General Modifying/combining cards to try to enable non-poisonous storm

[Biologist]

These are for a cube with a ton of cards that are modified or combined versions of existing magic cards as opposed to "from scratch" customs or "as printed" cards. Also, note these are for a cube that is aiming for a relatively high (but flat) power level and likely don't make sense slotted into lower power lists.

Turnabout / Sleep
At the end of Turnabout, add "If it's your main phase, those permanents don't untap during their controllers next untap step" to make it act as both a storm card and a tempo card (similar to Sleep).

Lion's Eye Diamond / Lotus Bloom
Smash these together by making a Lotus Bloom with "Discard your hand: Remove all time counters from Lotus Bloom."

Lotus Petal / Mox Diamond
Change Mox Diamond's sacrifice clause to "at end of turn" so it can act as a Lotus Petal when not discarding a land.

Mox Opal / Chrome Mox
Both abilities combined on one card.

Jeskai Ascendancy
Change cost to to match colors that most support storm.

Sarkhan Unbroken / Dragonstorm
Lower ultimate to [-7], widen from library to "library, hand, and graveyard," and change from "put onto the battlefield" to "cast without paying mana cost."

Scapeshift
Change to "untapped" to enable use as ritual

Accumulated Knowledge
Draft one get three.

Rite of Flame
Draft one get three.

Memnite / Arcbound Worker
Costs , Modular 1, Draft one get three.

Metalworker

Birchlore Rangers
"Tap two untapped creatures to add 2 mana of any color."

Nettle Sentinel
2/3

Nivmagus Elemental
2/1

Gitaxian Probe
Instant

Noxious Revival
"top or bottom" (more playability as incidental graveyard hate, also miracle enabler)

Cloud of Faeries
flash, "tap or untap two target lands"

Etherium Sculptor / Master of Etherium
Noncreature artifacts you cast cost less. ___'s power and toughness are each equal to number of artifacts you control. Other artifact creatures you control get +1/+1

Etched Oracle
Costs , remove from activation cost

Mana Bloom (also enchantress support)
Remove "activate this ability only once each turn"

Beck // Call (also token / enchantress enabler)
Change to Instant costed and and creates 3 2/2 enchantment bird tokens.

Wargate / Chord of Calling
Instant, convoke, put any permanent with cmc from library onto the battlefield.

Shardless Agent
Give flash so it can hit counterspells in addition to being a 2 storm count for 1 spell card

Ardent Plea (also a devotion and control/loner enabler)
Change cost to

Channel the Suns
Change cost to and add draw a card to make it a mega manamorphose

Mindbreak Trap
Change cost to to make it more useful outside of just storm hate

Necropotence
Change cost to and remove graveyard exile clause to make it more playable in graveyard dependent strategies and easier to splash.

[Non-storm side note: Seismic Assault also changed to to complete the Spectral Procession (which is changed to an instant) cycle]

Storm Entity
Trample

Actual storm cards
Brain Freeze
Crow Storm
Empty the Warrens (Instant)
Grapeshot (Instant)

Plus other prowess / spells matter stuff and other things I'm not remembering/finding right now...

 

[VincePendrell]

On a first look, all I can say is "Sure, possibly all of these could work", but I think there are two things that need to be addressed if you want Storm to exist as an non-parasitic archetype:

1. You need high-powered cards that signal Storm as a possibility. They need to seems as powerful as most of your first and second picks. Someone will say "but my power band is very flat", and sure, it can be, but powerful cards that steer a draft into a strategy exist in all good formats. You should probably not have too many as to entice too many players into drafting Storm. I have played with the idea of literally writing on the sleeves saying "We support Blue Aggro!" or "This card is really good! You should play it!" to make sure that players get a message. A foil Crow Storm written "Storm is a thing in this Cube" should go a long way into signaling to your players that they can force the strategy.
2. You need to address the lack of cogs in the engine. I think that bundling picks for Rite of Flame is a good solution, and there's plenty of others that you posted already. I'll go in depth in with this soon enough.

