I perhaps did not make it clear that Pauper was not the birth of a new format I was talking about. I did use it as a counter example to some of my logic. The second part of the article is where I intend to talk about the possible birth of 2 formats.
I had originally wanted to talk about those 2 new formats first but once I started writing it became clear that it would work better if I did it in reverse. I guess it is unfortunate that the title implies that I would talk about new formats and then the demise of an old one. This is also the reason i used Formats (plural) for the title, because in part 2 I will be talking about the others. I could have talked about Singleton 60 because I was an avid player of that before its death as well, but honestly had just forgot once I became wrapped up in writing about prismatic.
I think you can accomplish much of the same consistency with only the original 2 colors using Tortured Existence instead of Grim Harvest.
Tortured Existence and Golgari Brownscale can gain life faster than Aven Riftwatcher and Blind Hunter combined. Add in Wild Mongrel, Grave Scrabbler, and Crypt Rats, and you've got a Rock deck in two colors that is much more consistant.
I'm thinking a four color deck can't really be aggressive in pauper due to mana issues.
My major issue with classifying formats as casual or competitive is that it is a very heavy handed way of WotC telling us which formats we should be playing.
How competitive a format is highly dependant upon how much time good players are willing to spend playing and testing decks for that format.
By classifying formats as competitive or casual, Wizards is trying very hard to tell us which formats to play. As I see it, the problem with this philosophy is that it completely ignores what formats we enjoy playing.
It's like if you had a Candy Store that sells Chocolate and Lollipops. As a business owner you think you're going to sell more Chocolate than Lollipops, so you order 6 boxes of chocolate for every 1 box of Lollipops. Then after a while you realize that you're always running out of Lollipops. So instead of changing the quantity of Lollipops and chocolate you buy, you raise the price of Lollipops so you don't sell them as quickly and hopefully more people will now buy your excess chocolate because its cheaper when compared to the more expensive Lolipops.
What Wizards does with these "casual" formats is like this. Wizards is not very responsive to what its customers want. Instead they change the cost and support of the casual format in order to steer people into buying more chocolate (competitive formats).
I realize I presented a confused argument. However, I still say that MTGO, as a business venture, does not rely on card prices. It will succeed or fail based on sales of product and event tickets, not because of card prices. One could imagine an increase in the player base, so that more packs are opened in a given period, but see no changes in card prices. In this case, card prices gives you no information on the health of MTGO as a whole.
You should run undead gladiator if you aren't already. It is one of the best ways to get targets into your graveyard. Makes a hand with entomb/buried alive , fat, and a reanimation spell awesome.
I thought I’d also have a go at making a Fusion deck after seeing your article as it looked like an interesting card to build round. My build is below I would swap the last Shield for another Qasali but I only have one at present.
So how does it work, well there is enough coloured mana from the Elves and Fertile Ground to hard cast the Fusion Elemental on turn 4 most games, and when you don’t have it in hand you can use Mayael, I wasn’t sure about her at first but she is really good when you trigger her in response to your opponents attack,they have no idea whats going to be blocking their creature. I’ve not missed with her in over 20 games today since I made the deck.
I made this deck to be very affordable I could add better cards like Birds for the Druid and swap the Safeholds for Finks but that would push the price well over a lot of peoples budgets.
Over the 20 odd games I won about 50% which isn’t great but I had lots of issues getting the mana settled while keeping it cheap, since then my win rate has shot up and I’ve found it a very fun deck to play. I’ve never Seen any one play Mayael.
Qty Card Name
4 Druid of the Anima
3 Elvish Harbinger
4 Fertile Ground
3 Mayael the Anima
4 Woolly Thoctar
2 Spearbreaker Behemoth
4 Fusion Elemental
1 Maelstrom Archangel
3 Mosstodon
3 Safehold Elite
1 Qasali Pridemage
1 Shield of the Oversoul
4 Oblivion Ring
4 Forest
4 Mountain
4 Plains
3 Savage Lands
4 Vivid Grove
4 Jungle Shrine
I've been playing a fair amount of pauper recently. I managed to take down the first pauper weekend event with my B/u control deck. (I'm a very competitive player)
Nice article,
A good start to beginning to play/understand storm combo. Needing 2 grapeshots to combo early and vulnerability to targeted discard naming grapeshot are nice insights that I can confirm from playing against the deck a ton of times.
