Been seeing alot of posts over the past few months about why Noxious Revival should/should not be in the deck. Here's a quick rundown of why you absolutely SHOULD have it in the deck:
1. Our most common kill condition is to have a bear in play and the ability to make 6 mana before casting Gifts. If you have Noxious in your deck, you can kill with the ability to make only 5 mana if your hand contains either a Manamorphose or a PiF
2. Noxious makes the deck less reliant on bears to kill. A common line you run with a Noxious is casting Grapeshot, cast Noxious to put the shot back on top, draw it again with either a morphose or a cantrip, and then grapeshot again. Realize that that is a double grapeshot for potentially only 4 mana with only a single copy of shot without a bear. Compare that to the other common line to double shot in the deck, going Grapeshot-Remand-Grapeshot; without a bear, that line costs 6 mana, which is considerably more challenging.
3. You can Gifts for a guaranteed bear by going Baral, Goblin, Noxious, other card (usually PiF or Grapeshot). Very valuable if your hand is poised to go off but needs the bear to beat counterspells for example.
4. You can get a guaranteed ritual with Rit, Rit, Noxious, other. Similarly, you can get bounce with Repeal, Wipe, Noxious, other. Basically any effect in your deck that you have two of (rituals, cantrips, etc) you can guarantee having one of by making gifts piles with Noxious
5. On a turn where you are land light and need to go off with a bear, and the opp has removal, Noxious makes the kill almost trivial. For example, if you have a hand full of rituals and already have a pretty stocked GY (meaning it would be easy to win if you can stick a bear), but you only have 3 lands which makes beating removal harder. In this situation, if you have access to Noxious either through your hand or in the GY after a PiF, you can play through the single removal spell, PiF, and then use Noxious plus a morphose or cantrip to get your bear back and finish the combo from there. That kill would be challenging without access to a second bear, which Noxious gives you
6. Having Noxious makes it alot easier to beat Surgical Extraction--this is not just a corner case. By prioritizing getting a Noxious online (either in your hand or active from a PiF in the GY) before you grab a Grapeshot with a Gifts pile gives the opp no window to ever hit your storm card with a Surgical. This requires some maneuvering, because you need to be careful about allowing a Grapeshot or Empty to go to the GY before you have the ability to cast a Noxious, but once you get it online their surgical is useless.
Those are the major points, there are a ton of small plays that come up every once in a while, but these stated reasons should convince you to keep Noxious in your decks. The card disadvantage argument is not valid to discredit the level of flexibility that Noxious gives your deck; just look at all the top finishing storm decks from the past few months and you'll see that they've reached the same conclusion.
Let me reiterate my position: I'm totally fine with differing opinions, I think that's a really good thing because it helps all of us think critically and get better overall. What I think we all need is constructive debate, however. We don't want to drive anyone away, as the number of storm pilots are low to start, and we're all working towards the same goal here as a community.
All control decks have a very slow clock, and you still have remands for it. 2 power flash creatures aren't a clock at all. If I do not have any trouble beating any kind of control deck and you do, either I've been incredibly lucky in dozens of games or I am doing something you aren't. And because I consider I've played enough games to dismiss luck as a key factor... I'm sorry, but if you consistently lose against any contro deck (jeskai, uw, ub, grixis...) you're probably doing something wrong. Either wrong approach, wrong sideboarding, wrong timing on your plays, or a combination of all 3. Obviously personal experience and skills are super important, I remember once asking bennyhillz (the best UW player online) about his win % against storm, since UW has been for me the easiest deck to beat and I was curious about the difference, and he was like 50-50 against storm while I am 90-10 against UW. Huge differences simply due to being better with your deck than the average opponent with his.
My general advice for any MU you might consider ''bad'' is that you should be trying to find out what you're doing wrong and work hard on trying to correct it rather than just assuming ''I'm dead to X and Y'' and that's it. Do something about it, change your plays, change your sideboard, change something, and be patient. You can always improve. But whatever.
Dude you shouldn't flame a guy because he has a different opinion than you. There's absolutely no way the matchup is 90-10 in your favor, and any good control player can make it tough for you to win. Experience definitely plays a huge part, but it's not everything. Their good draws are sometimes pretty challenging
I'm still on the 15 one-mana cantrip version with Opts and Peeks. I just hate how when Remand is dead, it's truly dead. It's definitely fantastic against the big mana decks and does give you additional graveyard padding, but the number of times I've wished Remand was another cantrip has been many. I really like the information you gain with Peek, I'm not ready to completely write it off just yet
The sideboard from Louisville list isn't entirely correct. He played at least with one Swan Song. In the stream appear 1 Swan Song and 1 Wipe Away, insted of 2 Wipe Away.
