Dies to Removal

Fully planning on getting foil acts for the chance that it's awesome in storm.

Good report. You should probably have kept the 3 land, 3 cantrip hand.

Not great, but your deck is highly redundant, and you can hold the second probe for if/when you draw Ascenscion to power through his bullshit which is how you win a lot of your games vs. counterspell decks.

IDK, I haven't thought much of it. You could probably find a way to add 2 lootings to the Ravings/Scour list, though if you did that, you'd also want to add a land. Maybe later, we can all brainstorm what the core of the deck is and figure out how much utility we can get out of the flex slots later. I do like the idea of 17 lands though.

Good shit.

How do you think the two versions differ in matchups? From finkels list which is the one I play:

Affinity: Idk, I think slightly favorable. Don't have a bunch of games in but affinity was drawing like shit and I was crushing. Completely flipped from the other day when affinity and small zoo where the only decks fast enough to goldfish.

Small Zoo:

Medium/Big Zoo: evenish. Scooze+fast clock is bothersome, but loxodon smiter basically timewalks them if played on three since it doesn't kill electromancer

Jund/Obliterock: LOLOLfavorable Not being able to rely on Ascenscion because of abrupt decay is annoying, but Jund plays a long game without the fastest clock and being a graveyard deck, that's basically just free draw steps. Plus I play desperate ravings. To quote zem "flippin lol" Postboard is
harder since they have dedicated gy hate in addition to scooze, but it's not that bad. We're still redundant enough to power through thoughtseize.

Twin: Haven't tested yet

UWR: Fairly even. If you resolve an early ascension and they have no pressure, they can't win ever as you quickly blank there counters. If they have some spell snares and a snapcaster, hold your butts kids, it's gonna be a rough ride. Ravings and thoughtscour shine particularly in this matchup.

Vs. other linear combo: Favorable as we're the fastest combo deck. Infect MIGHT be faster.

Melira Pod: very favorable game 1. That infinite combo takes setup. If they play resto, it can get tricky since they can resto/sin collector for value. However, that's a value you, not an I'm killing you play. Postboard, they actually have a decent gambit of disruptive spells to go with there clock making things hairier.

Big takeaway is this deck is
VERY resilient to disruption, so much so that I've found decks to generally have a better time racing. The grindy decks with the best chances of winning are UWR with snapcasters and spell snares, and Jund post board since they have infinite relevant disruption.

I'd guess that the shrout version from the article at least has a higher turn 3 kill rate since you can potentially have more control over the many cards you see with looting giving your more choices then scour/ravings. 3 lavamancers is just criminal though

Sorry Khaos, preferred finkels list.

Maindecking bolt doesn't vibe with me as it's not a win-con, nor a cantrip.

18 lands feels like too many. I get that with faithless, you can ditch lands, but if you don't have the lands, looting is simply the worst kind of cantrip as it's not getting you ahead on cards. Thoughtscour as finkel said is almost 1.5 of a card drawn since it's fueling your ascensions. The idea of "milling gas" and being screwed over is fairly dumb by my way of thinking since scrys aside, milling from the top is the same as milling from the bottom.

Ravings is awesome because for you only tough matchups(blue decks) it's getting you ahead on cards which is what you want. With so much redundancy, the random discard shouldn't adversely affect you.

But yeah, Val, if you've played U/R Delver for this long, I'd say the next step to take is to play Storm. You've already familiarized yourself with some very complex decision trees from the Delver deck.

If the meta shifts more toward Zoo strategies which Delver is traditionally weak to, I may be forced to play Storm anyway. I've been thinking of ways to tune Delver to beat Zoo but haven't come up with a solid strategy yet.

FWIW I enjoy goldfishing my Sac Land Tendrils deck (never actually played it because no one plays Legacy here) and I've goldfished Modern Storm as well. Both are
pretty difficult to pilot which I enjoy. I tend to prefer more interactive decks like Delver but sometimes I just like doing unfair things.

Threads of Disloyalty. Young Pyromancer's probably good as well. Board out most if not all of your counterspells. Maybe accomodate your manabase to include breeding pool/stomping ground to enable the full firespout(angers good as well since it's aweosome vs pod, but firespout lets you dodge your flipped delvers/cliques for the one sided wrath aspect.

Back to storm, the decks basically affinity lite. Will just beat you so long as you aren't packing sufficient hate or have an unreasoanbly fast clock. While Khaos durdles away at the primer( <3 ) one real quick piece of advice is that Goblin electromancer vs. decks with removal is often a 3 mana sorcery. When you cast him, you have priority letting you cast one discounted instant, and if they respond with removal, all of your ritualesque cards are instants letting you desperate/pyretic/
manamorphse your way to value you town with there bolt on the stack. Just make sure that when you do this, you either generate enough mana for a healthy past in flames, or you add enough blue with Manamophse to keep the chain going with your cantrips if it's the *OMG I'm so dead next turn* play.

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles ... chs-storm/

Relevant for all the storm enthusiasts.

Legacy storm is easy to play most of the time as you have on average 1/6th of your deck which you can use to look at there hand.

Modern storm is hard because your opponents disruption is on par with legacy's(no force, but ain't no ANT players 'bout to lose to force) while your library manipulation is BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD.

Yeah, writing a storm primer would be a lot of work. Ari lax writes about it about 2/4 times a year for Legacy, and the Legacy deck is a lot simpler oddly enough because it's drastically more powerful, has been around forever, and you play a compact 3/4 win cons with the rest of your deck being 3 different affects(draw, mana, disruptions).

Modern storm plays actual creatures, your filtering is horrible, you have your kill spell and you kill spell aid of which you have to play multiple of each, and you get zero disruption meaning you have to time your kill very carefully while racing both your and your opponents manabase in a sense.

Yeah, I don't envy you, but appreciate the work your doing and I imagine it will be very satisfying once finished.