I come from a cEDH background (I’m reformed I swear.). My first ever cEDH deck was helmed by Anje Falkenrath. I quickly got addicted to the feeling of shredding through my deck with a bunch of awful cards with the word ‘Madness’ on them to win with whatever awful combo I got to, usually Worldgorger Dragon. As I developed as a player, I realized that cEDH is not a competitive Magic format I enjoyed, and thus happened upon Value Vintage. I brewed a bit, and then one day Dan (known as DerKetzer in the discord) messaged me with a list.

The first draft of Fluctuator combo.

I was immediately enthralled. The deck spoke to my combo degenerate instincts like nothing else I had ever brewed for the format. It was clunky, sure. Too many taplands, the mana was super slow, and the colors were undecided. But we had a plan. It was just…missing something

And then Final Fantasy printed the card that broke the dam.

No, I’m not joking. This is the card that made Cyclestorm a real Value Vintage deck. Finally, the deck had eight Blasted Landscapes. And this one even color fixed!

And so, I was catapulted into a frenzy. From July to November of this year, I was consumed by this deck. I thought deeply about and brewed different builds, different color combinations and kill packages, assessing every single card with a cycling cost of 2 or less multiple times, whether it deserved a slot in the 75 or be consigned to the considering board. Dan and I put in the reps against some of the most powerful decks in the metagame. We were in the kitchen cooking, and it all culminated in SCGCon Baltimore. I 2-1d both side events, then at the 1K, I took the deck to a 4-2 finish, placing 14th out of 44. When this deck runs hot, it feels flat-out unstoppable. You feel like you’re cheating, and in a sense, you are.

With all that preamble out of the way, let’s talk about my pride and joy. The deck that brought back my love of looting through the entire deck in one go and finishing it off with the silly combo of draft chaff and unplayable garbage you won’t find anywhere else.

Welcome to Cyclestorm.

The Gameplans

The basis of the list is this bastard:

Did you know this card was banned out of its standard environment? The same environment with….checks notes…… Tolarian Academy, Memory Jar, Time Spiral, Earthcraft, Dream Halls, Lotus Petal, Windfall, and Recurring Nightmare? That little time in Magic history known as Combo Winter, where the game became YuGiOh and almost died because of it. It’s in good company, a who’s who of Magic’s most egregious design mistakes, because this dinky little two mana artifact makes cards functionally not in your deck. You land Fluctuator, and any card that cycles for 2 or less mana just does not count as a card in your deck anymore. This means, if your deck contains entirely cards that can cycle for 2 or less, that you can essentially guarantee a certain combination of cards at the end of your cycling chain, as well as some number of your other Fluctuators. In Premodern, it’s usually Lotus Petal, Songs of the Damned, and Living Death. insert We don't do that here meme here

Obviously, we cannot one-to-one replicate Premodern Fluctuator’s ability to kill on turn 2, due to Lotus Petal being a card we will never ever get unless Wizards decides to put it in every commander product for five years straight (which will not happen, and I’m ok with Petal not being in the format). The closest way we could directly replicate this is by adding Dark Ritual, Songs of the Damned, and Living Death to the deck, along with a set of haste creatures with cycling that are our actual payoffs for Living Death. However, that involves adding cards without Cycling, increasing our brick chance dramatically, and also forces us to play cycling cards that do nothing else pre-combo. Value Vintage is too strong of a format for your combo deck to have that high of a chance of bricking. So we cut all of the non-cyclers from the deck except for the four Fluctuator, one with honorary cycling, and a spicy one of in the manabase I’ll talk about later.

But how do we actually win then? This, my friend, is where Pauper technology comes in.

Ikoria gave us a lot of cards with cycling. It singlehandedly created the Pauper Cyclestorm deck due to this dinky little common.

