MTG Twiddlestorm Combo Deck Guide

Everyone who plays Modern knows that Nadu, Winged Wisdom is the deck to beat. This deck has won the Pro Tour and consistently makes dominant appearances at high-level Modern events. Simon Neilson, upon winning the Pro Tour, straight up said that this deck needs a ban. Unfortunately, we need to wait until the end of August, the 26th, to be specific, to actually get that ban.

One question many MTG players have is what is going to take over the Modern Metagame after Nadu leaves the format? While many have their eyes on Boros and Mardu Energy decks, I have my eye on something totally different. Lotus Field is back in the Modern format, and it’s better than it’s ever been. This combo deck is absurdly consistent, as long as you can play it properly.

Incredibly Difficult but Very Rewarding

Lotus Field has once again left the Pioneer format for greener pastures. The archetype is now both viable in Modern and Pioneer, but Lotus Field in Modern is on an entirely different level. Twiddlestorm existed pre-Modern Horizons 3, but the archetype got some surprising upgrades that turned it into something terrifying.

The objective is to assemble one of many different combo lines to empty your deck and win the game. To do this, the end goal is to use Wish to find Thassa’s Oracle from your sideboard.

While playing this archetype can be incredibly rewarding, it is sadly difficult to pilot properly. There is almost always a winning line through any situation. In testing, I have managed to beat a Karn, the Great Creator, Chalice of the Void on one, and a Trinisphere without too much trouble. Many of the correct lines are absurdly unintuitive, however, so this deck does require some thinking.

Your Rituals

Like Ruby Storm, you need to amass a ton of mana if you want to win the game in one turn. Twiddle, Dream’s Grip, and Hidden Strings are your rituals in this deck. You also get Vizier of Tumbling Sands as a sort of one-time boost that replaces itself.

In order for your rituals to work, you need Lotus Field established on your board. Once you have it in play, Twiddle and Dream’s Grip generate two mana for you by untapping a tapped Lotus Field. Vizier of Tumbling Sands generates one, but replaces itself, making it one of the best cards in your deck.

Hidden Strings is a little bit more complicated. With just one land, it only generates one mana since you’re spending two to untap three mana. With two lands, it generates two mana.

While these untap options have existed for quite some time, Modern Horizons 3 provided a new option in Deserted Temple. Originally from Odyssey, this land offers an easy way to untap Lotus Field and generate two mana of any color. As if this wasn’t useful enough, Hidden Strings gets even better with this card in play as you can untap both Deserted Temple and Lotus Field.

This will net you three mana, which is a big deal for your non-One Ring combo sequences. The best use of Hidden Strings isn’t something we’ve discussed yet.

Finding Lotus Field

Of course, if you’re going to win the game with this deck, you do need a Lotus Field to do it. There are two different cards in your deck that do exactly that. Expedition Map and Tolaria West do the job, though they are a bit clunky. Utilizing these cards allows the deck to essentially stay mono-blue until you try to win the game. This lets you run a lot of basic lands, preventing Blood Moon from being more devastating. You also get to include Sink into Stupor, which is a must-have against hate.

In some matchups, you can side out a Lotus Field so you can find it with Wish. This could be done in The Stone Brain matchups where you’re afraid of your Lotus Field getting exiled before you can respond.

Generally, finding your Lotus Field will be done by your cantrips. Consider and Preordain help to sculpt your hand, finding you the exact cards you need for a winning combo.

The One Ring

If it weren’t for The One Ring’s inclusion in Twiddlestorm, it would be a very strong budget deck for the Modern format. Sadly, The One Ring is crucial in your deck.

Everyone knows how good this card is. As the most played card in the Modern format, some are expecting The One Ring to be banned at the end of the month. This isn’t too surprising, considering that The One Ring does it all, offering protection and an absurd amount of card advantage.

In Twiddlestorm, winning the game on the turn you untap with The One Ring in play is not uncommon. It’s even possible to win the game on turn three when resolving this.

See, your Ritual effects untap permanents. Hidden Strings, Twiddle, Dream’s Grip, and Vizier of Tumbling Sands all untap Lotus Field to generate mana advantage. Those effects can also be used to untap The One Ring. This easily allows you to draw your entire deck in one turn. You’ll need to keep track of your mana, utilizing your rituals to untap mana and The One Ring appropriately.

Hidden Strings truly shines in your One Ring combo sequences. Not only can you untap The One Ring with it, but you can also untap Lotus Field. This ends up drawing you a ton of cards AND gaining you one mana!

Resolving an Underworld Breach during these sequences generally means you will never run out of Twiddle effects, at least until you draw your entire library. Do keep an eye on the size of your library during these sequences. The One Ring will routinely start drawing eight or nine cards during this combo, so it’s easier to accidentally deck yourself than you may think.

