Historic: Thousand-Year Storm (Revisited)

Overview

I spend much of my time on Arena creating new decks and trying to see what I can make work. This scratches the kind of itch I often get for Magic the Gathering and means I am always trying and playing new decks. But sometimes I get a different itch, one where I am compelled by my inner most spike to go beyond the average and try and tune a deck to my absolute limits.

It had been a long time since I had played Thousand-Year storm. It's a deck I love to play, but my build had some serious issues where the deck worked but was way less consistent then it needed to be. Power creep had simply not been very kind to my old staple. So I decided that it was time to dust off the deck and see what this deck looked like in the 2023 Historic meta.

How it Started

After new sets release I often go through the cards and try and get an idea of what cards might seem under appreciated because they don't seem to be that powerful, while filling some secretly left hole that people just have not realized yet. That is when I cane across the card "Flick a Coin".

On the surface this card seems to be alright. It does three one mana things for three mana. It's not a terrible value but it's not some all star just waiting to be discovered. But let's have a closer look. Flick a Coin Deals damage, draws cards, and makes mana. For most decks that is probably a sub-par deal, but for Thousand-Year Storm, that is the three things we want to be doing more then anything else. So I reached out to some other Thousand-Year Storm players and asked their opinions. What started as a simple "Is this card good in TYS" ended up with a massive deck overhaul, and a really sweet deck list that firmly answers the question with "Hell Yes."

TYS Primer

Thousand-Year Storm was a card from Guilds of Ravnica that was designed to simulate the powerful Storm mechanic. Storm has the pleasure of being one of the most overpowered mechanics in the games history (With companion, and maybe dredge being even in the same ballpark.) Thousand-Year storm let's you copy spells, and not just a few spells like many other copy effects, no it lets you copy spells a ton. Each time you cast an instant or sorcery you'll get to copy it for every instant or sorcery you cast before it.

The basics of a Thousand-Year storm deck is to stick the enchantment, then start casting a bunch of spells till you can cast a single spell that gets copied enough to end the game. You draw cards, make a ton of mana, and kill your opponent out of no where. It's great.

Treasures

Thousand-Year storm is a six mana enchantment that almost always does nothing the turn you put it down. Your very likely to die to aggro before you can play it on curve. SO we need to speed it up a little bit and treasure can help with that significantly. Big Score and Unexpected Windfall help significantly by speeding us up by a turn, and Flick a Coin can help us smooth things out and give us the mana to cast one of the two when we are a little light on lands.

But the treasures don't stop there. Mana can be a significant limiting factor once we start casting spells with Thousand-Year storm down. So we need to have a way to keep generating mana to keep increasing our storm count. The majority of our spells cost very little mana so Storm-Kiln Artist can quickly allow us to chain enough spells to very quickly go infinite. Strike It Rich can help us ramp into TYS, keep our combo going, or even let us start going off with a little luck.

Card Draw

Mana is only good if you have something to do with it so we will need to keep the cards flowing. Slight of Hand can be a cheap card draw spell that is great both early and later in the combo. Expressive Iteration helps us hit out T3 land drops, and gives us some selection later when we need to find the right thing for our combo, plus because it's not card draw you can use it with high storm counts to not die to decking yourself. Lórien Revealed rounds the tools out allowing us to find a land when we need it and draw into some action when we flood out.

Keep Going

Thousand-Year storm can be an effective source of advantage, but it does nothing the turn it comes down and requires you to have a couple spells to get things going. Mind's Desire and Past in Flames help round things out by giving us a few ways to keep things rolling when we do not have Thousand-Year storm down yet. A well times Past in Flames can take you from zero to winning very quickly.

Just Win Already!

The deck can durdle around. But eventually you'll need to win the game. Flick a Coin can do in a pinch but more often then not we are using Play with Fire to hit our opponent in the face for lethal damage.

Conclusion

This deck is a significant improvement to the decks that I have played before. After lots of play testing and tuning I feel pretty good about releasing this version but there is still more to do. I hope you'll join me for the next time I take a crack at this.