Storm the Festival is a strange card.

The potential to get two cards worth 10 mana for only one card and six mana is incredible, but it has a much steeper deck-building requirement than a card like Collected Company while also having a backbreaking fail rate. Five cards is less than six, and it's much harder to pack your deck full of four and five mana permanents. Whiffing on a six mana sorcery is also pretty backbreaking, so much so that I called Storm the Festival my "trap card" of Green in my set review.

So why am I here now playing a deck-build around it? Well, I think I've solved the riddle with a little mechanic called landfall.

Time Stamps:

04:50 - Match 1

15:18 - Match 2

25:07 - Match 3

44:08 - Match 4

Wrenn's Landfall Festival | MID Standard | Jim Davis

• Creatures (10)
• 2 Consuming Blob
• 4 Briarbridge Tracker
• 4 Lotus Cobra

• Planeswalkers (5)
• 1 Kaya the Inexorable
• 4 Wrenn and Seven

• Instants (2)
• 2 Infernal Grasp

• Sorceries (7)
• 3 Storm the Festival
• 4 Emergent Sequence

• Enchantments (9)
• 2 Borrowed Time
• 3 Felidar Retreat
• 4 Binding the Old Gods

• Artifacts (2)
• 2 Esika's Chariot

• Lands (25)
• 1 Plains
• 2 Swamp
• 4 Forest
• 1 Arctic Treeline
• 1 Branchloft Pathway // Boulderloft Pathway
• 1 Lair of the Hydra
• 1 Woodland Chasm
• 3 Brightclimb Pathway // Grimclimb Pathway
• 3 Evolving Wilds
• 4 Darkbore Pathway // Slitherbore Pathway
• 4 Overgrown Farmland

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Bloodchief's Thirst
• 3 Skyclave Shade
• 2 Graveyard Trespasser
• 3 Duress
• 1 Reidane, God of the Worthy // Valkmira, Protector's Shield
• 2 Culling Ritual
• 2 Liesa, Forgotten Archangel

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The goal with a card like Storm the Festival is to make sure that the floor is as high as can possibly be. You need to make sure your misses are palatable enough to handle the swings of playing such a high variance card.

The best way I can see to do this is lean into landfall as a mechanic. Hitting a four mana spell and a land is going to be pretty bad normally, but if that four mana spell is a Felidar Retreat and the land is an Evolving Wilds, that's actually pretty good - especially if you have a Lotus Cobra in play. This landfall theme gets fleshed out with cards like Emergent Sequence and Binding the Old Gods, as well as one of the best new cards in Innistrad: Midnight Hunt in Wrenn and Seven.

There's no denying the power of Wrenn and Seven and Esika's Chariot, especially in concert, so what we end up with here is a midrange Abzan deck with tons of great removal and threats, as well as this awesome landfall top end. Cards like Briarbridge Tracker and Borrowed Time do a great job at bridging the gap as well.

These games were a bit awkward, but I think there's definitely potential in this archetype!