Does anyone remember how oppressive Collected Company (CoCo) was during its time in Standard? Remember all of the mirror matches putting in Reflector Mage and Spell Queller at instant speed? Well, Innistrad: Midnight Hunt has brought us a card quite reminiscent of the loved and hated CoCo, and it is already seeing a good deal of play in Standard.
Storm the Festival
If we compare Collected Company and Storm the Festival, they each require vastly different ways to build your deck around them.
Collected Company costs four mana and can be played at instant speed. It requires your deck to consist of a high density of low costed creatures. At best, you can get six mana’s worth of creatures for the cost of four mana. At worst, you can ‘whiff’ and find no suitable targets in the top six cards of your library.
Storm the Festival is a lot more expensive to cast and also a lot slower at sorcery speed. But it can be a lot more powerful when resolved. At best, you can get ten mana’s worth of permanents for the cost of six mana. Its downside, unlike CoCo, is mitigated by the fact that it can hit any permanents (of five mana or lower) in the top five cards of your library. So as long as you build your deck with a high density of permanent cards, at worst you get a pair of lands. But extra lands aren’t so bad with Storm the Festival because more mana will ramp you into Festival’s Flashback cost, to cast it again from your graveyard.
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Selesnya Ramp
A ramp deck is a suitable shell to fit Storm the Festival into, allowing us to cast Festival easily and quickly while building towards its Flashback cost to cast Festival again. Playing this in a Selesnya deck allows us to take advantage of all the extra lands we’ll be putting into play. Yasharn, Implacable Earth is a big body that ensures we get all the lands we need, and Felidar Retreat can turn lands into an army of cats. Wrenn and Seven is also a must include for Festival decks as it makes tokens equal to the number of lands we have in play.
Sultai Festival
Compared to the Selesnya Ramp variant, the Sultai deck is more so concentrated on putting the highest quality 5-drops into play. It still has some aspects of ramp in the deck like Binding of the Old Gods and Rootcoil Creeper to leverage Storm the Festival’s flashback. But this version of the deck plays a higher count of 5-drops like Lolth, Spider Queen and Iymrith, Desert Doom alongside four copies of Wrenn and Seven.
Collected Company has a turbulent price history. When it was first released it was $5.00. It quickly jumped to $15.00, sunk back down for a few months, then skyrocketed to almost $25.00 when it became the dominant deck in Standard. Since then, CoCo has shifted between $12.00-$20.00, as it continues to see play in older formats like Modern to this day.
I think Storm the Festival costs too much mana to see play in older formats, so I wouldn’t expect it to see prices as high as CoCo’s. But currently, the cost of a regular art Storm the Festival is less than $1.00 on TCG Player! The extended art version is only $2.00! Those are beyond reasonable prices for a card with so much potential. Plus, I think this card will only get better in Standard the more sets/cards are added in the future, because it will give Festival more powerful options to find on the top of your library. I can see this card costing as much as $5.00 later in its Standard life cycle, so I’d definitely pick up a playset today.
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