Our gameplan with this card is almost always nearly identical to Pauper’s gameplan with the card: cycle it. Get it in the graveyard to be reanimated with our other ‘combo piece’

This is the final piece of the puzzle. Jolted Awake is the second best card in the deck behind Fluctuator, because if they make us discard a Fluctuator or counter it, now we functionally have seven more copies in our deck. Jolt recurring artifacts has surprised many of my opponents over my time playing the deck, and you will not believe how many people also don’t realize it has cycling too.

So that’s Plan A: The Combo Kill. Play a Fluctuator ASAP, cycle cards until you hit a Drannith Stinger, pitch it, find a Jolted Awake, Jolt back Stinger, cycle 20 more times. Donezo bingo, game over. We’re usually going lethal on turn 3 with a Fluctuator in the opener, barring interaction from the opponent. That’s on par with some of the fastest decks in the format. Pretty sweet.

But How Do I Actually Sequence This Combo?

While going over an entire Fluctuator combo line would take a ton of time and words, there’s some general heuristics to follow:

• If you have a Fluctuator on turn 2, it’s usually good practice to cycle until you hit a Hollow One or two (more on that later), then deploy it. This allows us to retain some impact should our Fluctuator get destroyed, as most of the commonly played artifact removal in the format is two mana. Deploying Hollow Ones like this can be risky on lower mulligans where you have less cards in hand to actually execute the kill, leading to a larger brick chance, but in the matchups where you’re immediately under pressure, slamming a Hollow One can save your life.

• If you’re not in a rush to slam Hollow Ones or cannot afford to due to low cards in hand, on a turn 2 Fluctuator hand, cycle in their end step, not on your turn. This allows you to play around Ravenous Trap postboard, which can screw you up if you try to Jolt back a Stinger. By cycling on their turn, you present less of an obvious chokepoint.

• If your hand produces a Fluctuator on turn 3 off of a pair of taplands, don’t play your third land. This is the exact scenario for our fifth non-cycling card.

Cavern lets you have untapped mana for Jolted Awake on a turn 3 combo line, should you see it before you run out of cards to cycle. And yes, that is a legitimate concern in this deck. We only play one because playing too many is just asking to brick on a combo turn, so we keep one around for these scenarios where we’re forced to try and win on turn 3.

There will be rare times when you go deep and don’t get there. Especially if you’re digging for a Cavern kill, sometimes the deck does not cough up the cards you need to get there, and you begin to run low on cards in deck to actually get there. Your pivot plan becomes getting Hollow Ones in play and trying to supplement any Stinger burn you can manage. As soon as you start getting to about 25 cards in deck, consider pivoting.

But what if they do interact? What if they have the turn one Inquisition or hold up the Spell Pierce, and that Fluctuator you opened with ends up in the graveyard instead of the battlefield? Or worse, what if you’re on your mulligan to five and haven’t seen a Fluctuator in any of them?

This is where we engage Plan B: Beatdown.

Plan B is to scale a Marauding Mako, Flourishing Fox, or Scrounging Skyray to the moon and turn it sideways until they die. Hollow One forms the more explosive axis of our beatdown plan, able to deploy on turn 2 on a high roll hand with something like Street Wraith plus a one mana cycler plus an untapped land, or more usually turn 3 with chaining some one mana cyclers together.

Hollow One is the hardest card to play with and around in the deck bar none in the grind game situations. When you’re cycling for value, you already have to constantly be thinking “what if I draw Fluctuator”, but right behind that question is “what if I draw Hollow One”. Sometimes one appears out of the deck when you’re not ready and you’ve exhausted your mana on cycling two lands, and now it’s stuck there until next turn. For that reason, it’s usually best to always cycle the cheapest cycling cost cards first. This gives you more resources to adapt to drawing one of these two critical cards.

The best part about Plan B is that it directly feeds into and supports Plan A. Every grow threat is also an outlet for going off with Fluctuator, given our opponent has no blockers, or we still have access to this little number:

Footfall plus two untapped lands with a Fluctuator in play means any grow threat can trample over any blockers our opponents have and punch them in the face directly. Crater also pulls serious work without a Fluctuator in play for the exact same reason, enabling a grow threat to punch through boards where it would otherwise get chump blocked.