I don’t really like the emphasis on goldfishing and going off turn 4. I can identify good storm combo players by how long they wait before they combo off. This is matchup dependent of course but I have definitely played against players who try and go off turn 4 when I have 0 pressure on them.
Naturally your conclusions are biased towards 4 turn games. I’d say 4 turns is not the duration of the vast majority of pauper games (of course it does happen). I don’t agree that the deck is very vulnerable to life gain. Riftwatcher into okiba-gang is going to be problem because you are losing 2 cards, you don’t care if they are just gaining life. If you play 50 games going off on turn 8 instead of 4 you won’t have a problem doing 25-30 damage.
Personally I would recommend storm combo over mono R burn. I’m fairly confident that the average pauper play is not prepared to play against a good storm player. Mono red is a not really my style and a bit to linear for my tastes, at least storm has multiple angles of attack.
It's pretty rare that you actually die on your 4th turn. Slivers can goldfish with their best draw, obviously, but other decks' fourth turns are more like "a solid board position with several cards in hand," or "tendrils online," or "ready to counterspell two spells."
Those things would be bad if you were planning on winning with 1 critical spell or a series of creatures, but as everybody knows, that's not what this deck does.
You typically have more than four turns to kill with storm, and unless you're staring down lethal damage or a shinobi, there's no reason to try to go off (and can usually wait 1-3 more turns)
I don't claim to be a storm expert by any means, but your decklist seems far from optimal.
you mentioned in your article that there is no way to tutor for grapeshot, but there is, shred memory, which you chose to run in the sb rather than maindeck for some odd reason. I think shred memory will make those 10 storm double grapeshot hands much more consistent, rather than playing so much draw spells and going straight for 19 storm single grapheshot.
I dunno, but from my experiences playing vs storm, it seems to go off turn 4 undisrupted almost every time, even turn 3 kills once in a while. I don't doubt your data so i'm guessing the decklist you used could be better optimized.
"In order to test games on the play with MTGO I mulliganed my opening 7, drew for t1 and then decided whether I would keep or mulligan. If I had to mulligan I would start another game with an additional mulligan and repeat. (Does anyone know a better way to do this?) Since the games were solitaire they were all done with the maindeck."
What I do, and you can only do this is you have personal restraint, is base you mulligans you your opening 7, and just play like you don't know what the right most card is in your hand. Ie. you don't count your draw on turn 1, as it's the card you are "drawing" on turn 2 and you don't count the the card you actually draw on turn 2.. etc
only works if you think you can be honest that you aren't playing with that knowledge though. (hehe, I suppose if you can't be honest a postit note on your screen could hide it .. at least until you start playing things ;D)
1) I disagree with Alex. Storm Combo in Pauper is almost completely undisruptable, so why not get goldfish data and take it with a small grain of salt? Sure, you might eat a single Distress, but compare that to the games where you aren't forced to go off until turn 6 (or later) because your opponent has a slow clock. More than any other deck-in-context I've ever seen in my life, this one is all about solitaire.
2) The lists I've seen generally have a couple Shred Memory, which is a huge omission from your discussion (if not from your decklist). You spend a lot of time explaining how the deck's weak spot is finding copies of the card Grapeshot, so you should at least explain why you chose not to play the best card for fixing that problem.
3) You should play 1 Island in the deck. It is like a Lotus Petal that doesn't sac itself, thus helping you cast draw spells before going off.
4) I don't know why you save your Ideas Unbound to cast last when you're going off, but it seems wrong to me. You get the most information by resolving those, such that you can plan how to use your other resources. Casting all your rituals first seems wrong in the same way, because you don't know if you will end up with more than enough mana but short on lands to discard to Careful Study and Compulsive Research.
"3) The Fundamental Turn of Pauper is Turn Four. I have said it before and I will say it again- Turn Four is the Fundamental Turn. This is the turn by which combo and aggro will often goldfish....Your deck, and by proxy you, should have a plan for this. Can you win by turn four? Can you establish dominance? If the answer is no, then I would seriously consider reconsidering your deck for competitive Pauper."
Obviously goldfish = solitaire. The data is rather useful I believe in determining whether the fundamental turn is indeed turn 4 and whether Storm Combo is a viable deck in the format -- i.e. "How Good is Storm Combo"
"card values have nothing to do with how MTGO is doing as a business venture for Wizards"
So what you're saying is this: people crack more packs if prices are high, but that has nothing to do with the success of the MTGO business. What the hell?
