The Perfect Storm (Type Two Version)
2 City of Brass
4 Glimmervoid
4 Great Furnace
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Vault of Whispers
4 Chrome Mox
3 Talisman of Dominance
1 Talisman of Indulgence
4 Seething Song
4 Gilded Lotus
4 Dream's Grip
4 Twiddle
4 Mind's Desire
2 Tendrils of Agony
1 Temporal Fissure
4 Machinate
3 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Thoughtcast

There's the list. There are certainly a large number of deck list hunters out there who care only for their prize, so I'll give it to you up front if you are one.

What's that you say? You're still here? Well, that's good. Allow me to start the article then.

Some of you may remember me, and some of you may not (it's okay, the reason why I even made that comment is because I am vain. I am perfectly aware that none of you remember me). If you do in fact remember me, then you might be wondering where I've been. You also might be wondering why I am running single copies of cards in that deck. Fear not, I am not a hypocrite and all will be explained in due time.

The answer to"Where have I been" is: busy. Through Mock Trial, school, my internship, and my girlfriend, I have had next to no time to write. It's a miracle I've been able to test this build out at all, let alone the two hundred plus games that I've completed. But along the way I have had help from a very large source. That source has been MTGNews.com. It is what sparked my interest in the deck and is what helped me shape my deck. I do not know the forum member's actual names, so I will thank their nicknames in the thread. Most especially, I thank Hybrid Life, Silent Edge, and ButteBlues18 for their continuing support and input on the deck. There are many others, but those three have been the most consistent.

What you will not find from me is any mention of other builds of Mind's Desire decks. I am aware that there are other ways of going about it, but they all have weaknesses that do not fit my play style very well. I have no independent knowledge of how much better or worse they are in the long run compared to my version, other than that they cannot kill any faster than The Perfect Storm can.

It should also be noted that I did the bulk of my testing pre-Darksteel, and also that I wrote about 75% of the article before another swamp of time constraints prevented me from finishing it. As of now, the Ravager Affinity matchup isn't terribly scary, but it isn't particularly favorable either, which makes it scary. The Goblin matchup is quite favorable. I do fear, however, the results of Mike Flores splash damage on this deck. The decks that will inevitably be teched out with a lot of artifact removal at Regionals will probably show up in excess numbers, and that can only hurt this deck. Losing a Gilded Lotus or early artifact land can hiccup your speed to the point where you won't be able to win in time. That being said, I don't know if this is as close to tier 1 as it was in the past, despite the fall of W/u. But I am committed to finish what I started, which is a thorough overview of the Mind's Desire deck (sans a brief intro) followed by a decklist and matchup analysis.

Without any farther ado, I will begin the analysis.

Deck Concepts
This deck is a combo deck. A combo deck has not been seen in Standard for a very long time, so I will go ahead and define it. A combo deck is a deck that uses a combination of cards used in a chain to kill your opponent. A combo deck is far less concerned with what your opponent can do to you than it is with what you can do to your opponent. A combo deck is supremely concerned with the following:

1) Obtaining its combo pieces.

2) Playing its combo pieces.

3) Doing it fast.

Any other cards used to do anything that are not for the purposes above are unnecessary pre sideboard and are considered chaff. A combo deck tries to play gold fish as much as possible every game. Interaction with the opponent should be kept at a minimum. Things such as board position matter only when they become potentially lethal, and it is at that point that actions against this must be taken, not before.

The Perfect Storm is a deck very similar to its Extended cousin, sans the regular turn 2 kills. It is a deck that is also very akin to the Pros Bloom decks of old. In essence, the deck can be broken down into the categories it is most concerned with.

The Engine
The object of the deck is to abuse the Storm mechanic, hence its name. It is supremely concerned with the storm count, which will be referred to from now until forever as"the count." The count is simply the number of spells you have on the stack.

The deck uses Twiddle and Dream's Grip to untap Gilded Lotus multiple times to create a large amount of mana. They also in addition help to add to the count. The large amount of mana is then used to cast a very early Mind's Desire, with usually a count somewhere around three plus the Mind's Desire itself.

Once the Desire is cast, you should be able to cast more spells for free to continue adding to the count until you have a high enough one to kill your opponent via Tendrils of Agony. Typically, you want nine spells plus the Tendrils, but game situations will dictate whether or not a smaller or larger amount is required. The deck, when completely undisrupted, can win as early as turn 2. However, this is extremely unlikely, and a turn 3 kill is almost as unlikely but they are possible. What is likely is a turn 4 or 5 kill. I would say about 35% of the time is turn 4, and another 45% to 50% is turn 5. In all, that is somewhere between 80% and 85% that the deck will go off by then.

