If you are supporting storm, you'll get no arguments from me on running Brain Freeze. I'm not convinced it's that easy to get enough mana quickly enough, but that's very dependent on speed of the cube and prevalence of aggro among other factors. Regardless, I'm not sure comparing freeze to scour or dream twist is fair since the former replaces itself and the latter has flashback so sort of replaces itself, and they both cost half as much. And neither is cubeable outside a heavy mill theme. This isn't quite going
Tallowisp deep, but it's closer than you think it is.
I'd also caution reading too much into the match you posted with the UB storm/reanimator deck. All the times he used brain freeze on himself was both in desperation and also because his two reanimator targets were combo enablers (one drew him 7 or 14 cards and is arguably the most powerful reanimation target in the game and the other potentially made infinite mana for him). And he missed more than once on that play because brain freeze is an extremely janky reanimator enabling card.
And again, that deck worked because he was also running and liberally using ancestral recall (broken), time spiral (broken), time twister (broken), channel (broken). His deck was not good because he was brain freezing himself to enable his 2 random reanimation cards he kept drawing hoping to lucksack into one of his two creatures. It was also helping that one deck he played featured deathrite shaman along side oath of druids with the tech being burst lightning his own deathrite to trigger oath.
Its really far from tallowisp territory. Tallowisp is pretty close to non-functional outside of making some modifications to it, while brainfreeze sees play in a lot of existing cubes already.
The topic kind of splits here, so let me address each prong individually.
1) Comparison of thought scour and dream twist vs. brain freeze. Presumably, if we are even in the market for this, we have a heavy focus on the graveyard and self-mill. Any conversation as to whether brain freeze fills a "janky" role is an immediate non-issue, as this entire class of cube has a need for these types of interactions. Than the question becomes whether we want to layer storm on, or if we want to still include brain freeze on as a super self-mill tool. I'll acknowledge there is an an elegance sub-issue in the latter case, but that varies playgroup to playgroup. Either way, this is a unique and interesting way to approach self-mill from a designers standpoint, that opens up several doors, and shouldn't be discounted.
The potential ceiling on this card, in its role, is way higher than either scour or twist, and in formats that
really want to fill the yard, this shouldn't be discounted.
2) The general fesiability of storm in a format. This is going to be a format specific issue, and I feel that you're being unfairly dismissive. Of course some formats will have issues with aggro decks being too fast or what not--its up to the designer to approach those issues and balance them if appropriate, just as you would do with every other single archetype you would support.
You're also reading
way too much into the individual matches. You don't need broken cards in a power max environment to enable storm. Yes, the specific cube he was playing was structured so that storm would be a product of broken engines, but that shouldn't be taken as indicative that storm needs broken support cards to exist. Its
really easy to design storm for low power formats, for example. Ultimately you just have to provide the mana generation tools, coupled with library searching or sifting tools, and of course the combo kill conditions.
Any true combo deck functions as such, since they are critical mass decks.
But lets step back a bit and look at this as a macro problem: how to incorporate storm in the least poisonous manner possible. Staying in our UB frame for the moment, LSV's observation that its possible to design storm so that it overlaps eloquently with reanimator is
really helpful if you want to support storm in a format.
This is again, a design choice that you have control over. For example, when selecting reanimator monsters, you
could select cards that mutually support both a reanimation and storm deck, and thats a design principle that you saw in action here. In fact, taking an even more macro point of view, thats probably a strong rule of thumb when looking at all color combinations you would run storm in (and an argument you already made re: UR): that the storm pieces should be naturally supporting something the color combination is
already interested in doing. In fact, you could step even further back, and note that this is probably the way to incorporate sub themes into a main theme. That vintage cube draft is really helpful in displaying how and why you might do this.
So to inject brain freeze into the discussion again, and following the flow of this thread where we were originally talking about about self-mill pieces (and relating back to prong 1), if my UB combination is already interested in self milling, and I'm in the market for self-mill tools, than this is suddenly a great opportunity for me to support storm if I wish, in a fairly compact, as
non-poisonous a manner as possible. Thats pretty neat.
In addition, if in my format, I have designed the UB decks so that as many of the pieces as possible work interchangeably between a storm or reaniamator approach, than the cost of picking a
mid-pack brainfreeze becomes much lower if I was wavering between storm and reanimator. This is really nice to have, because one of the classic problems with storm is that it pivots
horribly in draft. By making the pieces interchangeable with a sort of "bread and potatoes" UB theme, than going early into storm suddenly is less likely to result in a trainwreak, because you always have the reanimator safety value, which is
exactly what you saw happen in the draft video.
To be really direct, one of storm's big problems is that its traditionally incorporated into a cube as a fully functional deck on its own, which is probably a gigantic mistake for all of the millions of reasons we have already done to death. However, its much better off as a sub-theme that can pivot back and forth between a main theme. Storm goes from this notoriously hard deck to draft and design to something reasonable when it has something it can pivot into and out of, and
Brain freeze plays a role in this when you can support both aspects of its functionality.