"Casual" to me means less competitive. I think these formats are competitive, so I disagree with the label. I also disagree with the notion that these formats are only there to lead people into the "real" formats.
So, any comments on what you would change the deck to after a good tournament like this one under your belt? Did the Esper Stormblades and Aven Mimeomancer's work out good or would it be better served with something else?
Zimbrado, card values have nothing to do with how MTGO is doing as a business venture for Wizards. They make their money through store sales. There is no causation between the two, however there is correlation.
A healthy demand for singles, as a result of formats that people want to play, translates into demand for the game in general. If prices of single cards get too high, people will end up cracking packs for them. For example, when I was getting into pauper, I scoffed at paying the singles prices for Crypt Rats and River Boas (1 to 1.5 tix if I remember correctly), and instead cracked packs of Visions from the store to get what I wanted.
And as for the formats you mention in your last paragraph, if not 'casual', how should these formats be classified? What is your definition of casual? Casual to me is a format that isn't played at a high level of competition, so the design space for decks tends to be less explored, leaving room for innovation and pet decks.
I haven't had a chance to check out the videos yet, so they do not influence my comments.
My biggest issue with this article is that you start talking about Solitaire games, but those do not matter in Magic. Yes, while Storm is the deck best equipped to Goldfish in Pauper, you never really go into why (other than to say to see if you can kill on turn four...is this enough of a reason- I don't know).
These numbers are all great except they have no bearing on actual play. Storm is one of the decks in Pauper that everyone has to prepare for (especially during an event). While Solitaire is important for learning when to mulligan, going off in these situations is far different than going off under pressure or in the face of interaction. How many of those hands could have beaten a Duress or Distress? A well timed counter?
This is a great first step, and I hope that the articles that follow go on to examine how the deck works when set up against an opponent who is prepared to interact.
-Alex
Meh storm is either a turn 1-3 kill, or your dead. Answer's exist(Echoing Decay for ETW, Dawn Charm or Prismatic Strands for Grapeshot) and identifying the key cards to a storm deck is a no brainer. Does it win yes, but but it win consistently not no imo.
First off, I loved your card pics as they highlighted the article themes in a cogent, wistful way.
Secondly, I think your title is off; if not, you gave us no indication in your original thesis how this is going to be rectified in part 2. The problem is this: We have the analysis of the death of only one format (Prismatic), and tangental analysis of the birth of a second (pauper). In fact, all the analysis on the death side focused solely on Prismatic; to be convincing, you need to show how those same effects apply to other formats. Would other formats have differing indicators of decay?
For what it's worth, I think the 'Spirit of the Format', so called, is a fine way to make a banned list. And fortunately, it's not a democracy where people have to agree on anything; it's a supreme dictatorship by the WotC oligarchy. The problem is that they did have obvious inconsistencies in the case of the Prismatic banned list, appeared not to listen to the public despite soliciting their advice, made late decisions, did not try to correct their mistakes (instead they killed the format), and blamed their mistakes on lack of support. If WotC had done this right, the spirit of the format, as they ultimately see it, could have been a fine yardstick to measure by. So, my point: while I agree with certain principles you espouse here regarding WotC's abominable behavior here, I don't like the logic you used in this particular argument.
I think you make great arguments outlining Prismatic's demise and a few indicating the rise of Pauper - maybe you should have left your topic at that. If you're insistent on outlining the death of formats (plural), maybe you could speculate on Rochester Draft, 60-card singleton, leagues, Momir, Vanguard, etc. Finally, is death of a format a good thing or a bad thing? Take a stand and persuade me one way or the other. Good luck on part II!
Might as well have another line that says "They may be regenerated" the idea of paying that much and not even finishing the job is disheartening. Wizards is really pushing mindless aggro and it makes me sad.
Yup...this format is close to the definition of stupid. Cascade seems cool on the surface but it turns the game so much more towards pokemon. Just flip some coins and get lucky. Whee...
I should add that moving one ETW to the maindeck is a smart move; it functions as storm spell #5 and sometimes saves your ass when you would otherwise fizzle.
I can attest that Ponder is quite useful in this deck. I'm surprised you didn't compile any data regarding T3 kills. I find myself going off on T3 about 10-20% of the time.
Thanks for the constructive advice BoB,
I perhaps did not make it clear that Pauper was not the birth of a new format I was talking about. I did use it as a counter example to some of my logic. The second part of the article is where I intend to talk about the possible birth of 2 formats.