There are other cards out there that one can use other than the Tendrils of Agony. The most commonly used different card is Hunting Pack. Honestly, I do not think that Hunting Pack should be the only kill mechanism, because it gives your opponent one more turn to either untap and send damage to the dome, or to cast a mass removal effect that will kill all of your tokens. This is why I don't use it. However, it gets by Gilded Light, so if for some reason that card is used instead of Ivory Mask, it might warrant investigation.

The Mana
Access to Blue and Black is obviously required, but one might scratch his head at the presence of Red. Allow me to explain.

One reason to have Red is Seething Song. This card will allow you to both cast your Gilded Lotus early, but also it can be used to cast Mind's Desire early as well. Also, you have access to Pyroclasm from the sideboard, something that is very important against weenie decks. Also, it gives you access to four more artifact lands, which helps to fuel your search engine.

Every single search card that this deck has is tied to artifacts. Naturally, then, the more artifacts the deck can have the better its search and therefore consistency will be.

This deck runs eighteen lands. That normally is way too small an amount, but in this deck it is correct. In fact for a long time I had it at seventeen. Early on, I had ran sixteen, but that really was too little. There are many reasons for this, the most notable of which is that lands become very bad in conjunction with Mind's Desire. If you cast a Desire with the count at three or four, and two of those cards turn up lands, you could very easily find yourself in a bind.

However, you still need a way to get to five mana in order to cast your Gilded Lotus. How do you do that without lands? Well, I'm glad you asked.

The most obvious choice is to use Chrome Mox. It is, for all intents and purposes, an artifact land. However, it is even better in this deck, because casting it without imprint is not always a terrible proposition. In fact, I almost always cast an unimprinted Mox at least once a game to help add to the count. The Talismans also help you with your mana. You see, in my article about running one-of's, I forgot to mention another exception to the rule. That exception is mana. When I build a deck, I think in terms of colored sources that I have. I discovered that nine sources of Red is not enough, but I did not want to add another City of Brass or Mountain, for fear of the bad interaction with Desire, so I used the Talisman of Indulgence to up my Red source count to eleven.

Now, you must all be screaming at your computer right now that I am not taking into account the presence of Akroma's Vengeance, and that it would wreck this deck just as bad as Affinity. I am not going to lie to you all, if Akroma's Vengeance goes off, ninety percent of the time you are going to lose. But the key phrase is if Akroma's Vengeance goes off, which I will explain later. Just sit tight.

The Search
Gone are the days of one-mana tutor effects. In their wake, we have four mana and higher tutor effects, and that simply isn't cheap enough. That leaves us to turn to other ways of obtaining what we need. Enter the artifact-search engine.

First up is Machinate, which in this deck is the closest thing you are going to get to a full-fledged tutor. The card will give you access to a minimum of three cards, and typically early on will look at five or six cards off the top of your deck. The way this deck is designed, your chances of finding either more search or a combo piece in the top five cards of your library at any given time is very high. The thing you have to understand is that I am only speaking of the time frame before you cast Mind's Desire that you see three to six cards. After that, it becomes something like nine or ten cards.

And at that point Machinate does become a tutor. Every library starts the game with fifty-three cards. Turn by turn, that number will decrease by one. Other search cards are going to reduce your deck size in a hurry. You will have somewhere around forty cards left on average before you begin to go off. You will also have quite a few artifacts in play. So if you look at ten cards, you are effectively seeing 1/4 of your deck. You are running four of every important piece other than the kill condition, so the probability of you finding what you need to win becomes very high at this point. So Machinate is your best tool in this deck.

The other forms of search are also directly related to the number of artifacts in your deck. I think that both Thoughtcast and Thirst for Knowledge are well known enough that I shouldn't have to explain exactly how they work.

As to what I'm not playing, Future Sight sort of acts as a permanent Mind's Desire, only it doesn't let you play the spells it reveals for free. So, one would have to actually cast the spells from it (Yeah, I know, I am the master of the obvious. But I'm going somewhere with this, just stay with me). In general, what this means is that you will only be able to use two spells extra per turn at the most because of mana restrictions, or as many cards as you would see with Thoughtcast.

But Future Sight costs 2UUU. Which means, if it's not cast from a Desire, it will typically eat up a turn to cast. Thoughtcast will typically cost one or two mana, which would allow someone to cast those spells looked at immediately. Consider the following:

You have a Gilded Lotus and four artifacts in play. You have a Chrome Mox in hand, and a Thirst for Knowledge, as well as Thoughtcast. You cast the Thoughtcast for U, drawing into a Mind's Desire and a Seething Song. You tap your Lotus for Red, and then cast your Thirst for Knowledge as well, netting you a Chrome Mox, and we'll say some Twiddle effect and a land. At this point, you have used three spells, and you have five mana still available with two Moxen. You can then play the rest out in order to create a very large Mind's Desire all in the same turn.