Wish

The One Ring and Wish are your primary win conditions in the current iteration of Twiddlestorm in Modern. While utilizing The One Ring is not too complex, Wish is a completely different story.

The application of Wish in your deck grants you a secondary combo line that does not involve The One Ring. That way, if your artifact is shut down by an effect like Karn, the Great Creator, or if Orcish Bowmasters is threatening to cut your card draw short, you have another avenue to victory.

This win condition utilizes Underworld Breach and a combination of cards from your sideboard to deck yourself out. You can win the game with just a Wish and some cards in your graveyard.

In order to achieve this, you need six mana, including two red and some number of blue mana. You also need enough cards in your graveyard to get back up to five mana after Wishing and resolving Underworld Breach. Here’s a step-by-step method on what that would look like.

Use your ritual effects to generate six mana. Cast Wish, finding Underworld Breach. Cast Underworld Breach. You should have at least one blue mana left, with a Ritual available to cast.
Use your rituals to generate five mana. This usually means that you’ll need to cast two iterations of Twiddle or Dream’s Grip.
Cast Wish for a second time, leaving two blue mana available. Find and cast Tome Scour, targeting yourself. This will mill five cards, giving you more fodder to exile for Underworld Breach.
Cast a Ritual, untapping back to three mana. You now have a progressive loop, casting two Tome Scours, milling yourself for ten, and untapping your Lotus Field with a Ritual. You should be netting one extra card in your graveyard per loop. You are milling ten cards and exiling nine to cast your spells. Once your library is empty, Wish for a Thassa’s Oracle to win the game.

Notably, if you have no other Ritual effects in your hand after resolving an Underworld Breach from a Wish, you’ll need at least ten cards in your graveyard to pull this off. Having eleven cards makes the combo much more consistent, as you’ll need to exile your Ritual and hope to mill one otherwise. Most of the time, you’ll be able to go for smoother lines than this, utilizing other resources in your hand, but the objective with this combo line is to get to a position where you have Underworld Breach online, and you are doing the Tome Scour loop.

Do note that you cannot attempt the Tome Scour loop on turns where you have One Ring protection. Tome Scour will be unable to target you.

This basically covers how to play Twiddlestorm at a fundamental level, but there’s a lot more to consider. There are a lot of cards that will interact with your combo, ruining your chances of winning the game. This deck comes packed with ways to beat those cards, but they are incredibly unintuitive.

How to Beat Hate

There are a variety of different types of hate that you’ll come across when playing this deck. Some forms of hate are easily beatable if you know how to do it. Others are… more problematic. Here is the type of hate you’ll need to consider, and how to beat it.

Blood Moon effects (hardest)
Damping Sphere (hard)
Graveyard Hate (depends on the piece, but can be very easy)
Stax pieces like Trinisphere (usually very easy)
Karn, the Great Creator (easy, but you have a small window)
Countermagic (easy)
Drannith Magistrate/Soulless Jailer (medium)

Karn, the Great Creator, in particular, may seem like a nightmare for this deck. Its presence shuts off The One Ring, and all you need to shut off the other combo is something like Tormod’s Crypt. That should be game over, right? Wrong.

Tormod’s Crypt is surprisingly terrible against this deck, and that’s because our Rituals have a secondary function. Not only can they untap your stuff to generate value, but they can also tap your opponent’s stuff.

There’s a reason why Twiddlestorm decks play a full playset of Dream’s Grip over Twiddle itself. Dream’s Grip has Entwine, allowing you to both tap and untap a permanent. This has some absolutely absurd applications.

You can use this to tap a variety of graveyard hate pieces, which effectively forces your opponent to use them immediately. If they don’t the card becomes tapped. Tormod’s Crypt and Soul-Guide Lantern, the most common hate pieces for grave shenanigans, need to tap to activate.

Trinisphere also gets wrecked by your rituals. Tapping the card turns it off. This means that Dream’s Grip and Hidden Strings basically turn off Trinisphere for free as long as you have a Lotus Field in play.

In a similar vein, you can tap your opponent’s mana with your ritual effects in matchups that involve countermagic. Force through a One Ring or some other kind of win condition, and Control generally cannot deal with the consequences.

Do note that, against Karn, the Great Creator, you generally have a small window to win the game. Should your opponent untap with Karn in play, you’ll generally fall too far behind. They can find The Stone Brain and shut out your Wish, which will end the game in game one.

As a cautious note, do be careful about decking yourself out completely when your opponent has open mana. Kozilek’s Command and Flame of Anor can cause you to overdraw, losing you the game. Protection from The One Ring will stop this, and other effects like Endurance, but you can otherwise play around this easily when you have your entire deck at your disposal.