I had originally wanted to talk about those 2 new formats first but once I started writing it became clear that it would work better if I did it in reverse. I guess it is unfortunate that the title implies that I would talk about new formats and then the demise of an old one. This is also the reason i used Formats (plural) for the title, because in part 2 I will be talking about the others. I could have talked about Singleton 60 because I was an avid player of that before its death as well, but honestly had just forgot once I became wrapped up in writing about prismatic.
I think you can accomplish much of the same consistency with only the original 2 colors using Tortured Existence instead of Grim Harvest.
Tortured Existence and Golgari Brownscale can gain life faster than Aven Riftwatcher and Blind Hunter combined. Add in Wild Mongrel, Grave Scrabbler, and Crypt Rats, and you've got a Rock deck in two colors that is much more consistant.
I'm thinking a four color deck can't really be aggressive in pauper due to mana issues.
My major issue with classifying formats as casual or competitive is that it is a very heavy handed way of WotC telling us which formats we should be playing.
How competitive a format is highly dependant upon how much time good players are willing to spend playing and testing decks for that format.
By classifying formats as competitive or casual, Wizards is trying very hard to tell us which formats to play. As I see it, the problem with this philosophy is that it completely ignores what formats we enjoy playing.
It's like if you had a Candy Store that sells Chocolate and Lollipops. As a business owner you think you're going to sell more Chocolate than Lollipops, so you order 6 boxes of chocolate for every 1 box of Lollipops. Then after a while you realize that you're always running out of Lollipops. So instead of changing the quantity of Lollipops and chocolate you buy, you raise the price of Lollipops so you don't sell them as quickly and hopefully more people will now buy your excess chocolate because its cheaper when compared to the more expensive Lolipops.
What Wizards does with these "casual" formats is like this. Wizards is not very responsive to what its customers want. Instead they change the cost and support of the casual format in order to steer people into buying more chocolate (competitive formats).
There's always something with you, eh Spike?
I realize I presented a confused argument. However, I still say that MTGO, as a business venture, does not rely on card prices. It will succeed or fail based on sales of product and event tickets, not because of card prices. One could imagine an increase in the player base, so that more packs are opened in a given period, but see no changes in card prices. In this case, card prices gives you no information on the health of MTGO as a whole.
You should run undead gladiator if you aren't already. It is one of the best ways to get targets into your graveyard. Makes a hand with entomb/buried alive , fat, and a reanimation spell awesome.
I thought I’d also have a go at making a Fusion deck after seeing your article as it looked like an interesting card to build round. My build is below I would swap the last Shield for another Qasali but I only have one at present.
So how does it work, well there is enough coloured mana from the Elves and Fertile Ground to hard cast the Fusion Elemental on turn 4 most games, and when you don’t have it in hand you can use Mayael, I wasn’t sure about her at first but she is really good when you trigger her in response to your opponents attack,they have no idea whats going to be blocking their creature. I’ve not missed with her in over 20 games today since I made the deck.
I made this deck to be very affordable I could add better cards like Birds for the Druid and swap the Safeholds for Finks but that would push the price well over a lot of peoples budgets.
Over the 20 odd games I won about 50% which isn’t great but I had lots of issues getting the mana settled while keeping it cheap, since then my win rate has shot up and I’ve found it a very fun deck to play. I’ve never Seen any one play Mayael.
Qty Card Name
4 Druid of the Anima
3 Elvish Harbinger
4 Fertile Ground
3 Mayael the Anima
4 Woolly Thoctar
2 Spearbreaker Behemoth
4 Fusion Elemental
1 Maelstrom Archangel
3 Mosstodon
3 Safehold Elite
1 Qasali Pridemage
1 Shield of the Oversoul
4 Oblivion Ring
4 Forest
4 Mountain
4 Plains
3 Savage Lands
4 Vivid Grove
4 Jungle Shrine
I've been playing a fair amount of pauper recently. I managed to take down the first pauper weekend event with my B/u control deck. (I'm a very competitive player)
Nice article,
A good start to beginning to play/understand storm combo. Needing 2 grapeshots to combo early and vulnerability to targeted discard naming grapeshot are nice insights that I can confirm from playing against the deck a ton of times.