Now, consider the same situation, except this time with a Future Sight instead of a Thoughtcast in hand. You cast the Future Sight, netting you the Song first. The only way to continue the chain is to play the Mox and then cast the Song, at which point you still can't cast the Desire. Your turn is done.

The Thoughtcast was much more beneficial because it costs less. The argument in favor of Future Sight is that it stays there over several turns, so it is effectively several Thoughtcasts. But remember rule number three, that combo decks are concerned with doing things fast. That means in as few turns as possible. What Thoughtcast can do is give you the boost you need without sacrificing any down payment in turns.

Also, Future Sight can be cast off of Desire for free, but at the point you are attempting to go off you will more than likely be just looking for things to add to the count. In rare instances will a Future Sight net you more than two cards, so it is marginally better when cast off Desire than Thoughtcast is, but I believe the fact that Thoughtcast is better independently from the Desire makes it better overall.

As for Temporal Cascade, its disadvantages lie in its casting cost sans Desire and its mirror effect. True, you can continuously shuffle your graveyard into your library in an effort to"go infinite," but that is truly arbitrary. What Temporal Cascade does negatively is create a vast number of unknowns that your opponent may have. It gives them far more opportunities to find an out. Temporal Cascade is vastly more powerful than both Thoughtcast and Future Sight, but its mirror effect makes it unpredictable and thus unwieldy.

Lastly, I will discuss other forms of card drawing. Other cards include Ambition's Cost, Concentrate, and Trade Secrets. Both Ambition's Cost and Concentrate are like bad Future Sights, because they will typically eat up a turn to cast outside of being cast off Desire, and they will net you less in the long run. Plus, Ambition's Cost is horrendous against weenie strategies, most notably Goblins.

As for Trade Secrets, it is certainly a powerful card, and before Machinate's existence I played four copies of it. But its drawback is just too detrimental, Especially considering Machinate pretty much does the same thing or better, at the same casting cost. This I cut Trade Secrets. I will note that when I did the bulk of my testing, W/u was a lot more popular, and with it, Stifle and countermagic. It may now be reasonable to run a few copies of Trade Secrets if you can fit it in, because Stifle is not as prominent as it once was.

Time
When playing The Perfect Storm, it is important to know what aspects of your opponent's game to ignore and which parts to take significant interest in. The biggest factor that you must be concerned with is at which point your opponent can effectively kill you.

I define these situations in terms of turns. Every major deck in Standard right now has some way of beating this deck at some point in the game, as early as some turn in the game. It is based on this principle I have developed the following rules and terms for playing The Perfect Storm:

The critical turn is the earliest turn your opponent can kill you.

Sudden Death is every turn after the critical one; starting then, your opponent can beat you at any point, so it is crucial that you dramatically alter the game in your favor before then to avoid this from happening.

The Window are the turns before the critical one. The window is the time in which you can feel safe in doing nothing but setting up your deck. In the window, what your opponents do in the turns before the critical one is only relevant when what they are doing relates directly to your demise.

The most effective answer is to simply win the game before the critical turn. This deck has the capability to win faster than any deck in Standard, sans a perfect draw from Ravager Affinity, and so that can be a reliable answer.

However, there are times when that simply isn't going to happen. They may have disrupted your Lotus, or you simply might not have drawn the cards in time. It is in these situations that your secondary solution becomes stalling your opponent until you can finish them off.

The best way to do this is through the use of Temporal Fissure. Against at least half of the major decks in Standard right now, Temporal Fissure acts as a way of slowing your opponent down. If you can't win that turn, you can use the number on the count to take the same amount of Time Walks. By bouncing their mana/on board threats, they have to take the turns to redeploy their permanents, gaining you a significant advantage against your opponent because it delays when the critical turn is.

Now is when I am going to answer"One-Of Question Number Two." I am running only one main deck Temporal Fissure. More than anything, this is because of space. The deck, at least in game 1, should be primarily concerned with killing your opponent as fast as possible. I said that the Fissure helps in at least half of the matchups, not all of them, so it is not optimal in some matchups. However, I am hard pressed to think of any situation when having the Temporal Fissure instead of something like another Talisman would be a particularly bad thing.