He mentioned on Twitter that he meant that slot to be the second Wipe Away, but that he couldn't find an extra copy at the event, so he had to put in a Swan Song instead
Appalling. Absolutely appalling. You're going to sit here and denigrate a man with one of the most successful event streaks with the deck ever because he doesn't agree with your assessment of the correct build? Shame on you.
His play are not "unexpected", as his sideboard strategies have been written about by both himself and by Emma Handy on SCG. His lack of success with his online stream is due to 1. Trying out new ideas every stream that may or may not work, and 2. Trying to simultaneously answer chat questions while playing an already difficult deck, which undoubtedly creates some mistakes.
How is finding ANY specific card in Fetch storm easier than Fetchless? Variance reduction due to a greater number of cantrips increases your odds to find any individual card. Just because you struggled to find an Empty in your "few" playtested games does not imply that the math is worse for Fetchless to find its cards. I suggest you refer to introductory statistics if you have inquiries about this idea.
I take no issue with Fetch Storm at all; both decks, while still running the core Gifts kills, are looking to achieve that goal through slightly different avenues, with Fetch storm looking to force medallion bears onto the table while Fetchless is designed to be less reliant on the bears and have greater velocity. They both obviously compete and have their own pros and cons.
As a community, we cannot embrace this closed-off mindset. We should be excited that there appears to be TWO very viable strategies for the deck, with each having slightly different playstyles and lines to take. Feel free to disagree with me, but I am not afraid to call out toxic commentary when I see it.
Guys, a theorical question regarding sideboard. When do you side out Vials?
I side out vials against Dredge, Burn, Affinity, Storm, Ad Nauseam, Tron (not the eldrazi one
I disagree siding out Vial against Storm and Ad Naus. Pressure is excellent in those matchups, and Vial helps provide that additional pressure in the midgame to close out faster. You need to give them the fewest number of turns possible; otherwise, they will find a way to power through disruption.
Vial is also really important against those strategies to deny them of resources with Flickerwisp. Having the ability to blink a Baral or Goblin Electromancer for the storm player's entire turn usually can prevent them from going off that turn, and sometimes denying a land or blinking a Phyrexian Unlife against Ad Naus can buy you the extra turn you need to win.
I think its worth saying that neither of the mana bases are "wrong" per say. It depends on how your deck is constructed. If you're running heavy on Remand and you would like to have Blood Moon as a sideboard threat, the fetches are great. If you run additional Peer Through Depths and/or Peek, the fetchless base is going to show its value. I'm running fetchless with additional cantrips right now and it feels great.
I agree with including Noxious Revival; I was a naysayer of the card in the past, but it actually opens up so many additional lines to kill with that it's indispensable. There will be times where it's a dead draw, but you can say that about many of the cards in the deck.
My feeling is that the distinction between the two builds--the fetchless versions with more cantrips and the 4 Remand 4 Grapeshot version--will eventually take the same shape that ANT and TES do in Legacy in that both decks, while moving towards a similar win condition, take relatively different approaches to get there. This results in two legitimate options that any storm pilot can use.
I feel like if we are going the 4 YP route (just like Deathstroke did) we should look at Logic Knot and Deprive as possible counters. With 4 Thought Scour and only 2 Tasigur, running a number of Logic Knots should go without any problems. Deprive on the other hand basically becomes counterspell with a YP out as you can "pay" for it with a token and immediately get a new one of the cast trigger.