Finally, we also have the Secret Plan B2: Become Rhinos. Once a Fluctuator is down, we can usually cycle until we find one or more Hollow Ones and just jam them down to either attack or block with. This tactic is especially powerful in hands where we have Fluctuator on turn 2, where we physically cannot kill our opponent and so must pass the turn. Jamming out a Hollow One as a blocker for aggressive creature boards is totally fine, and doing so against other matchups is great to insulate us against artifact removal they could have for Fluctuator. It’s a line of play that can win you games.

‘But Doot!’ I hear you say ‘Rest in Peace+Energy Field just completely crushes you right? Or just control in general? You need to force so much through to actually get there! Even with Jolt giving you resilience, is it enough?’

And this is where Plan C (and honestly my favorite) plan comes in: The Drain Pivot

You see, we do play a specific card that is not a cycler in the sideboard to beat the decks that let us sit around for forever while they twiddle their thumbs casting draw spells, not working towards actually pressuring us.

What if you never had to cast a spell to kill your opponent? And what if that kill condition went right though every single combo that locks you out of dealing damage?

Faith is my favorite piece of tech. It singlehandedly crushes the control matchup should it stick. You just never need to cast a spell for the rest of the game, and control in this format is largely not equipped to fight on that axis. They need to find their Disenchant before you cycle ten cards, period.

To assist in all of these plans, we pack some supporting cast cards that tie the room together.

Miscalculation gets people constantly. Nobody expects the turbo combo deck to be playing an in-engine counterspell. It protects every plan at almost every stage of the game. I’ve played builds without them main, and with the benefit of reps, I think that’s a mistake. Never leave home without Miscalcs.

Drannith Healer is our anti-aggro tech card. We do have some bad mulligans, and Healer can bail us out of games we had no right to win just by gaining a couple extra points of life. It also puts us almost completely out of reach on a combo turn even if we end up bricking, making it a must-kill threat for any deck looking to attack our life total.

Finally, the card that has honorary cycling.

Probe is a beast. It’s basically a fifth copy of Street Wraith. It might not have actual cycling, and it does come out in more aggressive matchups, but Probe letting you take a peek at a control or combo player’s hand and see for sure whether you’re supposed to go off this turn has won me a lot of games.

Ok, you’ve sold me. Gimmie the sauce.

With pleasure!

This is my current working list. It’s getting close to what I would consider to be the optimized 75 for a blind tournament metagame. It looks like it’s running up against the edge of its budget, but in reality, I’ve got a ton of spare budget wrapped up in the sideboard Pest Control, plus the Gitaxian Probe that loves to hang out around the $2-3 range. This deck just naturally has a comical amount of spare money, to the point where I genuinely have been annoyed that there’s not a lot of things we can spend it on. What can I say, cycling cards are cheap.

Now The Hard Part: Mulligans

It’s my firm belief that this is one of the most difficult decks to mulligan with in the entire format. Every single mulligan you take means one less card in your hand, which means one less cycler for you to utilize when you slam a Fluctuator down, which means the chances of you bricking go up. However, variance is bound to happen. There will be games where the deck just does not cough up a Fluctuator. When this happens, we vary from the Premodern builds of the deck which simply flounder and die. We lean on Plan B to let us survive long enough and build towards Plan A. That said, there are hands where keeping a hand on a higher mulligan that only executes Plan B but does it well enough to actually be keepable without a Fluctuator!

In the blind, we 100% steal a lot of Premodern philosophy.

On 7: Keep any hand that has a Fluctuator or produces multiple Hollow Ones on turn 2 or 3.

On 6: Keep any hand with a Fluctuator or with a solid Plan B with a one-drop or Hollow One.

On 5: Keep any hand that executes any plan to any degree.

On 4: Keep any hand.