As soon as there is an understanding that this needs to be addressed, we should dive into the methodology: You presented pieces that could fit very different types of storm decks, each pushing one spell at a time by a different corner (artifacts, rituals, pure card advantage, some sideboard, etc). Before any of this, I'd focus on defining what is the gameplan of the storm deck. Does it uses lands as a way to go off like High Tide? Do you play a ton of Rituals and abuse the graveyard, like the Gifts Storm in modern? Do you only need a couple of rituals to fire a Dragonstorm and get the finishers? You should probably lock yourself into one or two types of storm decks and go from there to choose the cards. I'd make a couple of decklists without thinking of what needs to be made more flexible or not, then go from there to think of what looks too parasitic to change.

As for what to change in the cards, I think that the idea of bundling picks together could work very well. I've played Velrun's cube a bunch of times already, and he has three options of bundling that you can probably steal? pirate? copy (he should pop by and talk about it at some point):

• The typical Pick-1-Get-X-Copies deal. In your case, I think Rite of Flame seems like a great bundled card if you are going the rites storm.
• The Pick-One-Get-Cards-X-and-Y package, like you get both Turnabout and Sleep in the same pick. This both gives you an out to increase redundancy for the cogs in your engine, and it can be used to seed a usable card in case the draft goes south for the storm picker.
• Then, there is the Pick-Between-Cards-X-and-Y (the versus cards), where you could have both Turnabout and Sleep in the same pick, put the drafter chooses which one of the two to keep after the draft is over, before building the deck. This gives players a safety margin if the draft goes wrong, and you can use this to make interesting decisions happen, but it is less about dealing with the lack of redundancy.

Even without changing cards to combine effects, I think you can easily support Storm just by applying some bundled picks to your list. The thing for storm is that the player will mostly be fighting for the cantrips and card advantage in the first few rounds, and most storm enablers are very likely going to wheel. If your cube is small enough that all cards are visible in a single draft, the only thing that you have to be in peace with is the fact that some cards will inevitably go late and possibly never picked unless someone is playing storm. (But if they are, they are almost guaranteed to get the cards). If you are not happy with cards going late, bundle them (or versus them) with other cards, and you are good to go! Just make sure that you are bundling the storm cards with other cards that would be picked at about the same time in a draft, otherwise they will start to be overpicked and storm will never happen.

As soon as you have a draft of your list and play a couple of times and see how storm is doing, then you can rebalance and see if it needs some secondary plan, more redundancy, or if players were simply not picking the right cards.

And for recommendations: If you play with Conspiracies, these might be very valuable for the Storm player, but highly usable by everyone else in the table:

They are very high powered (the first less than the others), but could go a long way with Storm.


On a completely different note of everything I said before: What is the problem of having a parasitic mechanic if we can support it? And if there are already tons of cards playing with the gamespace of casting multiple cards in a single turn, is it really parasitic? I think the biggest problem with something like Storm or Poison is not to treat them as parasitic mechanics, but not treat them as parasitic enough! Half-supporting a half-storm deck, or just having a medium amount of creatures with infect for a half-poison deck is more of a problem than having hyper-specialized picks for narrow these strategies, in my opinion.

 

[whydirt]

Is your goal to explicitly support the storm mechanic itself or just have a spell velocity combo-ish deck? Obviously the former is tougher, but for the latter, cards like these can provide a similar feeling payoff without needing as many parasitic support cards:

 

[Jason Waddell]

I think the biggest thing with Storm is that is had to be designed for Constructed and Limited and it's hard to tune the cards to be reasonable in one and balanced in the other.

For what it's worth I think Hearthstone has a pretty good take on the Storm mechanic. (Combo)

Personal opinion is that the printed Storm cards are not very good payoff for Storm in a limited environment.

 

[japahn]

Yeah, I always thought Hunting Pack was closer to what storm for limited should look like, just a little bit expensive. Something that's bad with storm count in [1, 2], good with [3, 4], great with 5+. That's why Crow Storm tempts me so much.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I'ld say Crow Storm is decent with storm count 1 (i.e. one other spell played). Two 1/2 flyers for is okay. At storm count 2 you get a better deal for your mana than Spectral Procession, even if you probably can't cast it on turn two (though Gitaxian Probe and Frantic Search... ) Anything above storm count 2 gives you insane value for the mana cost.

 

[japahn]

I was considering storm count including the storm spell itself, so we agree after fixing the off-by-one error.