Be aware that cutting Delve creatures generally makes the big mana matchups worse because the YP clock can't kill as reliably as a quick Tasigur. I'm definitely going to try it out though, I haven't sleeved up mys YP's in a long time
If you cast even 2 cantrips, the maintaining of your scrys outweighs the thinning of your deck. In a sense, scrying thins your deck because with very few shuffle effects, you're not going to be seeing those cards for a long time. Caleb also runs more Peers to maximize this effect, along with more 1 mana cantrips (he's between Peek, Quicken, and Thought Scour at the moment. I've been testing no fetches since the Open, and I feel like it makes the deck a TON more consistent. Try it out, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. And this is coming from someone who owns a playset of Tarns in paper
After some evaluation of the plan of dropping remand I have to say I'm not with it. First reason, it presents the same card cycling as thought scour. It just isn't that much of a consistently change but you lose all interaction. So many of storm games go turn two remand, untap win, where without that remand you were dead. Not to mention with burn and eldrazi tron raging rn, remand is well placed. Remanding chalice or eidelon and then gaining one more turn, aka one more draw and one more land play to win is insanely huge. And I'll point out that Caleb didn't get taken out by tron. Thought scour seems superior against GDS, but even then it can be useful, comboing while holding it up for there interactions. Pieces of the puzzle is insane, if you aren't sideboarding it yet, add it ASAP.
A couple points:
- Scour digs deeper than Remand, as it lets you see 3 cards instead of 1 fresh one. Occasionally Remand lets you see 2 if Baral is out.
- Scour doesn't require your opponent to cast something. If you need to cast Remand on one of your own spells for the cantripping ability, you would have probably been better off just Scouring on an earlier turn so you didn't have to be put into that situation
- Remand is really bad against burn most of the time. Yes, countering a turn 2 Eidolon is good, but it sucks against the majority of their spells, and is not something I want to be seeing in postboard games. I do agree with you that Remand is really good against all the Tron variants. I will say, however, that basically the only turn 2 plays that could completely shut us down are Eidolon, Thalia, and potentially Leonin Arbiter depending on what your hand looks like. Chalice on 1 doesn't affect us much, and the odds of Etron hitting natural tron into Chalice on 2 turn 3 is pretty low, so I see that as a corner case. RIP can also be a challenge, but if you were expecting it your SB plan should be able to get around that
- Caleb actually did lose in the quarterfinals against Etron. He also lost to 2 Grixis Shadow decks in the Swiss, but his sideboard looks pretty good for that matchup and Remand is again not fantastic against Shadow because all of their spells are really cheap
- And I totally agree that Pieces is excellent, I'm running a couple at the moment in the board.
Remand is not an incorrect card to play by any means, but I think if you want to use it you want to be further on the Grapeshot-Remand-Grapeshot gameplan like some other lists we've seen here in the thread. The minimization of variance in those decks' cases is the fact that they can make that specific line quite often because they run 4 Remand and 3-4 Grapeshot
Hey players, I was at the SCG, drew very bad matchups in the open, Burn *2, deaths shadow, jund, Rock, Eldrazi tron and was taken out in round 7 by a rogue enduring ideal deck. Saw Caleb playing, I'm guessing the 0 fetch plan was a meda call against all the Leonins and avens in modern right now. Based off the decks I saw didn't seem like the right call, blood moon was very good in the meda and you'll want fetches for that. Remand is insanity and was very good in this meda. I can't say I know why Caleb dropped it, but he is a very intelligent player. Based off my experience and calebs list I am going to be trying swan song in the sideboard, besides that, my list was exactly what I wanted. Day 2 I entered the classic, 260 players. My matchups were burn*2, affinity*2, valakut, mono green devotion, baby eldrazi, blue white control, and blue moon. Made top 8 and then lost to burn. Here is my decklist http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=115390
Any matchup questions, I'm keen to reply.
Running 0 fetches to fade leonin arbiter is a very interesting meta choice, but yeah the threat of blood moon is a very appealing reason to be on the fetch plan to get your basic islands. I think if your meta is lousy with hatebears then it's worth considering, though they've other tricks that can be even bigger pains in the ass (I saw at FNM this past week a restore balance deck respond to a 20-storm grapeshot with a quickened Oketra's Last Mercy after most of them resolved. The salt was so thick you could attract deer with it.)
I've been testing Scherer's no fetch list and it feels fantastic. Having no fetches in the deck makes all our scrys much better. In most games, we're favored to win if we ever see a Gifts, so this is helping to reduce the variance quite alot.
Scherer also dropped Remand from his list, which I personally like. By reintroducing Thought Scour into the deck and playing 2 Peer, the card velocity of the deck increases. You see more cards, which in turn makes the deck more consistent. For those of us that were on previous iterations of the deck with Pyromancer's Ascension, you'll remember that card velocity was one of the fundamental principles that made the deck tick, and even though this version of Storm is a bit different, the underlying idea that velocity lowers variance is still there. Just look at Death's Shadow, for example; they churn through their deck with cantrips and Street Wraith, and each of their games plays very similarly because this variance is reduced. With us, we need to churn through more of our deck to ensure we're mitigating variance as well. This is especially pertinent for Storm because we need so many pieces to come together at once, with Gifts being the keystone of the whole plan.