I don’t really like the emphasis on goldfishing and going off turn 4. I can identify good storm combo players by how long they wait before they combo off. This is matchup dependent of course but I have definitely played against players who try and go off turn 4 when I have 0 pressure on them.
Naturally your conclusions are biased towards 4 turn games. I’d say 4 turns is not the duration of the vast majority of pauper games (of course it does happen). I don’t agree that the deck is very vulnerable to life gain. Riftwatcher into okiba-gang is going to be problem because you are losing 2 cards, you don’t care if they are just gaining life. If you play 50 games going off on turn 8 instead of 4 you won’t have a problem doing 25-30 damage.
Personally I would recommend storm combo over mono R burn. I’m fairly confident that the average pauper play is not prepared to play against a good storm player. Mono red is a not really my style and a bit to linear for my tastes, at least storm has multiple angles of attack.
I'm certainly no storm expert, as I mentioned in the article I merely grabbed what appeared to be the most recent placing list over at PDC.
It's pretty rare that you actually die on your 4th turn. Slivers can goldfish with their best draw, obviously, but other decks' fourth turns are more like "a solid board position with several cards in hand," or "tendrils online," or "ready to counterspell two spells."
Those things would be bad if you were planning on winning with 1 critical spell or a series of creatures, but as everybody knows, that's not what this deck does.
You typically have more than four turns to kill with storm, and unless you're staring down lethal damage or a shinobi, there's no reason to try to go off (and can usually wait 1-3 more turns)
I think you meant this: "Wrath of God has swollen to 150% its original size."
I don't claim to be a storm expert by any means, but your decklist seems far from optimal.
you mentioned in your article that there is no way to tutor for grapeshot, but there is, shred memory, which you chose to run in the sb rather than maindeck for some odd reason. I think shred memory will make those 10 storm double grapeshot hands much more consistent, rather than playing so much draw spells and going straight for 19 storm single grapheshot.
I dunno, but from my experiences playing vs storm, it seems to go off turn 4 undisrupted almost every time, even turn 3 kills once in a while. I don't doubt your data so i'm guessing the decklist you used could be better optimized.
"In order to test games on the play with MTGO I mulliganed my opening 7, drew for t1 and then decided whether I would keep or mulligan. If I had to mulligan I would start another game with an additional mulligan and repeat. (Does anyone know a better way to do this?) Since the games were solitaire they were all done with the maindeck."
What I do, and you can only do this is you have personal restraint, is base you mulligans you your opening 7, and just play like you don't know what the right most card is in your hand. Ie. you don't count your draw on turn 1, as it's the card you are "drawing" on turn 2 and you don't count the the card you actually draw on turn 2.. etc
only works if you think you can be honest that you aren't playing with that knowledge though. (hehe, I suppose if you can't be honest a postit note on your screen could hide it .. at least until you start playing things ;D)
1) I disagree with Alex. Storm Combo in Pauper is almost completely undisruptable, so why not get goldfish data and take it with a small grain of salt? Sure, you might eat a single Distress, but compare that to the games where you aren't forced to go off until turn 6 (or later) because your opponent has a slow clock. More than any other deck-in-context I've ever seen in my life, this one is all about solitaire.
2) The lists I've seen generally have a couple Shred Memory, which is a huge omission from your discussion (if not from your decklist). You spend a lot of time explaining how the deck's weak spot is finding copies of the card Grapeshot, so you should at least explain why you chose not to play the best card for fixing that problem.
3) You should play 1 Island in the deck. It is like a Lotus Petal that doesn't sac itself, thus helping you cast draw spells before going off.
4) I don't know why you save your Ideas Unbound to cast last when you're going off, but it seems wrong to me. You get the most information by resolving those, such that you can plan how to use your other resources. Casting all your rituals first seems wrong in the same way, because you don't know if you will end up with more than enough mana but short on lands to discard to Careful Study and Compulsive Research.
"3) The Fundamental Turn of Pauper is Turn Four. I have said it before and I will say it again- Turn Four is the Fundamental Turn. This is the turn by which combo and aggro will often goldfish....Your deck, and by proxy you, should have a plan for this. Can you win by turn four? Can you establish dominance? If the answer is no, then I would seriously consider reconsidering your deck for competitive Pauper."
Obviously goldfish = solitaire. The data is rather useful I believe in determining whether the fundamental turn is indeed turn 4 and whether Storm Combo is a viable deck in the format -- i.e. "How Good is Storm Combo"
"card values have nothing to do with how MTGO is doing as a business venture for Wizards"
So what you're saying is this: people crack more packs if prices are high, but that has nothing to do with the success of the MTGO business. What the hell?
