Against the Odds: I Made Infinite Storm, Infinite Mana, and Infinite Black Mages in Standard!
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we're heading to Standard to try and generate infinite storm count, which might also give us infinite mana and infinite black mage Wizard tokens to close out the game, all with the help of Mindsplice Apparatus and Sorceress's Schemes! If we can get a Mindsplice Apparatus up to three counters, all of our Sorceress's Schemes become free. This means we can loop them infinitely with two copies, which is where the fun begins! What are the odds of going infinite in a bunch of different ways in Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Infinite Storm
The Deck
So, how do we go infinite in so many ways? Let's walk through the steps. First, we need to get a Mindsplice Apparatus on the battlefield and keep it there for a few turns to build up counters. To go infinite, we need to reduce the cost of our spells by three. This generally means we need to play Mindsplice and wait three turns to combo off, although multiple copies of Mindsplice Apparatus or a Artist's Talent can speed up the process.
Next, we need not just one but two copies of Sorceress's Schemes, a new uncommon from Final Fantasy that, for four mana, returns an instant or sorcery from our graveyard (or a flashback spell from exile) to our hand and makes a red mana, and we can also flash it back for five. With two Sorceress's Schemes and a Mindsplice Apparatus reducing the cost of our spells by at least three, we can loop the Sorceress's Schemes forever since the one red mana they make essentially makes them free spells. By itself, this doesn't really do anything but up our storm count. But once we add one more card into the mix...
We have a few plans for actually closing out the game after we go infinite. The most straightforward is Vivi Ornitier or the Wizard token from Lindblum, Industrial Regency. Either will deal a damage whenever we cast Sorceress's Schemes, which means that as we infinitely storm off, we'll also get infinite damage.
While simply pinging our opponent to death one damage at a time is fine, a much more fun plan is Thousand-Year Storm or Ral, Crackling Wit. Ral is pretty straightforward: if we can get it on the battlefield before the loop, we'll get infinite loyalty from its static ability, which will then let us ultimate it to draw three cards and get an emblem that is essentially Thousand-Year Storm. Things get pretty crazy once we have the emblem or a literal Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield. As we loop Sorceress's Schemes, we'll get not only infinite storm but also infinite mana since every time we cast a Sorceress's Schemes, we'll get an increasing number of copies from Thousand-Year Storm, each of which makes a mana. Once we do this for a while, we can cast one of our many card-draw spells, get a bunch of Thousand-Year Storm copies, and then win the game, either by casting a Burst Lightning to our opponent's face or, even more fun, casting a Lindblum, Industrial Regency to make an absurdly huge number of black mage Wizard tokens, at which point we can cast any random spell to trigger them and win the game!
Rounding out the deck are a bunch of cantrips and card draw to find our combo pieces. (Even though we need at least three or, realistically, four pieces to combo off, it was surprisingly easy to set up thanks to Opt, Sleight of Hand, and Stock Up and some removal to help us stay alive long enough to get our combo finisher online.)
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we went 10-8 with the deck, good for a 56% win percentage, which is pretty solid for an Against the Odds deck. More importantly, we had some spectacular wins with the deck. One thing I was worried about before heading into our games was that Vivi Ornitier would overshadow the rest of the deck because it's so strong, but thankfully, that didn't happen. While we did get a couple of random Vivi wins, a huge percentage of our wins came from our infinite storm combo! The games with Ral and Thousand-Year Storm were especially crazy. While we had to cut our combos short out of respect for our opponents, we could have easily hit the token limit on Magic Arena, returned all the spells in our graveyard to our hand, made infinite mana, and drew our entire deck! If you like massive storm-style combo turns, give the deck a shot! It can do some spectacular things!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
