchups were duress is quite crucial. However, it's often not good enough. It still doesn't stop topdecked Null Rod, Chalice and Trinisphere (which happened a lot). It's the best tool this deck has in game 1, but I still found them lacking. However, I suppose there's nothing else that's better.
- the whole tournament was luck-dependent. I got 3 aggro matchups and lost to everything else. I think you can see from my report that the games I played against upper-tier decks were wildly luck-dependent on both sides.
- you can play through Null Rod in some circumstances (I won 50% of the games where a Null Rod was in play). However, it requires very specific circumstances.
- a combination of Trinisphere and Chalice is a very difficult situation to get out of.
- IMO consult is very dangerous, but it allowed me to win 2 out of the 3 times I used it.
Top 8 included: 2 x Fish (both WTF), 2 x Stax, Affinity, Control Slaver and one other that I don't remember.
I'd say that, although I had a lot of fun with this deck, it was obviously not the right choice for the metagame. I've not played in a tourney in about a year (C&C:Generals: Zero Hour >> M:tg), so I didn't know what to expect and chose to play the deck since I was curious about it. There were 3 or 4 decks with Trinispheres, 2 Fish decks and 2 control slaver decks and a mono-U. Out of 17, that's quite a lot of the field to be "so so" matchups.
To be honest, I doubt I'd have done that much better with TPS or Belcher or had more fun playing something else that I can build like Stax, Control Slaver or Keeper, so in the end I'm happy. Aside, I seriously did better with combo the whole time I played Turboland, though, and I think the whole family of storm combo archetypes has been seriously weakened with the introduction of cards like Chalice of the Void and Trinisphere. Duress provides some needed disruption, but honestly, I saw very few duresses all day (probably not even half my games).
I'd venture to say that if it were possible to design a storm combo deck for pure speed, consistency and turn 1 win percentages (with perhaps no maindeck disruption), with a flexible sideboard of Xantids, duresses and artifact removal for games 2 and 3, it might perhaps be a better way to go. The death wishes were really not all that important to a lot of my games - I'd have rather had the goods like Yawgmoth's Will in my maindeck with more cheap deck manipulation, card advantage or mana-producers.
