The next deck in the series of Retrospectives is Dralnu. Dralnu is my longest standing deck. I have had him together in some form since Shards of Alara, back when Tolarian Academy was legal and there were no where near as many people playing the format. Over the years he has morphed from a control deck, to combo/control, to today when he is an unabashed storm deck.
The list: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/dralnu-13-01-14-1/
This deck is a very clear example of a four on the Bullshit Scale. It is very efficient at winning the game and really requires some specific interaction in order to contend with it at specific points during the game. That might not even be enough though since the deck uses colored cards for fuel and can have a number of counterspells ready.
Dralnu is built on a number of different engines, but the most important card in the deck is Dream Halls. Dream Halls lets you skip paying retail for spells by instead using other cards for fuel. This means that a card like Meditate that gives you a huge net positive of cards can keep chaining into other draw spells to pull you through the deck. So the deck has tremendous velocity once its firing on all cylinders. There are several engine cards in the deck though:
Dream Halls - Lets us skip mana for our spells
Mind Over Matter - Let's us turn useless cards into mana. At its strongest when Glided Lotus is in play
Future Sight - Increases our hand to a potentially infinite size and combos well with our library manipulation.
Null Profusion - Adds "Draw a card" to every card we play. The draw backs are harsh, but we rarely get stuck. Combos incredibly well with a storm oriented hand.
Tidespout Tyrant - Tyrant lets us loop our artifact mana and generate infinite storm. He also can deal with problems or bounce value cards of our own to use for Dream Halls or etc.
Can you spot what trips them all up? It also trips up our Mind's Desire. Lands! All of our engines hate lands. They clog the pipe and make it much more difficult to get spells. The one exception is Mind Over Matter, but honestly we can just as easily pitch spells as lands. This is why the land count seems so low. A measly 26 land, and I've been trying to convince myself to go down to 25 just so that I can say 25% land definitively. We can get away with such an outrageously low number of land because we don't need that much mana to operate, and we run tons of artifact mana since artifact mana increases storm count, interacts favorably with a number of cards in the deck, and gets us to the critical 5 mana mark faster. In addition, we play just so many cantrips. Cantrips are colored spells for Dream Halls, they increase the storm count, and they set up good combo hands. Early cantrips can dig into lands since we will likely only need 3-4 lands to cast our Dream Halls or Future Sight. After the printing of Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time the cantrips also fuel the delve cards.
Cantrips:
Brainstorm
Impulse
Opt
Remand - Its worth noting that we just as often remand our own spells for storm count. And bouncing our Mind's Desire with the copies still on the stack is super sweet.
Shadow of Doubt
Gitaxian Probe
Omen
Ponder
Preordain
Serum Visions
Sleight of Hand
Forbidden Alchemy
Baleful Strix
Most traditional lists wouldn't put Shadow of Doubt or Remand in the cantrip lists, but honestly that's their function. They might buy some time for us to develop but they get cast on turn two if you didn't have anything else to spend mana on. Baleful Strix is also a cantrip. Its a great card to ward off people from attacking you, draws you a card and is an artifact. That its blue and black means it pitches to cast anything in the deck. Being a permanent pumps up any potential Myojin plays that you have and pitches to Thirst for Knowledge.
Other card filtering effects include:
Unfulfilled Desires
Sensei's Divining Top
Frantic Search
Frantic Search has the ability to generate mana off of Ancient Tomb or if it gets cast via Dream Halls. It also can turn useless lands into cards. Unfulfilled Desires almost got listed under engine cards since its so good at sculpting hands, but it really doesn't do much mid-combo as mana is generally the bottleneck. It is dual colored, so we can pitch it to Dream Halls for anything. Top has many synergies in the deck. You can use it with Null Profusion to draw extra cards, the same with Future Sight and Mind Over Matter. With MOM you can tap Top to draw, then discard a card to untap the Top and active it again. Top combined with Etherium Sculptor lets you pull tons of bullshit.
