The Russell Report - UR Gifts Storm - 27th at GP Birmingham
Although it has been a bit late coming, I have finally got around to writing a report from my Top 32 12-3 finish at GP Birmingham earlier this year. I had started out 8-1 and managed to run moderately well Day 2 to cash my first event and make a good start to the Pro season for 2017/8.
Although it has been a bit late coming, I have finally got around to writing a report from my Top 32 12-3 finish at GP Birmingham earlier this year. I had started out 8-1 and managed to run moderately well Day 2 to cash my first event and make a good start to the Pro season for 2017/8.
Background
Prior to the event I had managed to roundly 2-3 two MTGO Competitive leagues and go 3-1 at a friendly mid-week paper event down at Dark Sphere in London. Although my results were far from stellar, I more or less understood why I was losing games and was making steady progress to knowing how the deck is supposed to play. My closest corollary thus far in Modern is UG Infect.
Infect requires you to be able to do two things; the first is a tight balance of composed and patient play, amassing a critical number of cards and forcing through the win over a long and drawn out game. The other is having a good read for the situation and knowing when to go “all in” on a turn and be stone dead if they have the right card, with the prize usually being winning the game on the spot. Storm more or less plays the same way, with the debate on playing a turn 2 cost reducer usually being matchup dependent and/or how critical the Baral/ Electromancer is to your ability to win.
Why Storm?
Having established that I wasn’t doing very well in my initial testing, you might very well be wondering what ponderous set of decisions led me to registering what most people consider to be a challenging deck to play at a GP. Well, let me reveal a little secret to you about Storm in Modern: it isn’t that hard to play.
While I don’t put it into the category of Titanshift or EldraziTron which both genuinely have very few meaningful decisions and whilst the Storm deck has a lot of sequencing optimisations to consider, it really only requires you to be able to do basic maths and and count to something like 20. Or at least, I think that is true for the in game decisions, which are typically only truly interesting with the second Gifts pile you make. The “hard” decisions I believe are mostly made in sideboarding and mulliganing, where experience in the matchups comes to play an extremely important part of the decision making process. Many decks while sideboarding are not necessarily boarding into hate for your opponents sideboard cards. You are also typically not pivoting in a totally different way or even removing what might appear to be your slam dunk namesake card, something that is quite unintuitive to some players.
Storm is fundamentally good for the following reasons:
1. It has a reliable Turn 3 goldfish kill. Speed and consistency are everything in Modern, the format where dying on T4 is usually guaranteed.
2. It can kill on Turn 2 with the perfect hand using grapeshot and pseudo kill on Turn 2 /3 with goblins a greater percentage of the time. Even the bad matchups can sometimes be won, meaning that you’re never truly cold when you sit down to play.
3. The deck is very redundant with 8 cost reducers, 12 rituals and 8 cantrips. Most hands with a Bear, Cantrip and some Rituals are a keep.
4. Two colours and many basics means you take minimal damage from lands/ the coloured requirements are quite good. This allows us to sometimes play Blood Moon and register 3 basic islands in our deck.
5. Most decks don’t have good graveyard hate game 1, meaning that they have very few axis to interact with you on.
6. The opponent tilt value from playing storm.
The Event
Started 2-0 with byes, a critical aspect to success at Grand Prix.
R3 Titanshift 2-1
R4 Elves 2-0
R5 Eldrazi Tron 1-2
R6 GB Tron 2-1
R7 GW Company 2-1
R8 4C Shadow 2-1
R9 Jeskai Control 2-0
R10 Bant Eldrazi 0-2
R11 Eldrazi Tron 2-1
R12 Abzan Coco 1-2
R13 Abzan Midrange
R14 Eldrazi Tron 2-0
R15 Burn 2-0
My List
Maindeck
4 Baral, Chief of Compliance 4 Desperate Ritual 1 Empty the Warrens 3 Misty Rainforest 4 Gifts Ungiven 4 Goblin Electromancer 3 Grapeshot 3 Island 4 Manamorphose 1 Mountain 2 Past in Flames 4 Pyretic Ritual 4 Remand 4 Scalding Tarn 4 Serum Visions 4 Sleight of Hand 4 Spirebluff Canal 3 Steam Vents
Sideboard
1 Negate 2 Dismember 2 Dispel 1 Echoing Truth 2 Empty the Warrens 3 Lightning Bolt 2 Pieces of the Puzzle 2 Shattering Spree
There are a few rules in Modern and one of the main ones is that you have to be as proactive as possible. The inherent variance of the format mostly comes in your match-ups which means that you often have lost the round when you sit down to play. A good example of this is Titanshift against most fair green midrange decks. As the fair deck you are something like sub 20% to curve out and kill them fast enough before the inevitable Primeval Titan or Scapeshift kills you all whilst you are busy durdling about.
Storm bucks this trend and has the ability to more or less win against anyone given that you have the speed and resiliency necessary to beat even your tough matchups. Landing a turn 2 Baral or Goblin Electromancer puts them to the test immediately and usually means they have to respect the possibility of dying the next turn.
My Sideboarding Guide
Storm is the kind of deck where sideboarding is very important to get right, as you aren’t bringing in your generic haymakers and the rest of the maindeck is a finely tuned engine meaning you can’t start cannibalising all the parts whilst still expecting it to function.
Without further ado:
Grind through their heavy removal and kill with Goblins matchups (Abzan, Jund, Grixis Death’s Shadow etc.)
The philosophy here is to transition to a more value orientated deck that is probably not going to go off early and instead try to slog through their removal. You can pivot your win condition from Grapeshot to Empty the Warrens and make their spot removal suffer as you offer them a paucity of good targets. Lightning Bolt and Fatal Push don’t line up very well to lots of Goblins and you can usually hold onto the mana bear until such time where it is actually useful in play. Do not run them out into certain death for no value, you must be a patient Peter.