Let’s look at some examples. As a principle, I’m going to omit hands that open a Fluctuator. Those hands are where Plan A takes full precedence, and the only thing to really think about in those openers is sequencing land drops and trying to read if your opponent has some kind of interaction.

Example Hand 1

On seven, in the blind, this is a pitch. We don’t have a Fluctuator and we don’t know what we’re up against, which means we’re trying to make Plan A happen ASAP and steal game one. However, against a known slower matchup, something like control or Cloudpost or a midrange deck, I keep this on six all day. I’m putting back a Blasted Landscape and partying.

Turn 1 we’re playing the Farmland and passing. Turn 2 we’re checking the hand with Probe before playing the Capital City, with Fox potentially coming down as well depending on their hand. If they have removal, we instead cycle the Fox at end step and simply hold up Miscalculation. If they don’t have removal or aren’t going to present something we really need to interact with, we slam the Fox and cycle Wraith to begin scaling it.

Along with any of these play patterns, if we draw a Fluctuator at any point after deploying the Fox, we now have an on-board outlet. If our opponent doesn’t respect the Fox and leave blockers back, they’re under the pressure of just dying out of nowhere. Let’s look at another one.

Example Hand 2

This hand, while very much a high-roll, is a hand I’m happy keeping on seven or six. The sequence looks like this:

Turn 1 - Massif, pass

Turn 2 - Landscape, Cycle Wraith. From here, one of two things will happen:

You’ve drawn a second one-mana cycler or Street Wraith. Here, we get to cycle twice more and jam two Hollow Ones down for free. Pretty sick.

You’ve drawn a 2 mana cycler or a Fluctuator. Less sick. Cycle the Healer and see what happens. From this decision tree, we’re back in the same scenario. Another Wraith or one mana cycler means we get to double Hollow One. Another 2 mana cycler means we’re paying one mana for a Hollow One and passing.

This is plan 2B in full effect. If my hand produces a Hollow One on turn 2, even if it’s a seven, in a known matchup where that plan is effective, I’d usually keep.

Let's look at one more.

Example Hand 3

This is a really interesting hand to sequence. The Skyray is dead, which is good because we have an obvious card to cycle away or bottom on a mull to six, where this hand is honestly at its best. This is a fine six. Our sequencing looks like:

T1: Massif, go. Gotta get our more relevant colors down first. It also opens up the line of casting Drannith Healer on turn 2 should we draw an untapped land.

T2: Now we have a really interesting decision point depending on what we’ve drawn.

If we’ve drawn a Street Wraith, we’re close to being able to slam a Hollow One. On the draw, this is a turn 2 Hollow One should we draw exactly untapped land+Wraith. Let’s assume we draw nothing super useful, some 2 mana cyclers.

If we’re not fortunate enough to be able to jam a Hollow One, we’re playing the Slough, deploying the Mako, and passing. Notably, we’re not cycling the Wraith end step before our turn because we want to save it to deploy the Hollow One next turn.

T3: Assuming no other relevant draws, we’ve got a couple avenues yet again.

If Drannith Healer is a good card into the matchup we’re playing, usually against more aggressive decks like Rhinos, Spirits, Merfolk, Boros Energy, or Burn, there’s a real consideration to playing it out. Healer can buy us a lot of time if we’re trying to force draw a Fluctuator, especially when paired with a source of pressure like the Mako.

More realistically though, we’re cycling the Wraith and the Mako to play the Hollow One for one mana. We’ve probably drawn another land at this point, which we can use to make our third land drop and see how the game develops from there.

All this planning and math, of course, goes completely out the window if we draw a Fluctuator. Drawing one in this opener leads to a pretty common curve. Turn 1 tapland, t2 tapland+grow threat, t3 Fluctuator, cycle into the Lair, try to win.

Now, these hands are definitely on the higher end of hands the deck can produce. There’s an equal amount of chance that the deck gives you a grip full of taplands and cards you don’t actually care about doing anything other than cycling away. Don’t keep those. Hands that don’t execute any of our plans are not hands worth keeping except in the direst of circumstances (read as: going to 5 or less).

