In the world of Magic, Stax cards can come in all shapes and sizes. From basic taxing effects to various forms of land denial, these types of cards have built up a notorious reputation as some of the most infuriating cards to play against.
While most Stax pieces are utilized for the sole purpose of keeping your opponents off-balance, some unique options can be abused even further with the right support. Storm Cauldron certainly fits into this category. There are a multitude of Commanders that help you take full advantage of Cauldron. This includes a new MTG Avatar legend that opens the door for some sweet infinite combos.
MTG Storm Cauldron
Like many other Stax elements, Storm Cauldron can have a massive effect on how MTG games play out. While it does technically allow your opponents to ramp, the final triggered ability is absolutely devastating. Any player who wants to make a big play is forced to return a bunch of lands to their hand, which should heavily delay any future plays.
With this in mind, to maximize Storm Cauldron, you need to break the symmetry in some capacity. Fortunately, there are many ways to do this. The easiest method is to play other tools that help you put extra lands into play every turn.
With Azusa, Lost but Seeking and other similar MTG cards on the battlefield alongside Storm Cauldron, you’ll be able to rebuild much quicker than your opponents. Burgeoning is especially powerful in this role, since your opponents will often be playing multiple lands a turn as long as Storm Cauldron sticks around.
Once you get some of these cards online, all of your Landfall creatures become turbocharged threats. If you ever run low on lands to play with Rampaging Baloths, tapping your lands proactively to bounce them with Storm Cauldron and then replaying them is a great option to have.
On top of these basic synergies, there are also a few Commanders that actually reward you for bouncing lands to your hand in the first place. With Borborygmos Enraged at the helm, for instance, Storm Cauldron gives you a simple way to turn excess lands into action. Alternatively, picking up your lands makes it trivial to transform Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant ahead of schedule.
Storm Cauldron Combos
Despite being printed roughly 29 years ago, Storm Cauldron is still opening the door for infinite combos with new MTG designs like Toph, the First Metalbender. By making all of your nontoken artifacts into lands that can be bounced to your hand after tapping for mana, generating infinite mana with Storm Cauldron and Toph becomes trivial. All you need is a mana rock that produces more mana than it costs to cast it, such as Sol Ring or Mox Opal. After replaying and tapping your mana rock infinite times, any payoff from Walking Ballista to Grapeshot will get the job done.
While Toph is the newest Commander to create infinite Storm Cauldron combos, it’s far from the only legendary MTG creature to do so. The combination of Patron of the Moon, Cauldron, and Amulet of Vigor gives you an easy path to infinite mana as well. Simply float mana with two of your lands and bounce them to your hand, use one of the floating mana to activate Patron’s ability, and use Amulet’s untap ability to repeat this process.
Meanwhile, with Kodama of the East Tree in the command zone, you can generate infinite creatures alongside Cauldron and any Landfall token maker like Rampaging Baloths. After triggering Baloths once, you can hold priority and bounce a land to your hand. Once the Beast token enters, Kodama will trigger, letting you put the land you bounced back into play to repeat this process.
Beyond combos with other legends, there are plenty of combos to be executed with Retreat to Coralhelm in play. Retreat’s ability to untap Sakura-Tribe Scout, Walking Atlas, or any other creature that taps to put a land into play lets you produce infinite mana and generate infinite Landfall triggers alongside Storm Cauldron.
The Good with the Bad
With all of these upsides in mind, there are still some limiting factors that hold Cauldron back from being an automatic inclusion in all land-based decks. First and foremost, the card is a bit clunky. Paying five mana for an artifact that doesn’t impact the board at all isn’t exactly ideal, even in Commander. You then run the risk of Storm Cauldron getting destroyed before you fully get to take advantage of it.
On top of this, any other lands opponent across the table may get a big boost from the symmetrical effect without having to invest mana themselves. In this sense, Storm Cauldron is far from a broken design. Nonetheless, against a field of big, slow haymakers, the artifact quickly becomes a nuisance to play through. If you’re looking for a fun build-around that your friends may be unfamiliar with, Storm Cauldron might be right up your alley.
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