This deck has immense card drawing and shuffling effects, so the chances of drawing a one-of are marginally higher than of normal decks in Standard. Also, the card can take care of any unforeseen main decked hate such as Stifle or Ivory Mask. It also allows for extra space in the sideboard, which is always a plus. In the end, the obscurity of running one copy of Temporal Fissure is out weighed by the many benefits by running it. It is not a direct exception to the rule, but I have never found a situation where having the Temporal Fissure was a completely dead card in hand. It is because of this that tweaking the deck to run a second copy by cutting an extra Talisman or Thirst of Knowledge is not out of the question. However, I have found this to be unnecessary. It's a judgment call, I suppose.

Well, I hoped the beginning of this article helped you understand how this deck works. At this point I am going to run through the major decks that I have tested against.

One last thing before I get into specifics. As I've said a great many times this deck is a combo deck; and a very streamlined and focused one at that. No one card is particularly in effective against anything, except maybe the extra Fissure. What that means is that you'll only have so much room to cut for cards to bring in for the board. You can hedge up to five cards at most, but that's starting to push it and it can only be done when you use the Fissure. Typically, I take the roundabout approach: I take out fourth copies of things. One Chrome Mox, Seething Song, Talisman, and Thirst are usually what I take out in order to make room for things. It's not really important which cards you take out first, but I'd take out Talisman before Mox, and Song before Thirst for Knowledge. I'll only discuss which cards to bring in rather than what to take out as well unless it's worth mentioning for that reason.

Clamp-Bidding
In Game 1 both players are playing Goldfish. It is all about who can go kill the other first... typically they can get you by turn 5, so you're window is before turn 5. There's really not much else to say game 1, except that you can use the tapping effect of Dream's Grip and Twiddle to potentially buy you one more turn.. but it won't come up that often because of Sharpshooter/Sledder/Prospector.

One thing you don't really have to worry about is Skullclamp. The concepts of resource advantage barely effect this deck. As such, the fact that they can draw two cards off of some sort of removal is irrelevant. One of you will be dead before attrition and hand size matter. What Skullclamp does early on is eat up small creatures to find better ones, but that still takes mana. So if they foolishly waste mana by cycling through creatures rather than playing them, it buys you a larger window.

After game 1, the match gets a lot better for you because of Pyroclasm. Pyroclasm can buy you anywhere from one to three or four turns, and that is huge. Skullclamp makes this a little unfortunate, but it's still only two cards gained in their hand, compared to three or four cards lost on the board.

They can bring in Shatter to hit your mana and Lotus. That's still okay, since Pyroclasm will buy you a heck of a lot more time than their Shatter will. Most of the time, they will bring in four to six removal spells against you. A lot of decks run anti-affinity cards like Electrostatic Bolt that do nothing against you. The biggest concern is the targeted removal on the Gilded Lotus, which is a sizeable concern. This can be played around to an extent: You can sit back and play your card drawing spells even after you obtain the Lotus, and then play the Lotus the turn you could go off. The counter to this is that you might be dead before then - but remember Pyroclasm buys you a lot of time. You could even wait for a second Lotus if one is in your opening hand.

One other option is to use Leonin Abunas to try and trump their removal, but that takes a lot of time. A much more feasible idea would possibly be Welding Jar, but even that only stops one spell. The key thing to remember is that whatever you do, you need to do something significant by the fifth turn or you're dead. Pyroclasm should be played late (like around turn 4) unless you go off with it on the Desire. The other thing to remember is that it is possible to go off with Seething Song in addition to the Lotus. They can't kill your Lotus until you get at least one use out of it, so using that option is probably the most likely. One last option is to use Platinum Angel in some capacity, and I've tried that to an extent. If you use Platinum Angel, it forces them to have two targeted removal spells or to waste a lot of creature power to throw at the Angel. That should assure you the time to find at least a Pyroclasm or second Lotus. The problem is that Platinum Angel is very unexciting in a lot of other matchups, and it can be difficult to get into play fast enough. In the end, Pyroclasm is still more hurtful to them than anything they can throw at you is, and the match up should fair somewhere around 60% in your favor post board.

W/u Control
I'm not going to lie, this is one of the deck's worst matchups. That doesn't make it un-winnable, especially depending on what they're running. Over a long haul, you probably aren't going to win more than maybe four out of every ten games or so.

The biggest question is if they are running a Kai build or one with Exalted Angels. Kai's build runs both Mindslaver and Stifle main deck, two cards that could give you problems. With Mindslaver they could go ahead and kill you with your own deck, and with Stifle they can just stop you from winning.

And then of course there is Akroma's Vengeance, which will wreck you. They can cast it turn 4, but probably won't, and they can cast it turn 5, which just might happen. So your window is around the fifth or sixth turn.

