Historic Enchantress Twiddle Storm: Fun & Jank Episode 4

Welcome back to Fun & Jank Episode 4!

Now I’ve seen what you’ve been cooking up lately on Arena. Those dull, tasteless, and boring brews. Barely seasoned. 

Luckily your good ol’ pal Plum (that’s me) brought you some spice to liven things up. This week we’re taking a look at another one of my brews for Historic Bo1.

Enchantress Twiddle Storm.

The Inspiration

If you play Modern I’m sure you’ve heard of Twiddle Storm. If you happen to live with Patrick Star and you’re not familiar with the deck, let’s take a look at an example deck list together.

The game plan is actually pretty simple. We want to chain together multiple untap effects, such as Twiddle, with Lotus Field to generate a net positive amount of mana. From there we use that mana to dig through our deck and increase our storm count. Underworld Breach makes it easy to keep the chain going until you find Wish. Then you can grab Grapeshot or Thassa's Oracle from your sideboard to win.

The Adaptation

Now I really enjoyed playing Twiddle Storm in Modern and that made me want to see if it was possible to port the deck to Arena. When trying to translate the idea of a deck from one format to another I like to first breakdown the list into it’s key components. Then I look for suitable replacements that allow the deck to function in a similar way.

In the case of Twiddle Storm those components are the following:

1. Mana Generator = Lotus Field
2. Untap Effects = Twiddle, Dream's Grip, etc.
3. Card Draw = Preordain, The One Ring, etc.
4. Win Condition = Grapeshot, Thassa's Oracle

Now, although we have Lotus Field on Arena, what we don’t have is all those fancy-schmancy “Twiddle-adjacent” cards like Hidden Strings and Dream’s Grip.

However there’s 2 cards that can take their place:

Both of these allow us to untap lands (which is not a common effect printed on spells these days), but having only 8 playable cards means that we need to generate even more mana than just Lotus Field would allow. I wanted every untap spell to be worth “more” in a sense.

That’s when I remembered Runaway Growth, an alchemy card I’ve been trying to find a home for since it came out.

This bad boy not only gives a land the ability to produce extra mana, but it makes even more mana every time we tap it. Four mana is a steep cost though, so we needed early game ramp to get us there a bit faster. Mana dorks are an obvious choice but as I browsed my collection I happened across Utopia Sprawl and Wolfwillow Haven. And you know what these two cards have in common with Runaway Growth? 

Bingo. 

They’re all enchantments.

And you know what else cares about enchantments and makes a ton of mana (besides your mom)? 

Sanctum Weaver

This is when I really started cooking with gas.

An enchantress shell would give us access to ramp with Sprawl and Haven, and card draw via Sythis, Harvest’s Hand and Enchantress’s Presence. We even have Rite of Harmony as redundancy.

At this point I had 3 of the 4 components I mentioned at the start.
Let’s revisit the list: 

1. Mana generators = Runaway Growth, Sanctum Weaver, Utopia Sprawl, and Wolfwillow Haven
2. Untap Effects = Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner and Vizier of Tumbling Sands
3. Card Draw = Sythis, Harvest's Hand and Enchantress's Presence

All I needed was a win condition.

Originally this deck stayed true to the storm game plan. I played Aeve, Progenitor Oozeand tried to stick to Selesnya colors. But storming off and making all these tokens just to deck yourself with Kiora’s draw ability or have a control player cast a board wipe the following turn didn’t feel great. 

So we took a page out of the original Twiddle Storm’s book and built a wish-board (accessed via Fae of Wishes) with different win conditions to match whatever board state we might find ourselves in. 

Going to draw your whole deck?
Win with Jace, Wielder of Mysteries

Opponent has counter spells?
Win with Banefire or Tendrils of Agony

Opponent has hexproof (Leyline of Sanctity) or can’t lose because of something like the Solemnity lock?
Win with Approach of the Second Sun

The cool part about this list is that although our lands only produce green and white mana, we can support win conditions from all 5 colors with Utopia Sprawl, Sanctum Weaver, and Unbridled Growth (which can also be sacrificed to draw a card when we’re combing off).

The Deck

And just like that the deck was ready to be served up to our unwilling customers on the Bo1 ranked ladder.  We had our core components, and we had our win conditions. Add a dash of Spirited Companion and a hint of Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx then stick a fork in me, ‘cause I’m done.

Here’s the finished product along with a short video showing off the combo. (skip to 2:35 to see it go off)

Closing Thoughts

Overall this deck is quite enjoyable to jam on the Bo1 ladder. Just like any other storm deck, thinking ahead and being able to find the path to victory makes piloting this list feel like you’re solving a puzzle each and every game.

Beyond the gameplay however, I’d like to continue not only focusing on the decks themselves, but also the process of how they came to be. In my last article I mentioned that I often find inspiration for my brews by looking to other formats. Twiddle Storm is a well known and successful Modern deck, but we don’t have all the pieces on Arena. So I wanted to talk about my thought process during the early stages of development, and how we achieved a deck with the same game plan as the original, yet the two look nothing alike. Hopefully my explanations for why I chose the cards I did is something you guys find interesting, because I certainly have a blast talking about the giant brainstorming (haha get it? Brainstorm??? I’ll be here all week) sessions I have when I start working on a deck idea.

As always feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below! Make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!

Happy Brewing!