Against the Odds: Insidious Otter Storm (Bloomburrow Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! Bloomburrow is here, and we have a spicy one today: Insidious Otter Storm! The plan today is simple: make the most Otters in the history of Magic with the help of our new Bloomburrow mythic Stormsplitter. However, there is a challenge: to make copies of Stormsplitter, we need to cast instants and sorceries, and instants and sorceries cost mana. This is where Insidious Roots comes in. The enchantment lets us tap our tokens—for example, our copies of Stormsplitter—for mana. If we can get both cards on the battlefield, we can sling a bunch of card-draw spells like Pitiless Carnage, Highway Robbery, Questing Druid, and friends to make an increasing number of Stormsplitters. With each spell making tokens, we can tap them to make more mana to cast the next spell (and make even more Stormsplitters). Eventually, we'll find Pitiless Carnage to draw the rest of our deck, which will let us make functionally infinite Stormsplitters (which on Arena is, sadly, just 250 thanks to the token limit) to win the game with one massive hasty attack! How many Otters can we make in Bloomburrow Standard? How good is Stormsplitter? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Insidious Otter Storm
Wrap-Up
As I mentioned in the intro, the two key cards in our deck are Stormsplitter (our finisher) and Insidious Roots (our support card). I won't rehash the entire combo, but basically, if we can get both on the battlefield, we can cast a spell to make a copy of Stormsplitter and then tap the new token Stormsplitter for mana with Insidious Roots to cast another spell, and we'll make two Stormsplitters this time. We can tap those for mana, cast another spell, and make four Stormsplitters, then eight, then 16, and so forth until eventually we have more Stormsplitters than there are Otters in the sea.
Outside of our two combo pieces, our two next most important cards are our plot card-draw spells in Pitiless Carnage and Highway Robbery. While part of the power of these cards is that they are card-drawing sorceries that trigger Stormsplitter, the bigger deal is that they have plot so we can exile them before we are ready to combo and then cast them for free the turn we play Stormsplitter. To combo, we need at least one open mana after playing Stormsplitter to cast our first spell. Plot cards help us get around this by giving us spells to cast for free, which makes token copies of Stormsplitter to make mana and storm through our deck.
Pitiless Carnage specifically is super powerful in our deck. Often, it's the first spell we cast after we play Stormsplitter, and we sacrifice all of our lands to draw cards, trusting that we are going to win the game this turn anyway. But it's also great mid-combo since we can sacrifice a bunch of tapped Stormsplitters to draw literally the rest of our deck and make sure we have enough fuel to make enough Stormsplitters to close out the game.
The rest of our card draw is interesting. We have Cache Grab and Urborg Repossession, which can help us find our combo pieces from the graveyard, and adventure creatures in Mosswood Dreadknight and Questing Druid, which are card-draw spells when we need to trigger Stormsplitter but also happen to be creatures so we can dig for them with Cache Grab and return them from our graveyard to our hand with Urborg Repossession.
As far as our record, overall, we won slightly less than half of the time, although this was during early-access day, so the record isn't especially important. While I don't think the deck is super competitive (it especially struggles against dedicated aggro decks, which can often run us over before we get the pieces together to combo off), it was good enough to pick up quite a few wins, and the wins were spectacular! Once we got the combo set up, it rarely fizzled—just once out of all of our combo attempts—and the end result was exactly what we were looking for: a hilariously huge board of Stormsplitters! If you like the idea of making the most Otters ever, give the deck a shot. It's not tier or anything like that, but it does make a ton of Otters and does it in style!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