The next category of note is the fast mana category. This includes both artifact mana and ritual effects:
Cabal Ritual
Dark Ritual
Chrome Mox
Gilded Lotus
Grim Monolith
Lotus Bloom
Lotus Petal
Mana Vault
Mistvein Borderpost
Mox Diamond
Sol Ring
Thran Dynamo
Most of these are self explanatory, but a couple should get some attention. Lotus Bloom is slow, but getting some free storm + mana is really strong. Unlike Ancestral Visions, we can't get around the [] mana cost through Dream Halls but it can still be cast off Mind's Desire and can be searched for by Tezzeret's -X ability. Mistvein Borderpost is not generally 'fast' mana, but the bounce clause can be used to extend our land drops and its colored for Dream Halls.
Of course all of this is moot without net positive draw spells:
Ad Nauseam - This is greedy and can't be used in every situation but its normally a draw 6 which is crazy
Careful Consideration
Dig Through Time
Fact or Fiction
Gush
Intellectual Offering - A lot of people don't like this card, including Sheldon, but I think it is unequivicably the strongest offering as it is possible to generate mana with the card with artifact mana. In this deck specifically its been nuts everytime I've cast it,
Meditate
Opportunity
Thirst for Knowledge
Ancestral Vision
Deep Analysis - Uniquely cool here since you can discard it to pay for something else with Dream Halls and then cast it at the discounted price to maintain velocity.
Enter the Infinite
Ideas Unbound - Not a true draw spell, this doesn't discard till end of turn, meaning its +2 until end of turn.
Night's Whisper
Read the Bones
Recurring Insight
Time Spiral
Treasure Cruise
Myojin of Seeing Winds
These are our setup spells. Usually you want to cast one of these prior to your combo turn to have enough resources, but they can also be used to dig during your storm turn. Speaking of the Storm turn:
Mind's Desire
Yawgmoth's Will
Tendrils of Agony
Mana Severance
These are cards you really only use on the turn you're going off. In addition to the regular level of complete insanity that Yawgmoth's Will is capable of, you can use Dream Halls to cast the cards in your graveyard. This means that you can fill your yard leading up to casting the Will by discarding to Dream Halls effect, then cast all of the cards you pitched under Will's effect.You can cast Mana Severance the turn before, but it really is at its best to cast right before you start chaining draw spells to ensure that you don't get clogged with land while going off. Off course going off is much easier when you have protection
Arcane Denial
Misdirection
Pact of Negation
Snap
Traumatic Vision
There should be a Force of Will in the deck, I just haven't gotten around to picking one up. Not a real one anyway, I've got a couple gold bordered ones kicking around. All of these spells are great for us. Misdirection can play spoiler to peoples Time Stretches and can even save us from uncounterable spells. Arcane Denial is a 1U counterspell that even replaces itself, and we care far less than normal about the cards our opponents draw since they likely only have a few cards that can interact with us at all. Snap can bounce our Myojin or Balefire Strix and can be used to generate mana while also getting rid of something like Teferi or Teeg on the combo turn without spending mana. Traumatic Vision looks weird, but under Dream Halls the text of a card is all that matters, and having the auxiliary mode of searching for a land makes it very like a cantrip. In fact, several of the cards in this pile and the cantrip pile could have been in either. I sorted them by how often they have been used in their various functions. The next set only has one function, but are proxies for the other functions.
Tutors:
Mystical Teaching
Mystical Tutor
Vampiric Tutor
Demonic Tutor
Diabolic Tutor
Increasing Ambition - Increasing Ambition doesn't care how its cast from the graveyard so playing this off of Yawgmoth's Will is just super awesome.
Lim-Dûl's Vault
That's a lot of tutors. Tutors increase the overall consistency of a deck and in 100 card formats are incredibly powerful deckbuilding tools to make a deck play the same from game to game. Lots of tutors push a deck more toward the 4-5 range. Reliability comes with playing your strongest game more often. The strongest game in a format with Yawgmoth's Will, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt and other crazy cards being legal is often completely bullshit. On the tutors themselves, Lim-Dul's Vault often elicits the response of not being worth it, but I can't tell you the number of times end of turn Vault has won me the game on the following turn. Diabolic Tutor is a stand in for Grim Tutor, but its honestly a pretty marginal upgrade in this deck with the way that Dream Halls obviates the extra mana. More tutors would probably improve the deck overall, but all the other options are either worse than what I'm already running or not enough better to warrant the real world cost.
