Against the Odds: Thousand-Year Storm (Foundations Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week, we're heading to Foundations Standard to play another classic build-around: Thousand-Year Storm! The enchantment is a truly absurd Magic card, essentially giving all of our instants and sorceries storm. Backed up by a ton of card draw and Treasure producers, a single turn with Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield shouldn't just win us the game but win us the game in spectacular fashion! What are the odds of Thousand-Year Storming in Foundations Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Thousand-Year Storm
The Deck
Thousand-Year Storm is a wild card. While it costs a lot of mana to get it on the battlefield, once it is there, all of our instants and sorceries become supercharged, essentially having storm for each instant and sorcery we cast before during the turn. Our deck's goal is simple: build in a way that allows us to win the game if we can stick Thousand-Year Storm for just a single turn and, in a perfect world, during the same turn that we play the enchantment.
Of course, we need to get Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield for any of this to work, which means we need lots of mana. For this, we turn to instants and sorceries that make Treasures. These cards do double duty in our deck. In the early game, they ramp us into Thousand-Year Storm; then, once we have Thousand-Year Storm, these cards give us the mana we need to have a huger combo turn. Take Grabby Giant, for example. It costs two mana to make a Treasure, which means that with Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield, we only need to have cast one spell before it to make it a free spell. And if we've cast two or more spells, it essentially turns into a ritual, making more mana than it costs. Meanwhile, Seize the Spoils is absurd with Thousand-Year Storm, not just making Treasures to let us cast more spells but also drawing us tons of cards, while Flick a Coin is by far my favorite card in the deck and one of our best finishers. Dealing 20 damage by flicking a coin at our opponent a bunch of times is a hilarious way to finish the game during our massive storm turn.
Brass's Bounty and Reenact the Crime make it impossible for us to fizzle once we combo. Once we get up to seven lands and are ready to combo, we can Brass's Bounty to up our storm count and then use Reenact the Crime to flash back the Brass's Bounty on the cheap and up the storm count even more, which should make us at least 20 (and sometimes way more, like hundreds) of Treasures to make sure we'll have more than enough mana to cast whatever we want to finish the game.
The other use of Brass's Bounty is casting it the turn before we combo off. This is the easiest way to get enough mana to play Thousand-Year Storm and combo off in the same turn, which is ideal since it lets us dodge our opponent's sorcery-speed enchantment removal. We can get to seven lands and cast Brass's Bounty to make seven treasures. This lets us untap the following turn with at least 14 mana, which is more than enough to play Thousand-Year Storm and then immediately follow it up with some spells to start the storm combo!
As far as actually winning the game, we have Burst Lightning and Flick a Coin. After we cast a bunch of spells with Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield and draw through our deck, a single copy of either can be enough to win the game. Just remember that Flick a Coin makes us draw a card, so make sure not to mill yourself out accidentally!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, I'm not exactly sure about our win rate since my Arena tracker was broken while I was recording this. But I can tell you that it wasn't great, probably in the mid-30% range. The good news is that in the games we do win, we win in spectacular fashion, and that's what Thousand-Year Storm is all about! We even had a game where we managed to deal the full 20 damage with Flick a Coin, which was hilarious! If you like slinging spells and storming off, Thousand-Year Storm is incredibly fun to play. But it's a bit too slow to really be a competitive deck.
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.