General Matchup Guide

Almost Any Other Combo Deck

This is stuff like Nadu Breakfast, Oops All Spells, Creative Technique, Channel Mirror, High Tide, anything doing unfair shit that’s killing you faster or on par with the nut draw.

Pray. Either mulligan to have the kill on turn 3, or a hand that pressures with t2 Miscalculation. Easily our hardest matchups.

In:

• 2 Pest Control or 2 Easy Prey maybe if they help.

Out:

• usually 2 Drannith Healer

There’s an argument to play Rapid Decay side to help out with some of these. If these cards are good in your local meta, run them. If you’re working off of the base list, then it’s cooked.

Hypergenesis

This is a very funny matchup on both sides. The essence of this matchup is ‘mull to Fluctuator+Drannith Stinger’ no matter what else the hand contains. This is because them executing their gameplan puts both halves of our A+B into play at once, and no matter what array of creatures they put into play that would either kill us or the combo pieces, we can cycle off on top of them. I’ve legit kept no-landers in this matchup just because they will always be putting the Hypergenesis on the stack.

No boarding for this one. Just trust the heart of the cards.

Living End

A similar story to Hypergenesis, but slightly more interesting. The key in this matchup is to get a threat down and then never stop cycling creatures away. Living End’s creatures are usually bigger than ours, but we play more of them. Obviously land the Fluctuator if you can, because then if they reanimate a stinger, they actively lose themselves the game.

In:

• You can get adventurous and side in Faith of the Devoted depending on how slow they are, but I wouldn't generally recommend it.

• 1 Rescind

Out:

• 1 Footfall Crater

Non-Blue Hyper Aggro

This is stuff like Rhinos, Eldrazi, Phoenix, Burn, Hogaak, Affinity, stuff that is looking to race you on board and kill you with creatures quickly.

These are another ‘have a Fluctuator or die’ matchup, but with slightly more nuance. These are the matchups we play Drannith Healer for, as the passive lifegain from cycling a few cards can turn a game we were certainly dead into one we’re still barely hanging on in. This is also a matchup where doing the Secret Rhinos plan is 100% a line that will steal you games by putting some toughness in front of an otherwise lethal board.

In:

• 3 Fuel the Flames/2 Pest Control (whichever is better. Fuel is generally better into everything except Rhinos and Burn, which is where Pest Control fires on all cylinders, especially something like Boros Energy)

• 2 Drannith Healer

• 1 Footfall Crater (Can be good if you can get the beatdown plan rolling. Depends on the matchup. I’ve legit outscaled a Hogaak before, so having the extra crater is good.)

Out:

• 1 Gitaxian Probe (all of their cards functionally do the same thing: kill you. The extra life loss and hand information isn’t worth it over the 2 life)

• 4 Miscalculation (Similar logic as above, all of their cards are trying to kill you, meaning rarely sniping individual spells matters. Crashing Footfalls doesn’t really count because any Rhinos player worth their salt knows to mulligan to a hand that jams their cascade spell ahead of where we’d have Miscalculation available.)

Blue Tempo

These are decks like Spirits, Delver, and Merfolk that want to play cheap creatures and back it up with Daze and other efficient, taxation-based countermagic.

Very similar sideboard strategy to the other racing aggro decks, but the way to play this matchup is very different. In stark contrast to the hyper aggro matchups, Gitaxian Probe and Miscalculation are often your most important cards in these matchups to know about and help beat unknown countermagic. Their clock is usually slower than the hyper-aggro decks, so Healers are even more important here than they are in those matchups. The time you buy by cycling two or three cards can undo an entire attack step from one of their creatures. Skyray also carries against the decks playing cheap fliers.

The way to play these matchups is to assess threats how they would on the other side, and sequence threatening spells as best as possible to bait countermagic, ending on the final spell you actually want to force through, usually a Fluctuator or a Fuel. Because the best bait for counterspells is a spell they also need to counter. The other important part of these matchups is the grow threats and Hollow Ones to establish counter-pressure. Because their clocks are usually slower, scaling a grow threat or dumping a Hollow One or two quickly can force them to play defensive, which is exactly where we want them.

