Exploring Prismari Storm: A Unique Standard Deck

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week we're storming off, but in Standard! While Thousand-Year Storm has existed in Standard for a while now thanks to rotation, Secrets of Strixhaven gave us a ton of cards that are absolutely perfect for a storm deck, including Prismari, the Inspiration itself as additional copies of Thousand-Year Storm and Resonating Lute to double up our mana! Is it enough to make Storm work in Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!

The goal of our deck today is actually pretty simple: get a Thousand-Year Storm or Prismari, the Inspiration on the battlefield - we don't really care which - so all of our instants and sorceries have storm. Sling a bunch of spells, which will be copied a ton of times thanks to how the storm mechanic works, and then eventually draw our deck, make a few hundred mana, and win the game!

The challenge of the deck, of course, is getting Thousand-Year Storm or Prismari, the Inspiration on the battlefield, which is tricky since they cost so much mana. Then we'll also need to either survive until the next turn so we'll have mana to start slinging spells or somehow have even more mana left over after playing a six or seven-drop to storm off and win immediately. Thankfully, Secrets of Strixhaven offered us the perfect card for getting our big storm finishers on the battlefield...

Resonating Lute is a silly card, doubling our mana for instants and sorceries for four mana, and occasionally drawing us extra cards as a bonus. Because our deck is overflowing with spells, doubling our mana, even just for instants and sorceries, is super powerful. But how does Resonating Lute help get an enchantment like Thousand-Year Storm or a creature like Prismari, the Inspiration on the battlefield?

The answer to this question is Rapturous Moment, which looks a bit expensive at first glance but is absurd in our deck for a couple of reasons. For six mana, the sorcery has us draw three cards and then discard two cards, but more importantly, it makes five mana, which means it technically only costs a single mana once we get six mana to spend on it. While Rapturous Moment is insane once we start copying it with our storm cards, giving us all the mana and cards we'll need to win the game, it's also one of our best ways to get a Thousand-Year Storm or Prismari, the Inspiration on the battlefield since it allows us to convert the fake "only for spells" mana from Resonating Lute into real mana. If we can play Resonating Lute on turn four, the next turn we'll have five lands, which means we can tap three of them to cast Rapturous Moment to make five mana, tap another land (or two), and play Thousand-Year Storm or Prismari on turn five, which should set us up to win the game the following turn.

While Rapturous Moment is one of the best cards in our deck, Secrets of Strixhaven also gave us another, even faster way to get Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield in Blazing Firesinger. The three-drop enters prepared, and its spell is literal Seething Song, a ritual so powerful it's banned in Modern. If we play Blazing Firesinger on turn three, we'll have just enough mana to Seething Song out a Thousand-Year Storm on turn four to set up for the turn five win! Later, once we start storming, Blazing Firesinger is even more absurd. Even though it technically costs six total mana to play it and then cast Seething Song, if we are copying the Seething Song three, four, five, or even more times, this still generates a ton of mana. Between Seething Song and Rapturous Moment, it's pretty easy for the deck to end up with hundreds of mana floating once we start comboing off!

Finally, when it comes to actually killing our opponent, our early game removal spells help us keep our opponent's board in check and deal with annoying threats like Badgermole Cub to double duty. Early game, we can use Burst Lightning, Prismari Charm, and Vibrant Outburst to disrupt our opponent, and then once we get one of our "everything has storm cards" on the battlefield, we can copy them a ton of times to burn our opponent out of the game during our big combo turn!

Our one mana cantrips Sleight of Hand and card-ref:Opt are similar. In the early game, they let us dig for our combo pieces, and then once we have a Thousand-Year Storm or Prismari, the Inspiration in play, they give us one mana spells to up our storm count. Later in our combo turn, we can copy them enough times to refill our hand for a single mana!

Sleight of Hand is especially powerful because one of the risks of our deck is that once we start storming off, we actually have to stop casting our card draw spells like Rapturous Moment or else they'll draw too many cards and make us die to milling out. Since Sleight of Hand doesn't actually draw a card, we can use it late in our combo turn to draw all the cards left in our deck without worrying about dying to drawing a card on an empty library!

The last card in the deck is just a one-of, but it's also hilariously powerful with our combo: card-ref:Flashback. While we can just use card-ref:Flashback for value by recasting a cantrip or removal spell early in the game, its true power is that once we start comboing, it sort of morphs into a one mana Past in Flames since we can copy card-ref:Flashback a bunch of times and recast all the instants and sorceries in our graveyard! card-ref:Flashback also helps make sure that we always have a finisher when it comes time to close out the game. Even if we spend all of our burn spells early in the game to deal with our opponent's creatures, eventually we'll find the card-ref:Flashback to recast one of them from the graveyard for the win!

Wrap Up

Record-wise, I played 19 matches with the deck and won eight, good for a 42% win percentage, which isn't enough to rank up or anything like that, but is a pretty solid win rate for a Standard storm deck! While the deck does sometimes get run over by aggro and dies before we can get a payoff online, the good games with the deck are pretty wild, and the new fast mana support cards make it easier than ever to get a Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield. While I don't expect Standard storm to be a truly competitive option in Secrets of Strixhaven Standard, as someone who has been building decks around Thousand-Year Storm since Guilds of Ravnica Standard when the card was first printed nearly a decade ago, I am convinced that this is the best version of Thousand-Year Storm yet! If you like slinging spells and massive combo turns, give the deck a shot! It's super fun to play, has hilariously big turns, and wins more than it should!