In the early days of Modern, Storm was a deck everyone needed to be afraid of. With Pyromancer Ascension backed by the likes of Ponder, Preordain, and Rite of Flame, the deck could combo off early with startling consistency, often through disruption. Even with the banning of those cards, the combination of Seething Song and Past in Flames also proved too powerful for Modern. Since then, Storm has become less popular, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t U/R spell decks to play.

Pyromancer Ascension ? Modern | Corrado, 5-0 Modern League

• Spells (42)
• 2 Cryptic Command
• 3 Remand
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Manamorphose
• 4 Noxious Revival
• 4 Thought Scour
• 4 Visions of Beyond
• 1 Faithless Looting
• 4 Gitaxian Probe
• 4 Serum Visions
• 4 Sleight of Hand
• 4 Pyromancer Ascension

• Lands (18)
• 1 Mountain
• 3 Island
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Minamo, School at Water's Edge
• 1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
• 1 Sulfur Falls
• 2 Polluted Delta
• 3 Steam Vents
• 4 Scalding Tarn

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Lightning Helix
• 2 Pyroclasm
• 3 Swan Song
• 2 Timely Reinforcements
• 2 Wear // Tear
• 4 Young Pyromancer

Buy This Deck

Though it has many cards in common, don’t mistake this for a Storm deck. There are no Grapeshots, no Empty the Warrens, and no Goblin Electromancers to be seen. Instead, this deck is all in on getting one or more active Pyromancer Ascensions. To that end, the deck plays the full suite of Thought Scour, Gitaxian Probe, and other cheap cantrips which help to ensure that you both find an Ascension and have enough duplicate spells to get it active.

Additionally, the deck has access to Noxious Revival, which goes even further to ensure you can get the requisite quest counters on your Pyromancer Ascension. Additionally, Noxious Revival is a critical piece of the deck’s combo engine. Once you have an active Ascendancy, there are three crucial cards in your deck: Manamorphose, Noxious Revival, and Thought Scour. Manamorphose is relatively straightforward. With an active ascendancy, it nets both mana and cards, and is the primary combo engine of the deck. Noxious Revival lets you re-buy additional copies of Manamorphose to keep the engines revving. Thought Scour plays dual role of stocking your graveyard for Pyromancer Ascension and also being the primary win condition.

The way this deck actually closes games is by using all of the extra mana and cards off of Pyromancer Ascension to draw your deck. With enough Ascensions, you can just use Manamorphose and Remand to accomplish this by allowing all the copies of Manamorphose to resolve and remanding the original so you can recast it. Once you’ve drawn your deck, you can use Noxious Revival and Manamorphose to cast whatever spell is appropriate infinitely many times. Sure, you have to worry about decking, but all the important cards in this deck are instants, which means you can just cast a Noxious Revival in response to anything that would cause you to lose.

Using this loop, you can bounce all your opponent’s permanents with Cryptic Command and then mill them out with Thought Scour before using Noxious Revival to make sure you don’t deck yourself and passing the turn. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine of a win condition if I’ve ever seen one, but you get the advantage that none of your combo pieces are dead draws mid-combo, which can’t be overstated. If Modern continues to shift toward midrange decks, this style of slow, resilient combo deck may be exactly what the format needs.