The question becomes whether or not they are going to draw any of those problems in the top fifteen cards of their deck. W/u runs deck manipulation in the form of land thinning as opposed to straight card draw, outside of a few Concentrates or Thirsts for Knowledge, and that's where your hopes lie; you just have to pray that they don't cast Akroma's Vengeance.

After boarding, you want to bring in all the hate you can. You will bring in Mana Leaks and Temporal Fissures, hopefully in large numbers. I'd say a minimum of two each, but I personally would bring in three Mana Leak. The fifth card to take out is going to have to be Machinate, as painful as that is. If you want to dedicate even more room to Persecute you can, but I don't know where the space for it is going to come from. Chances are they'll cast Vengeance before they have eight mana up to counter back themselves, so it should stunt a Vengeance, and it could counter an early Mana Leak to protect your Lotus.

Don't forget to tap their lands once they can cast Vengeance - you don't want to give them an opportunity to say"Oops, I win."

Ravager Affinity
This matchup is a toss up. It really comes down to how fast each player's draw is. You can bring in Pyroclasm, which helps a little, you can bring in Damping Matrix, which helps a little more, but by and large, your goal should be the fastest kill you can have. Temporal Fissure should obviously be handy, because it can bounce creatures with counters.

A big thing that I've found to be helpful is casting an early Tendrils, if possible. This acts as a buffer for usually about a turn, and you then need only worry about a much smaller Tendrils later. The problem with this is that you only have two Tendrils, and finding the final one in time is hard. For this reason, boarding an extra Tendrils of Agony along with the extra Fissures is probably your best bet. All told, this matchup is somewhere around 50/50 both before and after, with a slight edge in games 2 and 3.

R/W Slide
This matchup has always been very good, and the current environment makes it a lot better. Because of the speed of the format, Gilded Light and Akroma's Vengeance are run in much smaller quantities than in the past. In the case of the former, almost nobody runs them at all anymore. Also, the latest builds I've seen have taken out the tremendous quantities of colorless mana to fuel a quick Vengeance, so that may not even be as much of a factor.

With no pressure on you to speak of, what you must worry about is how much hate they bring in from the board in terms of artifact removal. And that can be tricky. You don't really have a window unless they are still packing four Akroma's Vengeance, which is a mistake for them in the long run anyway.

I'd board in Temporal Fissures in this matchup. You can take away their mana to Gilded Light or Vengeance you out.

Ponza
This matchup really depends on their builds. If they run a lot of land destruction effects, things can get ugly. If they try to go the Red Deck Wins route, with Blistering Firecats and what not, you could be in some trouble game 1, but games two and three become much easier. I'm really not sure how much this will be played, but I would not count on winning more than 50% of your matches because of the abysmal game 1 position.

There are some other decks out there, like Mono-White, and Cemetery. They really don't have much to go by, except Mono-White could get scary if they can ever fire off a Mindslaver. Cemetery really depends on the amount of discard they have. If they have a lot, the matchup isn't a cake walk. If they don't have a lot, then the matchup should be pretty simple. I could see running Ivory Mask or Stifles of your own to counter these two decks.

Tooth and Nail
To be perfectly honest, I have only played a few games of this match up. And it was mostly from the point of view of the Tooth player. What I can tell you is that you should win games 2 and 3 a lot more than game 1, which should be a pretty easy win anyway. The real question is how good of a draw they have, and for them, it has to be damn good. This is probably the biggest example of where splash damage comes in. The deck will run anywhere from five to eight main deck hate spells against artifacts, and if they get enough of those early on, they can potentially hold you off long enough to get their Angel and Abunas in play, which would essentially be the game unless you are running two Fissures and you draw both of them.

Game 2 gets a lot easier because you can bring in the Temporal Fissures and bounce all their mana back on turn 4, and then kill them around turn 6. They can't put any kind of offensive pressure against you, and the earliest they will get the Angel out would be turn 5. They can also beat you with Mindslaver, but that's assuming they don't have all their Cloudposts or Urzatron components bounced back to their hand before they get the mana. I'd say this is favorable matchup, lying in the 60 to 65% win percentage.

Conclusion
So what are my final thoughts on this deck? Well, if you've made it this far, I can only congratulate you, as it shows you are really interested in this type of deck. I must say this deck is more likely to run into more hate, but it no longer has to worry as much about W/u.

The Clamp-Bidding matchup was always a favorable one, so the real question becomes how much you can tweak the deck to do better against Ravager Affinity, or to make it less vulnerable to hate. I think Welding Jar would be a great addition to work with, but I have not tested it out fully. Only time will tell.

Until next time!

Jay McCarron