What storm build do you prefer in today's meta? TPS, GWSx, Grim Long or ANT, and why? P
Let me start with the 'why'.
I will advance of a model of thinking about Storm combo in Vintage that is different than how it is traditionally conceptualized. Let me first explain the traditional model and then highlight it's limitations. Then I will set out my revised model.
The traditional approach posits that all Storm decks fall on a long continuum of speed to resilience.
Resilience Speed
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The idea is simple: as you increase your deck's fundamental speed, inching ever closer to that idealized turn one kill, you trade-off the tools necessary to survive a counter-assault or to combat opposing stratagems. There are three basic (interrelated) reasons for this.
The first reason is that the faster you design a deck the greater the variance of it's opening hand, and the less consistency it will have in that regard.
Consider three facts:
Fact1 :Tthe minimum number of cards per deck is 60.
Fact2: you cannot run more than 4 copies of a given card (except basic land).
Fact3: you start the game with a 7.5 card hand, sans mulligans
When you combine these three facts with the fact that the best mana accelerants are restricted, collectively, they place a fundamental limit on how fast your deck can be on average,
and on the acceptable range of hands you are likely to draw. The faster your deck becomes, the higher the 'failure' rate will be. As you increase the speed of keepable hands, you will also increase your mulligan rate. There are many reasons for this. For example, as you include more mana accelerants, you will have fewer win conditions or ways to find them.
That leads to a second reason: in order to speed up your deck you *must* to include more mana accelerants, which leaves less room for disruption or answers to common counter-tactics. This reduces a deck's resilience.
Third, as you speed up your deck, certain cards, like land, become less important. Decks which plan on playing at least two turns of Magic will often want to include enough lands to give them a chance of seeing two lands in their first 8-9 cards. However, if your objective is to play only one turn of Magic, then every additional land you might draw detracts from that objective. Therefore, lands, which are essential for mana stability in the face of Spheres, Chalices, and the like, are often cut in favor of other forms of acceleration, all the while making your deck less resilient to Null Rod, Chalice, and Sphere. So, it is not just that you have less room for disruption or bounce/removal spells, you will also find yourself pressured to cut cards that allow you to use those spells. Your need for speed will incline you to cut bounce spells and disruption, which will make it more likely that you'll shave off an additional land or more.
So, consider the continuum again. Here's how we might map combo decks onto them:
Resilience Speed
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Drain Tendrils Intuition Tendrils Grim Long Belcher
TPS GWSx ANT SX
Both Belcher and ANT are built to win on turn one. Belcher wants to play an Empty the Warrens or a Belcher on turn one. ANT wants to play Ad Nauseam on turn one. Decks like GWSx or Grim Long are slower, but capable of winning one, but really aim for turn two.
Perhaps the most symbolic divide among this continuum is the presence -- or lack thereof -- of Force of Will. You'll notice that all the decks on the left side of the continuum feature Force, while all the decks to the right do not. Force of Will, for the three reasons explained above, slows down the deck, but increases its overall resiliency.
This first approach to thinking about storm combo is rarely expressed in such stark, clear terms, but it is nonetheless pervasive. It is deeply rooted in our thinking about Storm combo. It is implicit in virtually every conversation prompt like the question posed at the outset.
Graphically, this relationship is linear. If you were to graph it on an X-Y axis, it look like this:
However, I think that this approach is wrong. It provides useful, helpful information. But it also misleads.
In actual reality the graph is bowed outward or concave. Why might this be? This might be the case for a number of reasons, but one of which is most important.
On the cartesian grid under the traditional view, Speed and Resilience were posited as separate axis (and they were opposing, or trade-offs on the continuum perspective). In reality, speed is a form of resilience. The faster you are, the more resilient you will naturally be to certain forms of disruption, tactics, and strategies. To take a very simple example, a deck that tries to win consistently by turn two will bypass Mana Drain a good deal of the time.
If I am right, that the graph bows out rather than is linear or nearly perfectly linear downsloping, then the place to position yourself is on the outermost point of the bubble. You want a deck that combines a good deal of resilience *and* speed without greatly sacrificing much of either.
I believe that deck is probably TPS. TPS has a number of critical advantages. First, it has the absolute best disruption suite in the game: Force of Will and Duress, with a Misdirection. Secondly, it includes the best accelerants in the game in an attempt to fully utilize all of the best restricted power cards that aren't run in the Drain restricted list, like MInd's Desire, Necropotence, and Timetwister. Third, it has great resilience by including a few key bonce spell, just in case something slips through the disruption suite, and the deck has plenty of tutors to find those key answers.
That doesn't mean that other decks are bad choices. Nor does that mean I'm right. First of all, someone might contest the assumption that we want to maximize both resilience and speed, or that these are even relevant metrics. And they might be right. I am assuming that both resilience and speed are closely related to winning games, but they may not be as important as other factors.
