The Great Work: Forging Red Storm in cEDH
Urabrask // The Great Work by Campbell White
To those that know me, it is common knowledge that I love the Storm mechanic with all my heart. This love extends to cEDH and is part of what enamors me with the format. Storm strategies have been my preferred decks in cEDH for my entire time playing the format, and lately my weapon of choice on a multitude of Playing With Power videos has been Birgi, God of Storytelling. My take on the deck varies fairly dramatically from other takes I have seen discussed, and there is a surprising amount of range to work with when building Birgi given the single color identity, and quite a few more tools were added to the mix with the release of March of the Machine.
Among the list of cards I was excited to work with are Into the Fire, Path of the Pyromancer, and Urabrask, the latter of which I immediately tweeted about the second I saw the preview and got to work updating Birgi, God of Storytelling. All these options have clear upsides that have been discussed via numerous set reviews on Commander's Herald, and trimming down on the weakest cards in the deck landed my updated Birgi list looks something like this:
Urabrask in the Command Zone
But the most exciting card of the new options, Urabrask, is special because he has potential in the command zone. However, given his similar abilities to Birgi but more expensive casting cost and more restrictive conditions for granting mana, it's important to nail down what you are doing differently to leverage the unique aspects of Urabrask so that he does not play out as a strictly weaker Birgi. What appeals to me as the most dramatic upside that Urabrask has over Birigi is that he sets you up excellently to try again after a failed Storm turn via The Great Work. With the lack of stack-based interaction that mono-red has access to, it's relatively risky to combo off in the face of potential counter magic, outside of inherent risks of fizzling if your Wheel of Fortune hand is underwhelming, you discard the card you Gamble for, etc.
The Great Work allows you to use your floating mana from the last spell you cast to transform Urabrask, immediately stymie some of the aggression that could pressure you on the first chapter, rebuild mana on the second chapter, and go for a Storm turn again with the help of your opponents' graveyards, your graveyard, and Urabrask ready to go. Given the effectiveness of Mnemonic Betrayal, I am optimistic that resolving the third chapter of The Great Work will have a high conversion rate to victory. The more restrictive condition for getting the mana rebate from Urabrask cannot be ignored, however, and will have a dramatic impact on how our Storm deck will differ during construction.
The Cycling Problem
What I consider to be the most striking difference between how I approach building Birgi in cEDH vs. other players is I eschew most of the "free cycling" cantrips. Crash Through, Warlord's Fury, Rile, etc., are all cards I see other deckbuilders of Birgi to be heavy on. However, I find these cards often have the "Cycling Problem" where your hand ends up full of too many lands because you have few ways to get rid of them because your cantrips offer no selection. Instead I reach for cards like Pirate's Pillage, Unexpected Windfall, and Big Score as my cantrips because, while they're more punishing to get countered, they do a good job of sculpting my hand both on a big Storm turn and during setup turns because you can bank the Treasure mana to start with more to work with on the actual Storm turns. My approach to Birgi leans harder into her ability to make a lot of mana and invest in spells that can end your Storm turn immediately if countered, which makes the deck both more powerful and a bit more fragile.
What Urabrask brings to the deckbuilding table in the command zone is the option to use The Great Work as your "setup spell" or even as your recovery strategy in a Storm turn gone wrong. All the chapters present on The Great Work help you setup for a large combo turn, and having access to that as a plan every game is a huge boon to the resiliency of a counterspell-less combo deck. This resiliency also comes into play with the structure of Urabrask's abilities. Requiring instants and sorceries as well as incentivizing utilization of The Great Work means that the "Cycling Problem" is quite mitigated, and loading up on every one-mana cantrip is far more appealing than it is in Birgi.
Finishing the Great Work Ahead of Schedule
An obvious flaw with relying on using the last chapter of The Great Work with any amount of frequency is that it's entirely "face-up". It puts pressure on the table to either destroy the Saga, load up heavily on interaction, or end the game prior to the last chapter's ability resolving. This is where Urabrask gets to use one of my favorite sets of tools to combat this problem: the red Time Walks! Final Fortune, Last Chance, and Warrior's Oath are cards that have gained a lot of stock in my eyes over the last year or so, with their most effective use being paired with Ad Nauseam or Necropotence to serve as a way to end the game much more efficiently.
Final Fortune is widely popular already in other cEDH decks as a way to steal the turn after a large interaction fight and win the game. In Birgi, however, these extra turn effects fall a bit flat. Birgi is excellent at making a lot of mana in a single turn and resolving a single spell or set of spells to win the game. When stopped, Birgi often takes multiple turns of setup to get back into the game so a single extra turn to work with is often incohesive with Birgi's primary gameplan. The opposite is the case with Urabrask! The ability to take an extra turn after the second chapter of Urabrask resolves gives you a way to accelerate into the game-winning third before the rest of the table is prepared to deal with it. This allows wins via The Great Work to be a little less face-up as to when they will actually happen making the plan more effective.
Rounding It Out
The rest of the deck is going to fall in line with a host of the best red cards available to the color. The similarities in function of both Birgi and Urbrask as well as the limited card options due to color identity leaves much of the rest of Urabrask looking identical to Birgi. Many of the powerful cards in Birgi are just as powerful in Urabrask even if they will play slightly differently due to the incentive differences outlined above. The initial build of Urabrask I plan to begin iterating on looks like this:
Frankly, I'm actually surprised at how different the decks are given how similar in function they are. Ultimately I expect gameplay to also be quite different due to how I plan to approach games with Urabrask in comparison to how I approach games I play with Birgi: I expect Urabrask to have a unique identity that may ultimately end up being even better than Birgi!
If you are a Storm fan like me, March of the Machine was an early Christmas gift with new toys for established decks as well as delivering an entirely new deck to tune. Mono-red shows no sign of losing stock in cEDH, my summer forecast is looking 100% Stormy, and I couldn't be happier.