In:

• 2 Drannith Healer

• 3 Fuel the Flames/2 Easy Prey (depending on if they’re going wide or tall)

Out:

• 1 Footfall Crater

• 2 Marauding Mako/Scrounging Skyray (whichever is more dead in the matchup depending on if they’re on fliers)

• 1 Drannith Stinger can go in place of a Healer. Stinger is usually only landing if we’re winning in these matchups, we’re rarely casting it as a beatdown threat.

• 1-2 Miscalculation (they are important, but only if we can get to the mana totals to utilize them effectively)

This board plan is one I’m still kinda unsure of. These matchups are really really hard for the deck.

Disruptive Midrange/Aggro

This is stuff like Jund, Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar decks, Humans, Initiative variants like Scam and GW, Hymn to Tourach decks like Rakdos Lurrus, and generally decks looking to cast hand attack.

These are generally pretty good matchups for us. Anointed Peacekeeper is annoying out of GW, and they’re starting to have money for Spirit of the Labyrinth which is obviously a must-kill from us, but postboard they usually start treating us like a combo deck and boarding out their removal in favor of hate pieces, which means the aggro plan can slide in and catch them off guard.

In:

• 2-3 Rescind/Easy Prey (To take out pinpoint hate pieces, if needed)

Out (if needed):

• 1 Gitaxian Probe (again, all of their cards usually do the same thing, which means we don’t super need the information and would rather have the life)

• 1 Footfall Crater/Mako (whatever makes room for Rescinds 2 and 3 if needed)

These matchups are by no means easy, but they’re not nearly as hard as some of the other ones we’ve gone over. Hand attack can make our life annoying, especially if it's from an Elite Spellbinder, but usually I'm ok to get a Fluctuator Inquisition'd or Hymn'd because it means any Jolted Awake gets us back that Fluctuator at half price. Groovy.

Blue Control and Lockout Combo

This is pretty much any deck casting Counterspell, Swords to Plowshares, and maybe some board wipes, along with Solitary Confinement and Rest In Peace+Energy Field decks.

Game one, this matchup isn’t awful, but still tricky. The key is being the beatdown deck until you can force a window to go off through Miscalculation, or just generally running them low on interaction. Never deploy more than one or two threats, if you can force them to tap four mana for one of their sweepers for a single threat that’s a prime combo window. If they’re a lockout deck and they get their combo online, scoop it up and go next. These games can go long.

Postboard, Faith of the Devoted is the strategy. It’s a third angle of attack they need to account for, or else they will just lose the game because you never cast another spell.

In:

• 2 Faith of the Devoted

• 2-3 Rescind (if they’re on something like Bant Rec that wants to stick a marquee permanent they tap low for, or a lockout combo deck)

Out:

• 2 Drannith Healer

• 1 Footfall Crater

• 1-2 Scrounging Skyray (they're the least mana efficient threat)

Cloudpost Variants

Similar to control decks, but different because of the presence of Oblivion Stone. Stone is an absolute bastard. As long as one is in play, you functionally cannot combo, because you need to stick both a Fluctuator and an outlet at the same time, so they can just pop the OStone with the other half of the A+B on the stack. So, similar to the other control deck matchups, you need to be the beatdown, and above all, force them to crack that damn rock before you go to combo.

In:

• 3 Rescind

Out:

• 2 Drannith Healers

• 1 Footfall Crater

Don’t try to get cheeky with Faith in these matchups. Oblivion Stone will make you regret it.

And That’s All Folks!

Thank you a TON for reading all the way through this diatribe on what has become my favorite deck in the format. It’s explosive, it’s powerful, it’s high-variance, and it makes for some extremely satisfying wins. Sometimes she goes, sometimes she don’t. But when she goes, she REALLY goes.