Someone finally managed to break Stormscale Scion. An obvious reference to one of the most broken mechanics in all of Magic, Stormscale Scion got a lot of attention during Tarkir: Dragonstorm spoiler season. This Dragon isn’t great on its own, but with even just a few Storm triggers, Stormscale Scion becomes positioned to take over the game instantly.
As exciting as this is, Stormscale Scion generally had two issues: it doesn’t have enough enablers in formats with smaller card pools, and it doesn’t win the game on resolution. In faster formats, it doesn’t matter how many Stormscale Scions you have if an opponent follows it up with Grapeshot.
Despite this downside, a renowned combo player has figured out how to make Stormscale Scion work in Modern.
Stormscale Scion Finishes Second
Stormscale Scion took the second place at a 66-player Modern Challenge, earning an invite to this event. A variant of this deck ended up taking seventh place in the Modern Madness Finals.
This deck is, more or less, a Ruby Storm variant that utilizes Goblin Charbelcher and Stormscale Scion as win conditions. That changes the deck’s structure somewhat to better support win conditions that require more mana to use. Red Belcher cares a bit less about Storm count, and a bit more about just resolving a win condition with a ton of mana.
This means that the Modern Horizons 3 Storm enabler Ral, Monsoon Mage is dropped from this deck. This is an interesting response to the massive rise in creature removal – a symptom of Boros Energy being incredibly popular.
Instead, this Storm deck picks up Irencrag Feat as its main mana enabler. You get a one-time shot of seven red mana, but you can only cast one more spell. This isn’t great in a deck trying to win with Grapeshot, but seven mana is enough to cast and activate Goblin Charbelcher, or cast a Stormscale Scion. Between Feat and the various other Desperate Ritual-esque effects in the deck, it’s easy to drop a win condition as early as turn two.
The rest of this deck follows a similar idea. You’re much more concerned about ramping mana than continually exiling cards to cast. Glimpse the Impossible is still in this list, but a majority of the two-mana Impulse Draw cards like Wrenn’s Resolve have been dropped. Instead, this deck runs a full playset of Bitter Reunion. This can help find your win conditions and give Stormscale Scion Haste. This overcomes the biggest downside of Stormscale Scion in Modern: its inability to win the game immediately. You can even use the seventh mana from Irenclag Feat to activate your enchantment.
Different Tech Options
This is a really odd deck for the Modern format. Both Ruby Storm and Belcher exist as meta-relevant archetypes, but this deck kind of smashes them together. While this provides the strong aspects of either archetype, it does lose one of the most important aspects of Blue Belcher: free interaction. Blue Belcher may not have been as fast as this new Red Belcher list, but it backed its win condition up with multiple free counterspells.
Since Red Belcher isn’t trying to Disrupting Shoal its way to victory, the sideboard sees some significant changes. Defense Grid gives the deck a strong plan against countermagic, however, it’s not perfect. It makes Consign to Memory a very strong card to board into this deck, for instance, which could cause some problems. Not only does it counter Defense Grid, but it counters Goblin Charbelcher and the Storm trigger from Stormscale Scion. Guttural Response, however, can counter blue instants for red mana.
This deck also employs Cleansing Wildfire as a tool to beat other Charbelcher decks and Tron. Wildfire breaks up the mana needed for Tron to run away for the game, and Charbelcher won’t be able to replace their blown-up lands unless they side in one. This could also be used to blow up Urza’s Saga, or tutor for your own Mountain if you boarded it in to beat opposing land destruction. Sadly, this particular choice may have worked because it was unexpected. Now that this deck is a known quantity, Belcher players, in particular, will be ready for Cleansing Wildfire.
Finally, this deck gets to run Blood Moon. While it’s not exactly a new thing for Charbelcher as an archetype Blood Moon is more difficult to remove than Harbinger of the Seas.
Not Long For This World?
Stormscale Scion is a great win condition against Boros Energy, which is, by far, the most popular Modern deck after Underworld Breach left the format. They do not have the tools to fight against a sudden swarm of Dragons that all buff one another. Sadly, Stormscale Scion may not even stick around as a win condition in a deck built to incorporate it.
The variant of this red Charbelcher deck that top-eighted the Modern Madness finals cut Stormscale Scion, instead opting for a Rakdos route that allows you to fill the sideboard with discard spells. Goblin Charbelcher is the only win condition in this deck.
This could suggest that, as cool as Stormscale Scion is to see, it isn’t the optimal version of the Red Belcher deck. There’s a good chance that this deck is going to see a bit more play as players figure out exactly how to build it, but the Rakdos deck will likely be used as a starting point for curious testers since it had the stronger finish. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Stormscale Scion is the weaker variant of the deck, however. There isn’t enough data to rule in one deck’s favor.
The only answer to this question is for players to keep playing the deck. If Red Belcher is good, players will keep putting up great finishes with it. If not, we’ll likely see this deck fade away.