Hello, and welcome to Storm of the Century, my take on brewing around Thousand-Year Storm in Standard. Please +1 if you like what you see, and all comments and suggestions are welcome.
So the moment Thousand-Year Storm was spoiled, I knew it would have to be the first deck I put together for the new Standard. I love combo decks, and what could be better for me than a card that can turn a cantrip and some burn spells into an instant win? Several streamers have made versions, notably SaffronOlive, whose version you can see here: link:https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/against-the-odds-thousand-year-storm-standard, but I thought I could improve upon them. So here’s my take.
What is the weakness of combo decks? Speed. If the combo is too slow, Aggro runs you over, tempo outvalues you, and control digs in behind a wall of removal and counters. Ramp would solve that, but going into Green without the Gruul and Simic shocklands would be a nightmare. So we have to find a solution in UR. Seth’s idea was to run Brass's Bounty, but while this made for some incredible combo turns, I found it too slow in testing. Then I saw another streamer using a different Treasure card: Pirate's Pillage. Using this gives you a much better curve, and can even ramp you into TYS as early as Turn 4, which gets you in under any of the control decks in the format. I also run Goblin Electromancer as a cost reducer, and Niv-Mizzet, Parun as an alternate win-con.
A bit about the SB. Any player who can will bring in enchantment hate and counters in Game 2 against this deck, so there is an option to fully transform. Pull out all copies of TYS and most of the Pirate's Pillage and replace them with Crackling Drake and some mix of Ionize and Negate. This turns the deck into a slightly powered-down version of Izzet Drakes, which should throw the opponent off just enough to steal a non-combo win.
I’ve been playing this build on MTGA and had a lot of success. There are problems with timing out while comboing, so if you are going to try this deck out there, be careful and make sure to play quick in the early turns to earn some hourglasses for later. This is especially true if you drop a copied Beacon Bolt and the opponent has multiple creatures in play, as choosing several targets tends to bog the client down even more. But other than that the deck is a blast and can go from back on its heels to a win in a heartbeat. Try it out.
