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Sometimes a deck catches my eye because of some subtle deviation from an established archetype, and others I see a card that I don't normally see, or in an unusual quantity. My eyes definitely stopped on the 9th place list from the MOCS qualifier when I saw 4 Noxious Revival.
The four Visions of Beyond struck me, too, but I still haven't entirely figured out those ones.
Noxious Storm
Noxious Revival does a couple cool things in this deck. For starters, it's like having extra copies of your most important card in Pyromancer Ascension. If your opponent can't stop you from setting up Ascension, then winning is pretty easy. If they can stop you, then Noxious Revival gives you another go. It's also decent when you have Ascension in play, as you can rebuy a card that you have multiple copies of in your graveyard to turn the Ascension on. Manamorphose and twoNoxious Revivals can also go infinite under active Ascension with some cantrips.
Lastly, Noxious Revival buys you time in tandem with Cryptic Command. If you're able to tap your opponents creatures and draw a card, then you'll still be getting a card deeper in your deck despite fixing your draw step. I also imagine that you end up in some situations where you can even counter + draw and then just get your Cryptic back.
I'm clueless on the Visions of Beyond, the Minamo, and the Oboro. Two of those are probably just to give you some action against Choke. I really like the Noxious Revival tech though.
I’ve seen this deck list floating around (first noticed it on MTG top 8) but I’ve yet to see a proper primer or deck tech. I clicked this article hoping for something that would explain lines of play beyond what I could intuitively figure out based on a cursory reading of the list.
This article didn’t even explain what the deck’s wincon is! After studying the list a bit, I figured out that you’re supposed to start doming your opponent with Lightning Bolt and recurring it once you go infinite with Noxious Revival and Manamorphose, but the purpose of articles like this should be to explain things like this in explicit terms, rather than leaving them for me to puzzle out.
Disappointed with this article, hope someone does a proper deck tech at some point because this does look like a very cool deck.
Can also try to deck them with thought scour depending on what you have when you start going off.
These posts never claim to be nor try to act as primers. The idea is to shine more light on obscure, cool decks. Everything I post here is something that looks new and innovative to me, and as such I have never played this deck or most of the other Overview decks that I post- nor do I claim to be an expert on how they work.
In fact, I’m a little embarassed to admit that I didn’t notice the lack of Grapeshots in this deck. If I did, I’d have expounded more on the Noxious loop.
“Everything I post here is something that looks new and innovative to me”
As I stated, this deck is also something that looks new and innovative to me as well. And that’s all the more reason why it’s important to answer the basic question of “how does this deck win the game?”
Imagine you’re explaining UR Twin to someone who has never played the deck before. You could talk about how the deck tries to play a controlling game with Remand and Cryptic Command. You could neglect to mention things like the fact that Keranos out of the sideboard acts as a secondary wincon, and that would be fine for an article that doesn’t aim to be comprehensive. But at some point you should point out that the deck can win by putting Splinter Twin on a mite/exarch and creating hundreds of hasty token copies.
If you’re writing a UR Twin guide for Twin players, then you don’t have to explain how the combo works; it’s fair to assume that your readers know the fundamentals when you’re talking advanced strategy for a known archetype. But it seems weird to say, “I wrote this article to introduce the deck to people who are completely unfamiliar with this deck, and that’s why I didn’t explain the fundamentals of this deck.”