The Rest:
Tezzeret the Seeker
Spelltwine
Etherium Sculptor
Notion Thief
Snapcaster Mage
These cards are all good but don't slot neatly into a category because of their flexible nature. Tezzeret is usually a mana play, letting you get 3-6 mana usually, but he can also function as a tutor for a variety of important artifact like Sculptor or Top. Spelltwine is able to generate a monstrous amount of storm on its own, representing three spell casts. Under Dream Halls you can even discard the card you want to play with Spelltwine. Sculptor is the most important of the bunch, letting you either get to combo mana earlier or enabling Top shenanigans in a number of situation. Notion Thief can steal an opposing draw spell and then let you untap with a surplus of cards in hand. He was originally Consecrated Sphinx since the Sphinx does the same thing but is more reliable at it. I found that the flash nature of Thief plays better with our tutors and his UB cost makes him more valuable if draw mid-combo. Snapcaster Mage is just a great versatile card for re-casting anything from a cantrip at the end of an opponents turn to getting a re-go on your Treasure Cruise.
Finally we come to the land. The land is almost entirely perfunctory mana. With so few land we don't really have much room for frills.
Land:
Ancient Tomb
Cephalid Coliseum
Crystal Vein
Drowned Catacomb
Flooded Strand
11x Island
Marsh Flats
Polluted Delta
Seat of the Synod
Sunken Ruins
Svyelunite Temple
Swamp
Underground River
Underground Sea
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Watery Grave
The 1 Swamp is mostly for Traumatic Visions, but I also found that Marsh Flats ran out of fetch able lands a little too quickly. Black mana is important, but most of the time we'd rather have blue mana since casting multiple cantrips needs lots of blue mana and very little to no black mana. We also have Rituals which give us a significant amount of black mana, but there are no blue rituals so we need more blue lands.
And that's the deck! Its a blast to play and string together a win. The whole thing became way easier to pilot after they printed Enter the Infinite as can be imagined. You don't actually cast Dralnu all that much honestly. Once you get to 5 mana you are usually all about casting Dream Halls, but at a non-red table he can be a value engine on his own. A strange thing happens when you play at tables that don't know what you are up to. People imagine that you have a million counterspells since that's what Dralnu naturally reinforces. Well that and extra turn effects, letting you surprise people with the combo nature of the deck and leading them to not play the strongest game that they could. This advantage disappears on repeat sessions but is valuable when playing at a SCG pod or something else of that nature.
Various things that I've considered for the deck include adding Force of Will, Mox Opal, High Tide, Thought Scour, and Mental Note, Grim Tutor, Lion's Eye Diamond. All of these cards are very potent. Mox Opal would require a bit more support to ensure that it would be active, but three artifacts isn't that much honestly. I have seriously considered cutting Mox Diamond because of the low land count. The biggest argument against cutting it is that its ok pre-combo and essentially Lotus Petal during the combo. I envision a similar situation for Mox Opal. Its worth trying. Force of Will deserves a slot since its the primer free counterspell and we have plenty of blue cards. Grim Tutor is just another tutor and would be great but its exorbitant price has kept me from including it willy nilly. Lion's Eye Diamond is conditional, and we don't want Infernal Tutor due to it only really working with Lion's Eye Diamond. That said, Yawgmoth's Will is a card and it dovetails with LED extremely well. High Tide is interesting. We would probably need more reset card to make it work regularly. I could see Cloud of Faeries as an option since it has fucking Cycling on top of everything else, but I would have to do a lot of digging in order to find other options that I would be ok with. Mental Note and Thought Scour have worked out in other decks and we can always use more cantrips. The self mill helps us get rid of a bad Top look or Brainstorm, and putting cards in the graveyard can be useful for Treasure Cruise or Yawgmoth's Will. One card I didn't list was Time Twister. Not only is it almost a thousand dollars, but Draw 7s are actually not that good in the deck since Dream Halls is symmetrical.
Hope you guys liked the rundown and I'll be back in a day or so with another of my favorite decks.
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