"Casual" to me means less competitive. I think these formats are competitive, so I disagree with the label. I also disagree with the notion that these formats are only there to lead people into the "real" formats.
So, any comments on what you would change the deck to after a good tournament like this one under your belt? Did the Esper Stormblades and Aven Mimeomancer's work out good or would it be better served with something else?
-M
Zimbrado, card values have nothing to do with how MTGO is doing as a business venture for Wizards. They make their money through store sales. There is no causation between the two, however there is correlation.
A healthy demand for singles, as a result of formats that people want to play, translates into demand for the game in general. If prices of single cards get too high, people will end up cracking packs for them. For example, when I was getting into pauper, I scoffed at paying the singles prices for Crypt Rats and River Boas (1 to 1.5 tix if I remember correctly), and instead cracked packs of Visions from the store to get what I wanted.
And as for the formats you mention in your last paragraph, if not 'casual', how should these formats be classified? What is your definition of casual? Casual to me is a format that isn't played at a high level of competition, so the design space for decks tends to be less explored, leaving room for innovation and pet decks.
I haven't had a chance to check out the videos yet, so they do not influence my comments.
My biggest issue with this article is that you start talking about Solitaire games, but those do not matter in Magic. Yes, while Storm is the deck best equipped to Goldfish in Pauper, you never really go into why (other than to say to see if you can kill on turn four...is this enough of a reason- I don't know).
These numbers are all great except they have no bearing on actual play. Storm is one of the decks in Pauper that everyone has to prepare for (especially during an event). While Solitaire is important for learning when to mulligan, going off in these situations is far different than going off under pressure or in the face of interaction. How many of those hands could have beaten a Duress or Distress? A well timed counter?
This is a great first step, and I hope that the articles that follow go on to examine how the deck works when set up against an opponent who is prepared to interact.
-Alex
Meh storm is either a turn 1-3 kill, or your dead. Answer's exist(Echoing Decay for ETW, Dawn Charm or Prismatic Strands for Grapeshot) and identifying the key cards to a storm deck is a no brainer. Does it win yes, but but it win consistently not no imo.
First off, I loved your card pics as they highlighted the article themes in a cogent, wistful way.
Secondly, I think your title is off; if not, you gave us no indication in your original thesis how this is going to be rectified in part 2. The problem is this: We have the analysis of the death of only one format (Prismatic), and tangental analysis of the birth of a second (pauper). In fact, all the analysis on the death side focused solely on Prismatic; to be convincing, you need to show how those same effects apply to other formats. Would other formats have differing indicators of decay?
For what it's worth, I think the 'Spirit of the Format', so called, is a fine way to make a banned list. And fortunately, it's not a democracy where people have to agree on anything; it's a supreme dictatorship by the WotC oligarchy. The problem is that they did have obvious inconsistencies in the case of the Prismatic banned list, appeared not to listen to the public despite soliciting their advice, made late decisions, did not try to correct their mistakes (instead they killed the format), and blamed their mistakes on lack of support. If WotC had done this right, the spirit of the format, as they ultimately see it, could have been a fine yardstick to measure by. So, my point: while I agree with certain principles you espouse here regarding WotC's abominable behavior here, I don't like the logic you used in this particular argument.
I think you make great arguments outlining Prismatic's demise and a few indicating the rise of Pauper - maybe you should have left your topic at that. If you're insistent on outlining the death of formats (plural), maybe you could speculate on Rochester Draft, 60-card singleton, leagues, Momir, Vanguard, etc. Finally, is death of a format a good thing or a bad thing? Take a stand and persuade me one way or the other. Good luck on part II!
Might as well have another line that says "They may be regenerated" the idea of paying that much and not even finishing the job is disheartening. Wizards is really pushing mindless aggro and it makes me sad.
Yup...this format is close to the definition of stupid. Cascade seems cool on the surface but it turns the game so much more towards pokemon. Just flip some coins and get lucky. Whee...
-M
I should add that moving one ETW to the maindeck is a smart move; it functions as storm spell #5 and sometimes saves your ass when you would otherwise fizzle.
I can attest that Ponder is quite useful in this deck. I'm surprised you didn't compile any data regarding T3 kills. I find myself going off on T3 about 10-20% of the time.