Playing Around Blood Moon

Blood Moon and Harbinger of the Seas are the most difficult cards for you to beat. If you’re expecting to play against these cards, you need to be very careful when you deploy your Lotus Field. If you put the land in play, and your opponents respond with a Blood Moon, the game generally ends on the spot.

Against these types of hate, two practices are generally good when deploying your Lotus Field. First, delay its deployment as much as possible. If your opponents resolve a Blood Moon effect before you play Lotus Field, you can get your Lotus Field down as a basic land. This means that you don’t need to sacrifice your lands.

Secondly, if you do deploy your Lotus Field, and are not immediately going for the win, make sure you have a way to answer a potential Blood Moon. Untap your land and hold up a Sink into Stupor, another absolutely insane upgrade to Twiddlestorm post-MH3. You now have a land that doubles as a card that can bounce any piece of hate your opponent could play.

Similar rules apply to other permanent cards that cannot be solved by tapping them. Drannith Magistrate and Soulless Jailer only shut off one combo route, so you can beat these by playing The One Ring. Damping Sphere is a big problem since Lotus Field can only generate one generic mana, but this is still easier to beat than Blood Moon because your other lands are unaffected.

Matchup Spread

If you’re looking to beat Energy decks, Twiddlestorm has an incredibly dominant matchup against them. This, and the deck being much more resilient to hate than Ruby Storm, are the main reasons to pick up the deck. Control and tempo decks are also a very favorable matchup. You have all the tools to beat them as long as they give you enough time to assemble them.

Ruby Storm is slightly unfavored. You don’t really have a great way to interact with the deck, and it can go off on turn two much more consistently than you can. Twiddlestorm can theoretically win on turn two by utilizing a very complicated line with Consign to Memory (this card can counter your land sacrifice trigger), but it’s a very rare line that almost never comes up.

Nadu, Winged Wisdom similarly can be difficult. A recent list from Lotus Field fanatic TheManLand (the one shared in this article) comes equipped with a sideboard geared to beat Nadu, making the matchup a bit more palpable. This matchup feels even in my experience, with edges gainable on either side depending on deck construction.

Despite Tron having a ton of ways to stop you, the matchup does feel positive. These games are very difficult to pilot, however, with each of your Ritual effects having tons of different uses.

If there’s one matchup you want to avoid on Twiddlestorm, it’s Merfolk. This deck can shut the door quickly, has countermagic, and a Blood Moon effect. This is a recipe for disaster, and fixing the matchup for how often you’re going to run into it is just not worthwhile. Take the L and move on.

Sideboard Guide?

As always, sideboarding, especially in Modern, is no easy feat. Since Lotus Field actively uses the sideboard with Wish, it’s even harder than usual. On top of this, there’s no one perfect sideboard that will always come out on top. Due to this, it’s often better to curate your own sideboard over time, based on your own experiences.

This is especially important when playing Modern physically at your LGS. Since opponents will often bring the same deck, you’ll quickly know exactly what you need to play around. If you’re playing on Magic Online, however, you may need a broader sideboard to account for the digital diversity there. This is the portion of Twiddlestorm where I am currently different from the Netdeck variants, so take the sideboarding advice in this article with a grain of salt.

All that said, there are still a few key cards that your sideboard should always contain.
Generally, when playing against faster combo decks, side in pieces that dismantle their combo. Dismember is particularly good against Nadu, Winged Wisdom, and other decks that utilize creature-based hate to try and interact with you.

Countermagic decks generally encourage you to side in countermagic of your own or Defense Grid to try and shut them off. Exactly what you need will depend on what deck you’re facing, with some matchups, like Nadu, requiring more interaction.

Strix’s Serenade generally comes in when you need to counter key cards. Against Tron, this counters Karn, the Great Creator. Against Nadu, this can counter Nadu, Winged Wisdom, but not if they use Chord of Calling or Delighted Halfling. It also counters Damping Sphere if you’re expecting that piece of hate.

In matchups that involve hate pieces like Blood Moon and Damping Sphere, side in some bounce effects like Echoing Truth to give you more reliable windows to combo off.

Additionally, it can often be a good idea to keep an extra win condition in your sideboard for Stone Brain matchups. Personally, I like to use Grapeshot, however, many players don’t run any alternative win conditions so it’s not mandatory.

When choosing what to take out, I generally try to split the difference between Expedition Map, Consider, and Twiddle. In slower matchups, you can take out Consign to Memory if they aren’t countering anything significant. In faster matchups, Expedition Map can be too clunky. You may be forced to rely on cantrips to find your Lotus Field.