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By: fhooglander, Frankwin Hooglander
Apr 21 2007 10:54am
3.8
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I’ve been playing this deck for a few months on MTGO now and have tweaked it many times to what I think is the quickest build for this type of deck. The deck is Standard Legal since that’s the most common format I play.

You must all be very curious for the deck. Well here it is:

 

Eye of the Past

by Frankwin Hooglander

     

Main deck

Lands
2
Watery Grave
6 Island
6 Mountain
6 Swamp

Artifacts
3
Dimir Signet
3 Izzet Signet
2 Rakdos Signet

Enchantments
3
Eye of the Storm

Instants / Sorceries
4 Boomerang
4 Consult the Necrosages
2 Counsel of the Soratami
3 Diabolic Tutor
2 Pyroclasm
4 Shock
3 Sins of the Past
3 Telling Time
4 Volcanic Hammer

Sideboard

I have not created a sideboard for this deck yet. If you have any suggestions for a sideboard, please feel free to post them in the comments for this article.

 

Eye of the Storm

I did make this deck before the Time Spiral block came out and there are probably some good Time Spiral block cards that would fit very well in this deck, but I've been able to still play this deck very successfully, so I haven't really spend  a lot of time looking for Time Spiral block cards to fit in this deck.

A quick rundown of the cards in this deck and why I chose them:

Watery Grave
Why only 2 you might ask? Well... the simple fact that I only have 2 is the main reason for this choice. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this deck, so I went with what I had. For those that have all the dual lands it will probably be worth it to run 2 of each to maximize your chances of getting the right mana. I wouldn’t run more than 2 of each since it will just slow you down too much or cost you too much life.


The Signets
Obviously here for mana acceleration and also to make sure you’ll get the right color of mana available to play your spells. The main reason is mana acceleration since the heart of the deck is the Eye of the Storm/Since of the Past combo and you’ll ideally want to play the Eye on turn 5.

Eye of the Storm
This card is the first part of the combo in this deck. You only want to play this when you already have the other part of the combo, Sins of the Past, in your hand though. Don’t play it sooner than that unless you have to. The Eye will also work for your opponent, so you don’t want to give them too many chances of stacking spells on it, or too much time to get rid of it.

Sins of the Past
This is the second part of the combo. When playing this with Eye of the Storm in play it will pretty much set up a loop that lasts until your graveyard is exhausted of spells allowing you to play multiple copies of the spells in your graveyard.

Boomerang
Use this to slow down your opponent. This card is ideally played on things like the taplands from Ravnica block, mana accelerators, large creatures, etc.

Consult the Necrosages
This card has two functions in the deck. First of all to dig through your deck to get the cards for your combo, but it’s also very important to use while in the combo to target yourself to discard cards so your graveyard keeps getting filled with instants/sorceries for you to target with Sins of the Past.

Counsel of the Soratami
Counsel will help you to dig through your deck searching for your combo cards.

Diabolic Tutor
Diabolic Tutor will help you search for your missing part(s) of your combo.

Pyroclasm
Up against a token deck or some other deck with a lot of small creatures? Pyroclasm is your answer. It also works very well on the Eye to remove larger creatures as well. If you can play more spells, you’ll be able to use it more then once. Since your deck doesn’t have any creatures what do you care.

Shock
This is of course removal for early use in the game to keep your opponent under control.

Telling Time
Just like Counsel of the Soratami and Consult the Necrosages this card will help you dig through your deck searching for your combo cards or a Diabolic Tutor.

Volcanic Hammer
More removal for the harder to kill creatures.

How to play this deck?As you can see there are no creatures in the deck, so it’s very important that you use the removal and bounce spells to kill/remove the major threats from your opponent. Don’t waste it, but also don’t be too careful. It can take 5-7 turns or so before you can get your combo out, so you need to make sure your life lasts that long.

Use the card drawing cards etc to dig through your deck to get the combo in your hands. Then as soon as you have enough land to play Eye of the Storm just play it. This will give your opponent just 1 turn to use it or destroy it. Your next turn you will play Sins of the Past. Just make sure there are a number of spells already in your graveyard (another reason to just use your spells) so you have something to target with Sins of the Past. Ideally you’ll have 1 or 2 burn spells and 1 or 2 card drawing spells (preferably at least 1 Consult the Necrosages) already in your graveyard before playing out your combo. Once you do that you’ll most likely win the game that turn.

