Special thanks to Anuraag Das and Sam Roukas for their contributions to this article.

Miracles, with and without Sensei’s Divining Top, has been a natural predator of The Epic Storm for many years. Force of Will, Counterbalance, and Terminus combine to form a suite of cards that can be pretty difficult to beat at any stage of the game. One of the major edges that The Epic Storm players can gain is by fully understanding the Miracles player and their approach to the game in order to slip through the important pieces necessary to cobble together a win. In this article, we’re going to be hearing from two of the best Miracles players, Anuraag Das and Sam Roukas, in order to better understand the Miracles approach to the matchup. Understanding what cards they value pre-board and post-board, as well as their general view of the matchup, can hopefully allow you to make better decisions when using your own cards. Mulligans, Cabal Therapy, and baiting Counterspells are all decisions that will make or break a game, but they can be tough to make in the dark. By hearing from the Miracles point of view, you will be better poised to understand the nuances of these critical decisions.

Anuraag Das

(AnziD): Anuraag first started playing Miracles in 2014, and has been a fervent disciple of the deck since. His finishes include a win at Eternal Extravaganza 6 and Top 8 at SCG Worcester in 2015. He sometimes streams at www.twitch.tv/anzi104, where you can find him browsing the internet for dogs and sweet Miracles tech. Sam Roukas

(TheZooKeeper): Sam is a mainstay of the middle of the MTGO trophy leaderboard, earning him a small amount of influence in the community. He has a positive lifetime record (2-1) against his hero Bryant Cook, with his latest and most stunning victory coming from a Force of Will buried 3 cards down, just in reach of Brainstorm. His Legacy career is highlighted by long history of registering underpowered Tundra decks to donate entry for the sake of the eventual top 8 competitors.

How favored do you feel in the first game? What is TES’s best path to victory pre-board? Is it better for TES to be fast and loose or grindy and cautious? Honestly? I feel like I need to get a little lucky to win as Rite of Flame makes this deck too fast to consistently handle. The most important factor that determines my pre-board win rate is the number of Counterbalance s in my list. In general, if 3 or more, I feel favored; any less and the games get a bit dicier. Counterbalance is especially critical as once it is deployed I care much less about Cabal Therapy and Duress . Additionally, Counterbalance is able to turn part of the bad half of my deck – Swords to Plowshares – into something relevant. The scariest games versus TES are the ones where my opponent casts a discard spell on turn one and combos off on turn two. Because my game one deck is full of chaff like Swords to Plowshares, even if I cantrip it’s mathematically unlikely that I will have enough interaction to beat multiple discard spells and the combo. The problem with giving the Miracles deck time is that it just lets them dig deeper for Counterbalance, and once Counterbalance is in play it is much easier to stop the combo. Obviously in the situations where your cards tell you to grind you grind, but if you have the decision to choose between “fast and loose” or “grindy and cautious”, definitely go for the first option. Pre-board it depends on Miracles’ keep. Miracles has a wide range of keepable hands in the dark but only some are playable against TES. The good news is you’ll find out very quickly. The bad news is a good chunk are totally unplayable and have no way to fix it before losing.

In any case, I think TES should be aggressive against fair blue decks because the relative quality of TES’ draws doesn’t improve over time, where Miracles’ does.

Obviously these guidelines are dependent on a few in-game factors, but TES typically dictates the pace of the game and the pendulum will swing slowly but surely toward Miracles as it drags on.

In the past, TES would sometimes try to play a “grindier” game against Miracles after sideboarding. Do you think this is still the best strategy, or should they try to be as quick as possible? Why? It really just boils down to how much risk the TES player is comfortable with. Personally I am most afraid of the quick turn 2 kill with discard backup. However, the reason I am afraid of that more than a grindy game is because it’s the part of the game where I haven’t had time to sculpt my hand and am forced to rely on my opening 7 cards for resilience. The reason I say it’s a matter of risk aversion is because the probability of finding a way to answer an early combo is something the Storm player doesn’t really have control over. You could Duress my Force of Will on t1, but if I chose to have an irrational amount of Storm hate that weekend, I could very likely draw something to stop your “blind” combo next turn. That’s why I would personally suggest playing the grindy route – it’s safer. Yes, if you give the Miracles opponent infinite time they can amass unbeatable game states, but I think it’s fair to say that if both players min-max optimally “infinite time” is less likely than is needed to win. I think the best option is trying to resolve Ad Nauseam quickly. Granted that’s not always possible in Post-board games, where Miracles is more likely to have multiple early interactive spells and TES takes on deadweight in the form of Abrupt Decay or other cards that aren’t mana, tutors, or filtering.

That said, long games inevitably favor Miracles as it establishes mana to cast spells and picks up interaction. Neither of those is a good situation for TES.

Ideally, the TES player will cantrip for action with an eye toward executing the combo as soon as there’s an opening. It’s also possible to disguise which resource is their choke point, potentially leading the Miracles player to counter the wrong thing and let TES combo freely.

What is the biggest mistake you see storm players often make against Miracles? What is the biggest mistake you see Miracles players often make against Storm? The biggest mistake I see Storm players make is exposing themselves to Surgical Extraction . I think I’ve mentioned it many times, but Surgical Extraction is just so good at removing subsets of problems in the matchup. There are a couple sly ways to abuse Surgical Extraction that some players are unaware of, and they revolve around cheating priority. This brilliant puzzle by Yuuta Takahashi is a great example of the kind of opportunity I look for. Essentially, using a fetchland here allows you to retain priority before the Storm opponent can cast that second Cabal Therapy or flashback Past in Flames . Another really cool way I’ve discovered is to use Flusterstorm to do the same thing. After resolving the Storm trigger, your opponent will let the spell get countered without paying any of the copies. However, the other copies are still on the stack… and before those copies disappear, the Miracles player can fire off a Surgical Extraction for max value. It’s much harder for me to say the other way around, but if I had to guess, it’d be identifying the crucial spells at any given point in the game. More specifically, I think ritual spells are countered far less than they should be. In situations where my hand is just ridiculously full of countermagic, the ways I can still lose are when my Storm opponent uses oodles of excess mana to get around Flusterstorm or cast Past in Flames twice in a turn. Especially if I have pressure or have seen my opponent stock up on discard spells via Infernal Tutor, I like to attack the ritual effects since it stops the Storm deck from going all-out in one turn. One of the dead giveaways that I need to shift gears is when my opponent casts Gitaxian Probe, sees 2 or 3 Counterspells, and then casts Dark Ritual. At that point, I need to ask myself what cards they could have that merit such a play and adjust accordingly. It’s not an easy skill to master, and the only reason I even know this is underrated is because I’ve died many, many times when I thought I had the game wrapped up. https://twitter.com/Vendilion/status/801463454347370496 I think Storm players make a few mistakes consistently against Miracles. The most common I see is using all of their discard early, but not saving any for the combo turn to strip a freshly drawn Counterspell or go off with perfect information. For a storm player this is inexcusable because it’s fundamental to playing combo with discard.

The other common mistake I see is discarding cards that are good in the matchup, but not relevant to the current game-state or the TES player’s hand. My favorite example is taking Brainstorm from an otherwise great Miracles hand. There’s some benefit to removing the choice Brainstorm affords, but if Miracles already has all the interaction they need, what else were they going to find with that Brainstorm anyway?

Conversely, the most common mistake I see from Miracles players is not understanding the danger of tapping out at various points in the game. Sometimes Miracles needs to take calculated risks, but knowing when it’s acceptable is a skill that comes with practice.

For more great content on the Miralces match-up versus TES matchup:

on theepicstorm.com

on theepicstorm.com

on theepicstorm.com