Lucky Clover and all of the awesome adventure creatures from Throne of Eldraine may have created an entirely new way to play a card that people tried very hard to break it was first released – Thousand Year Storm! This deck consists of almost all entirely new cards, so let’s just dump a list first and then discuss the individual card choices.
Lucky Clover is really the card this deck is built around. You only need to cast a single adventure spell after resolving this to break even, and after that it basically serves as an extremely powerful 2-mana planeswalker. Let’s investigate the adventure creatures that we have access to in the Temur colors.
Fae of Wishes is the next most vital card in the deck. Mastermind’s Acquisition is a card that had some time in the spotlight in the previous Standard format (especially for best of 1 on Arena), and this is even better. The weakness of a 4-mana wish/tutor effect is that it is only good against slow decks or in the late game. Fae of Wishes gets around this drawback by being a valuable card even against aggro. While a 2-mana 1/4 flying creature is not a card we’d be jumping to include in a constructed deck, against many aggro decks it’s actually an amazing blocker. White weenie decks are typically running a bunch of 2/1 creatures and the best red deck is running a bunch of 1 mana 1/1 creatures. Since this card is passable even in the matchups where its effect is not at its best, we get to play four copies and have huge upside when we do play against the control-style decks that it’s great against. We’ve included a list of 15 singleton cards that can be played in the sideboard to support this card, which we’ll cover later.
Bonecrusher Giant and Beanstalk Giant are the good payoffs for playing normal Magic in the mid-game, whether you’ve drawn a Lucky Clover or not. Bonecrusher Giant is seeing play in most decks that can make red mana, and for good reason. Temur combo style decks like this can have a tendency to spin their wheels for too long, so it’s nice to be able to cast a cheap removal spell and then have a solid body to play all in one card. Beanstalk Giant is a perfectly serviceable ramp spell, especially considering that the land comes into play untapped. These cards become amazing if you are lucky enough to stick a Clover – imagine the curve of Lucky Clover on turn 2 and Beanstalk Giant on turn 3! You can cast your high end as soon as turn 4, or just cast the random 7/7 Giant a turn later if you haven’t managed to draw anything else to do.
We’ve talked about the value portion of the deck, but now we get into the combo part. We already have access to a lot of ramp and cheap spells, which is all we really need for Thousand-Year Storm to be an immediate win if you ever untap with it. Rosethorn Acolyte furthers this plan, acting as either a free spell to get the storm copies started, or generating a ton of mana if you were able to cast other spells first. As an enabler before resolving a Thousand-Year Storm, Rosethorn Acolyte can also be useful as a mana fixer and a ritual if you’ve drawn Lucky Clover. The creature side of this card is not as impressive as some of the others, but it’s still a relevant body and a ramp spell if you don’t have anything better to do.
We’ve rounded out the deck with a few of the best cantrips in Standard. Growth Spiral is great in decks like this, getting our plan online much faster almost for free. It’s also incredibly fun with Thousand-Year Storm in play – you might be able to use it as a ritual if you can copy it several times and have lands to drop into play. Once Upon a Time doesn’t fetch our favorite Lucky Clover, but we do have a wide selection of vastly different effects on our creatures, and it can help smooth out our mana early. Opt is great at finding a good spell to cast on turn 2 as well as being a cheap cantrip to start our storm turns rolling.
We’ve only included a few copies of Shock in this list, because we have access to the same effect in Bonecrusher Giant. It is still nice to have a little more action against the aggressive type of decks that this strategy is generally weak to, as we might be able to cast it immediately after a Growth Spiral or a Fertile Footsteps (the adventure half of Beanstalk Giant). These cheap burn spells also serve as a win condition when we are able to go off with Thousand-Year Storm.
The sideboard we’ve included is just a suggestion of decent options. The fourth copy of Thousand-Year Storm is relegated to the sideboard to effectively play 7 copies with Fae of Wishes in the maindeck, but after that we’ve included a mix of cheap answers to a wide range of scenarios, hate cards, and some over-the-top powerful cards for a stalled out game. There are plenty of options to consider depending on the metagame. It’s also possible that we don’t need to devote the full 15 slots to the Fae of Wishes package, but this deck doesn’t really need to sideboard a ton of cards in and out so you should be able to find cards to bring into the maindeck to replace the copies of Shock when playing against control, for example.
There are plenty of ways to go with a Lucky Clover strategy, both with Thousand-Year Storm and without. Edgewall Innkeeper seems extremely powerful in this shell if it survives, meaning we could use it as a sideboard card in a list like the one above or in a more creature-oriented strategy that includes cards like Lovestruck Beast. Lovestruck Beast plays more fair of a gameplan, but it still contributes to a critical mass of cheap instants and sorceries in the deck if we still want to try to storm off. We could just cut Thousand-Year Storm from the maindeck entirely and wish for it if our opponent has given us time to go for the combo finish.
Black provides an interesting suite of adventure creatures as well in the form of Order of Midnight, Foulmire Knight, and Murderous Rider. With the green fixing and Fabled Passage the mana might be good enough to support four colors, but more likely this type of deck should be built differently as a value-oriented deck. We’ll leave that for another day, but for now we’re excited to try the Temur version out on Arena, so check back soon for a video!
