This week I wanted to address a new card that saw brief success in Standard, has been proving itself in Vintage, and I believe could be interesting in Legacy: [casthaven]Paradoxical Outcome[/casthaven].
The first week of Kaladesh legal Standard we saw Caleb Scherer pilot a storm-style deck with [casthaven]Aetherflux Reservoir[/casthaven], zero mana artifacts in [casthaven]Cathar’s Shield[/casthaven] and [casthaven]Bone Saw[/casthaven], and [casthaven]Paradoxical Outcome[/casthaven] to loop them and gain life above fifty then use Reservoir to kill his opponent in one shot. It was a sweet deck, but to my knowledge it hasn’t gone any further and it doesn’t do well in the face of control decks which have been getting more popular since the Pro Tour.
In Vintage you have Moxen, [casthaven]Black Lotus[/casthaven], [casthaven]Sol Ring[/casthaven], [casthaven]Mana Vault[/casthaven] and [casthaven]Mana Crypt[/casthaven] that actually net mana when you get them into play which allows you to easily cast a [casthaven]Paradoxical Outcome[/casthaven] and gives you plenty to return to your hand to draw through your deck and storm off or spam tokens with [casthaven]Monastery Mentor[/casthaven], whatever your favorite cup o’ tea is.
Now that we have the formula to make a Paradoxical Storm deck work, we can try to design it for Legacy. I now present you with a quick look into Paradoxaffinity.
Paradoxaffinity
| Lands (15) 2 Island 1 Misty Rainforest 4 Polluted Delta 4 Seat of the Synod 1 Swamp 2 Underground Sea 1 Tropical Island Creatures (12) 4 Frogmite 4 Memnite 4 Ornithopter Spells (33) 1 Brain Freeze 4 Brainstorm 4 Chrome Mox 4 Grim Monolith 3 Mox Diamond 4 Mox Opal 4 Paradoxical Outcome 4 Ponder 1 Tendrils of Agony 4 Thoughtcast | Sideboard (15) 3 Abrupt Decay 4 Cabal Therapy 1 Defense Grid 2 Dread of Night 3 Echoing Truth 2 Xantid Swarm |
The main deck is basically mono blue with black for a [casthaven]Tendrils of Agony[/casthaven] kill condition alongside [casthaven]Brain Freeze[/casthaven]. There are discard spells out of the board along with [casthaven]Abrupt Decay[/casthaven] and [casthaven]Xantid Swarm[/casthaven] for blue based control match ups.
Creatures
Here we have several of the old staple affinity creatures in [casthaven]Ornithopter[/casthaven], [casthaven]Memnite[/casthaven] and [casthaven]Frogmite[/casthaven]. Both the [casthaven]Ornithopter[/casthaven] and [casthaven]Memnite[/casthaven] come down for no mana and [casthaven]Frogmite[/casthaven] combined with several other artifacts is also a free spell where our [casthaven]Paradoxical Outcome[/casthaven] has so many cards that we can bounce and replay without issue to draw as much as possible.
Combo Pieces
To start the combo we need mana sources. We have the full set of [casthaven]Chrome Mox[/casthaven] since we can draw a ton of cards and have plenty of colored cards to pitch.
For [casthaven]Mox Diamond[/casthaven] we only have three. Since we don’t play very many lands, we are likely to not have many in play, but we do have enough lands that we could pitch as we combo and draw through the deck.
[casthaven]Mox Opal[/casthaven] is our easy mana source while we have multiple artifacts in play. At worse as we go along since it is legendary we can use them as [casthaven]Lotus Petal[/casthaven]s to at least get the mana from them, even if we can’t return them all.
[casthaven]Grim Monolith[/casthaven] does not come down for free but it does net mana upon casting. We can potentially use two of our moxen to get it on the board, get three mana and then use another mana rock to cast [casthaven]Paradoxical Outcome[/casthaven]. From there everything should be elementary to combo off and get there.
[casthaven]Paradoxical Outcome[/casthaven] is our engine/card draw enabler to give us that mass of cards in order to get to the needed storm count to get a [casthaven]Brain Freeze[/casthaven] or [casthaven]Tendrils of Agony[/casthaven] kill.
Sideboard
The sideboard is built to hate on the hate that we will end up seeing similar to a traditional storm sideboard.
The set of [casthaven]Cabal Therapy[/casthaven] are there to help remove counter magic from the opponent’s hand and clear the way for a combo turn.
[casthaven]Abrupt Decay[/casthaven] and [casthaven]Echoing Truth[/casthaven] are here to answer hate pieces from [casthaven]Ethersworn Canonist[/casthaven] or [casthaven]Thalia, Guardian of Thraben[/casthaven] to [casthaven]Null Rod[/casthaven] or [casthaven]Phyrexian Revoker[/casthaven].
[casthaven]Dread of Night[/casthaven] is another card that we have for Death and Taxes to kill off every [casthaven]Thalia, Guardian of Thraben[/casthaven] and [casthaven]Mother of Runes[/casthaven] which could protect a Thalia from [casthaven]Abrupt Decay[/casthaven] or [casthaven]Echoing Truth[/casthaven].
[casthaven]Defense Grid[/casthaven] and [casthaven]Xantid Swarm[/casthaven] are the anti counter measures to prevent our opponent from interacting on the stack.
It could be correct to run [casthaven]Force of Will[/casthaven] in the board over some of the other options to give us some game against other turn one combo decks and to allow us to also interact on the stack.
Initial Thoughts
This deck really feels similar to an all-in combo deck similar to Oops, All Spells!, Cheerios, and Belcher where a single [casthaven]Force of Will[/casthaven] or discard spell can throw a wrench into the combo. While we can easily sideboard anti hate and our own permission if we wanted something like [casthaven]Force of Will[/casthaven] out of the board. Game one we have an extremely high ceiling and a relatively low floor. Should be a fun deck to bring to your LGS and just go nuts on people who have no idea what you’re up to.
Happy brewing to each and every one of you. If anyone has an idea for a brew that they would like to see, I will gladly take requests and challenges on twitter. 🙂
Aaron Gazzaniga manages a restaurant and in his off time has been an avid magic player/brewer since 2003. Having begun in Odyssey Standard Block and always favoring control and prison style decks, we come to this moment in time where Aaron finally gets to talk about and share his ideas. If you want to contact Aaron tweet @aarongazzaniga