Legacy Storm is a deck that often functions off of gut, reads, mind-games, calculated risks, and overall tight play, which is something I like about the deck. It brings uncertainty along with excitement with every decision. Although the deck has great capability to play a slow, grindy game, some hands you have to play as dealt.
-Today I’m going to look at a play made by a friend of mine in round 13 of GP Atlanta against RUG Delver, piloted by Jarvis Yu. At 12-3, Max Carini (wonderperaux on modo) ended up in the top 16 of the GP with an interesting, slower take on ANT.
Storm by Max Carini
RUG delver by Jarvis Yu
Game 2, Turn 1
We find Max, our storm player is on the play for game 2 and keeps the following hand:
Take a minute and decide what you think you would do on turn 1. Seems simple, right?
Max took a line on turn 1 that i think most people wouldn’t consider. Max stepped on the pedal (petal?) turn 1 by fetching an Island, playing 3 LEDs, casting ponder, and cracking all 3 Diamonds.
Initially I would dismiss this play and not think twice and many I asked would do the same. However, this list is quite different from lists that I am used to so I decided to use more than my intuition to figure this one out.
Why would you make this play in the first place?
Storm has a really strong game plan of grinding out fair blue decks. That being said, Lion’s Eye Diamond is quite a bit worse than dark ritual in both this hand and this match up. LED is in my opinion the most powerful card in the deck, after the most powerful card in legacy, Brainstorm. It is normally a useful piece of the puzzle but is a lot worse than dark ritual in multiples or in conjunction with Past in Flames.
One of the keys to the RUG matchup from the storm side is to establish a stable manabase and try to blank their soft or conditional permission. Part of LED’s strength in the storm deck is speed and unlocking a hellbent Infernal Tutor. These are 2 issues you generally do not run into against delver as much as other matchups since you are playing a slower game. The card is much more important to the Ad Nauseam plan than the Past in Flames, grindy plan of multiple Tendrils that Max has chosen to register.
Considering all of this I think this hand has a lot less late-game equity than most keepable hands and I feel Max likely also identified this when making his turn 1 decision. This configuration only has 6 discard spells as opposed to the stock 8, choosing to fight against countermagic with a slow grind, a game plan that really does not involve 3 Lion’s Eye Diamonds.
How likely are we to hit on a goldfish?
As I said before, this list has a lot more business than a stock storm list. Let’s take a look at Max’s postboard configuration.
4 Ponder
6 Discard
8 Rituals
8 Artifact Mana
16 Land (8 fetches 8 targets)
Once again here is the scenario
- Ponder on stack, UUU BBB RRR mana from 3 LEDs
- Storm = 4
- Infernal Tutor, Tendrils of Agony, Misty Rainforest and 3x LED in graveyard
- 52 cards in library
So in order to keep ponder we need to see one of the following:
An Action Spell: Infernal Tutor, Grim Tutor, and Empty the Warrens are all wins if we find them. There are 7 postboard and 1 in the hand so 6 left in the deck.
A Past in Flames: Finding this requires a flashback ponder to find a 1 mana spell for storm count. We need to group this separately since there is around a 1% chance we still brick if we find this.
A Second Ponder: Brainstorm and preordain are not worth keeping since you are spending a mana and gaining a look. Ponder however shows you 1 additional card since you see one lower and the shuffle card.
With these conditions we are 51.765% to Keep ponder, which breaks down as follows:
The breakdown is a little complicated on ponder but you can see it here if interested.
Now a lot of the time we are going to shuffle Ponder in which we can flip the following:
An Action Spell: You are officially now a Noob Lucker
A Past in Flames: Once again almost always good enough but around 1% to whiff
A Blue Card: Redraws! Remember we have 3 Ponders, 4 Brainstorms, and 1 Preordain left in the Deck
Anything Else: We brick: This is the most common case and will happen 31.54% of the time. Once we shuffle the Ponder, this of course goes up by a lot (to nearly 70 Percent!).
This brings our total goldfish rate to… 61.57%
Part of this final calculation involves a couple extra percent from chain cantrip lines, such as Ponder into Ponder into Past in Flames. I calculated all lines that seemed to add up to at least 0.1% and took an educated guess summing up the dozens of miniscule possibilities.
In all honesty, this is much higher than I expected it to be. It is worth remembering that we are using a very Business-heavy list and this number will probably be a lot lower with a stock storm list. Knowing this now, if I were to play a list like this against a horrendous match up, like Eldrazi Stompy or White Eldrazi, I would feel much more confident taking those chances on a ponder than fighting through a mountain of permanent-based lock pieces.
Now how likely are we to win beyond the goldfish?
You may have once heard while talking about Leylines or Force of Will that a player is roughly 40% (39.95%) to have a 4-of in their opening hand. One could also argue that the number is higher since it is a reason to keep or mulligan a hand. While this is true, the other side must also be taken into account. A card like Force of Will not only needs a blue card to cast it on turn 1, but also needs to be in a hand worth keeping. Most 7s without a colored source, a threat or cantrip, or an appropriate spell : land ratio are probably better off as a 6. Since this is a very subjective measurement, and I feel both sides will come close to offsetting, I’m going to use these numbers as estimates of what to expect across the table.
Jarvis has 4 Force of Will and 2 Force of Negation, which at the time I think is a good number to assume from RUG Delver, although I think I would put the average around 5.7 or so leading up to the Event. This puts Jarvis on a 54.14% to have interaction on a random 7 with Forces alone. Our odds of winning the goldfish and dodging the force check are now down to just 28.24%
We could now look at how this number changes when we add 1 copy of Surgical Extraction but I don’t feel a need to consider that after seeing this number. It would be a hard sell to try and tell me that this opening 7 is less than 28% to win on the play, which is where I would probably need to make this play.
What happened in the game?
Once again, I think Max’s play had merit from the position he was in. After showing him this number, he agreed that it is the incorrect play looking from a number standpoint. Unfortunately we will never know if Max’s ponder would have hit because it was met by one of the 2 Force of Wills in Jarvis’s opening hand.
If you are interested in seeing all the calculations done for this article, you can once again see them <Here>.
Thanks and keep storming,
-Cliffy