Pieces is great against graveyard hate and lets you dig for the right pieces whilst also filling up the yard for future Past in Flames. Empty is the backup win condition and is generally quite hard to beat for these sort of spot removal heavy creature decks. I personally like Dismember against the Angler/ Tasigur/ Goyf decks as a way to stop you randomly dying to creature beats. I might cut these on the play in favour of leaving in a few Remands, especially against the Delve threats or sweepers.
Cutting gifts might not seem very intuitive but as many decks board into Leyline of the Void, Rest in Peace or Surgical Extraction you are usually incentivised to reduce your vulnerability to those cards. The third Grapeshot is less essential given the newly diversified threat base and Remand isn’t very good at stopping the cards we really care about in these matchups (it also sucks against Inquisition or Thoughtseize).
- + 2 Pieces of the Puzzle
- +2 Empty the Warrens
- +2 Dismember
- - 4 Remand
- - 1 Grapeshot
- - 1 Gifts Ungiven
Kill them as fast as possible matchups (Burn, Tron, Affinty, Titanshift, Elves, Ad Nauseum, and Infect etc.)
Other combo decks frequently feature Artifacts that we care about. Even Titanshift will usually board into a mix of Relic of Progenitus, Grafdigger’s Cage or Chalice of the Void. We are really looking to go as fast as possible and try to race them, which usually means not playing around things too much apart from stuff we cannot beat or want to try and head off. Most of these decks also don’t have a plethora of removal for our bears, which means that we can often keep hands with only one and even board down to 6 in favour of more meaningful interaction such as Shattering Spree or Echoing Truth. The plan is to be prepared for their interaction and also prepared to beat them on a slightly different axis. Having access to lightning bolts against decks like Infect, Elves and Affinity allows us to win on the draw and slow down their fastest possible starts. Often T3 with no interaction on the draw against Affinity spells doom. Burn is sometimes called an unwinnable matchup, which is usually true in the face of an Eidolon game 1, but is quite beatable in post board games. Lean on your bolts and be careful using them. That Goblin Guide might kill us in the long run, but if you can’t take an Eidolon off the table then it’s game over my friend.
- + 2 Shattering Spree
- + 3 Lightning Bolts
- +1 Echoing Truth
- - 2 Electromancer
- -1 Empty the Warrens
- - 2 Remand
- -1 Gifts Ungiven
Patience and knowledge of the stack matchups (UW, UWR Control etc.)
The name of the game here is once again becoming patient Peter and forcing them to interact on one of their main choke points, which is usually either mana or cards. What this means practically is waiting, playing out land and then finally going over the top of their counter magic using our Remands (which are great on our own spells) and making use of Past in Flames / Gifts to grind them out of cards over the course of a longer game. Spell Queller can be a pain, so be careful not to walk into that one. I typically find this matchup to be favourable if you don’t run Gifts or another crucial spell into counter magic for no gain.
N.B. This is not an exact guide but more following general themes. Please do not bring in Shattering Spree against Elves or Lightning Bolt against Titanshift.
A quick matchup rundown of the Top 10 decks on MTG Goldfish:
Storm: It’s the mirror. Don’t mess up.
Affinity: Great for you on the play, still probably favoured on the draw.
Jeskai Tempo: Moderately favoured.
Eldrazi Tron: Draw dependent for them, probably a slight dog if they draw averagely.
Titanshift: The unlosable matchup.
GDS: Not good. Can storm them out if they go low enough. The critical mix of disruption, stubborn denial and removal makes this tough.
Tron: Moderately favoured.
Eldrazi and Taxes: The bears can help overcome Thalia, otherwise a moderate dog.
Burn: You’re going to die. Can maybe win if they don’t land Eidolon T2.
CoCo Decks: Favoured. They can’t usually interact with the combo Game 1 and Game 2 they are relying on a small list of cards to interact meaningfully (Eidolon of Rhetoric, for which we have Dismember/ Echoing Truth and precious little else).
A few more closing points regarding UR Gifts Storm:
1. Try to play around graveyard hate by boarding into Pieces and away from Gifts/ PiF.
2. Try not to expose yourself to Surgical Extraction if possible, this should be done by not putting your Grapeshots in the graveyard unless absolutely necessary. Try to draw them naturally if you suspect a Surgical. You can set up Gifts piles with cantrips and more Gifts to do this.
3. The magic number for mana left over after a Gifts is 3. With 3 red mana they are dead and it doesn’t matter which two cards they put into your hand from the classic “ PiF, Desperate, Pyretic, Manamorphose” pile. You will always have enough to cast PiF and keep going off.
4. Early Goblins can often do the trick, you need the stomach to go in hard on what can appear to be quite risky. Know when it is a good idea and when they are likely to just have a Ratchet Bomb to make your day go south quickly
5. Shattering Spree is very good against Chalice. The copies can go through the trigger and blow up multiple annoying artifacts.
6. Remanding your own Grapeshots is an easy way to generate more Storm without using the graveyard.
7. Don’t forget your loots from Baral when countering spells. This is also a good reason to hold excess lands.
8. The god hand is a Turn 2 kill. “Land, land, Baral, Desperate, Desperate, Manamorphose, Gifts” can often turn into a win if you draw a second ritual off a manamorphose or a cantrip you find along the way.
That’s all for now but I’ll be playing Storm in Madrid on one of the Mana Gaming Teams we send there for the team event. I’ve also been attempting to grind out a few wins with the deck in recent PPTQs to no notable success as yet.
Until next time:
Tom