I’ve probably played around 200 or so games with this deck and my win percentage against casual decks is over 80%. This deck is not very good against the mainstream competitive decks, but that’s why it’s a casual deck.

I hope you enjoy the deck. Feel free to send me a note with comments or suggestions.
Sins of the Past

7 Comments

by MysticLancer at Sat, 04/21/2007 - 14:18
MysticLancer's picture

I really like what you're doing here, nice casual deck idea. What could really make this article better in my opinion (and I'm not trying to rag on you) would be some game recaps versus a couple decks. It could give a bit more insight about the deck and would be fun to read. Overall, nice article, keep it up.

Nice idea, original by Ant d Man (Unregistered) 209.227.78.2 (not verified) at Sat, 04/21/2007 - 16:03
Ant d Man (Unregistered) 209.227.78.2's picture

I like it, though I tried breaking spellshift and I found a way with the eye, using simply diabolic and the eye I can play every instant and sorcery in my deck, including tendrils. The other combo working off of the eye is with spellshift targeting one of your instants or sorceries, you get infinite playing of all sorceries and instants in deck as well, both come out to the same effect. You also have a chance with tendrils to win though slim should your eye be defeated. This deck is awesome in ffa. I have a version up and an updated one on this sight.

Thanks by fhooglander at Sat, 04/21/2007 - 20:35
fhooglander's picture

Thank you all for the comments. I defenitely agree with all of them. I'll defenitely take the comments into account for my next article. There are defenitely some changes I would make to the deck based on the current standard game if I had the money. Damnation would be one for sure against aggro decks. Also the deck really doesn't have a great win condition if the combo gets broken, but it hasn't really been too big of a problem in casual games for me simple because nobody that I've played really expects this combo which makes it great for the casual room.

vs counters by Anonymous (Unregistered) 82.170.146.251 (not verified) at Sat, 04/21/2007 - 12:49
Anonymous (Unregistered) 82.170.146.251's picture

This deck obviously has a great problem vs counters.
Luckily , not many of those decks excist in the casual room, cause most casual players dont want to play against them. Therefore , most casual players build decks without them so people dont quit on them all the time, Hence, combo decks like this can work.
Like he says, this deck doesnt do well vs real tourney decks,
but hey, it's casual

by runeliger at Sat, 04/21/2007 - 12:11
runeliger's picture

An ok first article, it was fairly well written. However, my major complain would be the length. I appreciate you went over card choices, but I wish you would have shown us at least one example of the deck in action (or at least a screen shot showing the deck in action). This versus a grand total of 22! blue mana symbols, and a

Also in regards to your mana base, I think your lands are a bit off. You run 11 red sources (6 mountains and 2 rakdos signets, and 3 izzet signets), but only ten red symbols (IE if you add up the # of occurances of the red mana in all your cards, it only adds up to 10). Compare this to 16 black mana sources. More on the mana base would be the fact that you claim in regards to Watery Graves "I wouldn’t run more than 2 of each since it will just slow you down too much or cost you too much life." I would personally recommend that you run like a couple of mountains and fill up the rest with shock lands (if money isn't an issue).

Just a few thoughts anyway, good article overall.

by Lord Erman at Sat, 04/21/2007 - 12:17
Lord Erman's picture

I never had a deck based on Eye of the Storm so I'm the last person who can comment about it. But after seeing the decklist I thought one thing and I wanted to ask that to you. If somehow your Eye of the Storm gets Extirpate-d or Hide/Seek-ed or Jester's Cap-ed or even get Cancel-ed, you have no other win condition in your deck. I understand that this is a deck build around that card, but I think that a secondary win condition, just in case that something goes wrong, would be fine. Even a Confiscate or Enslave would do. Also as I said, counterspells must be a problem. You say that you played around 200 games with the deck and I'm sure you played against such decks. Can you please tell a little bit about those games? Because I think that they will cause some major troubles to you. Also I think that Damnation would be a nice addition to the deck, most probably replacing the Pyroclasms. And one final thing is that for a deck that relies on two cards with casting costs like 5UU and 4BB, 20 lands is a little bit less even though you have signets in deck. But as you say, you are the one who played 200 games with this deck, not me, so you'd probably know it much better than me. These were just some thoughts I wanted to share. Thanks.:)

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seooseoo's picture

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