While we do lose out on the Grapeshot-Remand lines, playing 3 Grapeshot somewhat mitigates this issue. Scherer said on Twitter that Remand either wins the game or is a dead draw; I tend to move away from cards that are either amazing or dead manindeck, especially in a deck like this, so I believe that there's justification for cutting Remand.
This deck is all about statistics, and this build is an excellent example of minimizing variance
Does Kor Firewalker do work against Grapeshot, by the way? The wording is not really clear if the copies are cast or 'played' (for lack of a proper wording).
I run a couple of Firewalkers in my sideboard for Burn and Skred Red (which shows up quite a lot in my local meta).
Kor Firewalker is in the same camp as Burrenton Forge-Tender. When Grapeshot's storm trigger occurs, it puts a number of copies of Grapeshot equal to the number of spells cast before it that turn DIRECTLY on the stack. These copies are not cast, they just go on the stack, so Firewalker would only trigger for the original Grapeshot, meaning you would only gain 1 life
This is the same reason that casting a Grapeshot doesn't immediately double your storm count; if you cast a Grapeshot with a storm of 10, and then cast another Grapeshot after the first and all of it's copies resolve, your storm count will only be 11 instead of 21
Also note that because the copies of Grapeshot are not cast, Thalia's tax does not apply to them. So the original Grapeshot will have a tax imposed (base cost will be 3 instead of 2), but all of the Grapeshot copies will be unaffected. Same thing goes for Empty the Warrens
The last two previous Grixis Delver list that made top 8 in some events both had 2 Inquisitions and 2 Thoughtseize in the 75. The Enigma Drake list had 2 Inquisition and 2 Thoughtseize in the main. This list has 2 IoK in the main and 2 TS in the side. It seems like discard package is a great card in Delver right now.
The thing that makes me worried with moving towards more discard is that you start to turn the deck into a proactive rather than a reactive strategy. The reason this works for decks like Jund or Death's Shadow is that they have, on average, better topdecks than you because the raw power level of their cards is higher. We in general do not have that powerful lategame topdeck ability because we're not packing as many "haymakers" as those traditional discard strategies. Our deck runs alot more on synergy and reactive disruption, so-called "nickel and dimeing", rather than poking a hole in the opponent's defense and powering through that opening, which is exactly what you see from other discard decks.
Now this isn't to say that discard is bad for us; I've been running a couple Thoughtseize in the board for quite a while now which has been great against Tron and combo. All I'm saying is that the more we move into maindeck discard, the quicker we become bad Shadow
Any thoughts on Collective Brutality in the current meta? I'm running 2 in the board atm and find myself only bringing it in against Burn/Zoo and Storm so it feels really akward atm.
It's still solid against any of the CoCo variants, which can be problematic for us if they ramp too quickly and hit on their companies. I think it's worth at least a 1-of in the board for the utility
A lot of PPTQ are coming near my area and here's the list I thought I would run. I don't have the Canopies but I believe I'd be able to borrow them so I want to focus on the main elements of the deck. Cavern of Souls naming Cat, Human or Angel is very good. Iterating on Merry's list I've cut one Mirran Crusader and one Serra Avenger to make room for a Brimaz, King of Oreskos and a Gisela, the Broken Blade. The latter is more of a meta call, since a lot of decks are now replacing Lightning Bolt in favor of Terminate. Once Gisela hits the battlefield it requires immediate action before she starts snowballing into a victory which in turn, leaves the main engine in place. In match-ups where Bolts are played (Blue Moon, Red, some variants of Jeskai Control) she can be easily boarded out for Dusk // Dawn (which I believe is a must verses control to out-value them and keep up tempo-wise).
The Brimaz on the other-end is just an all-around good creature. With vial on three, opponents will be playing around a Flickerwisp, not a Brimaz. It can quickly fill up your board to put even more pressure without capitalizing too much on board presence while also dodging Bolts on the few match-up where they are present.
All around I think the main deck list is quite good, I've been playing it for some days on MTGO and I think it does fine. My only problem right now is the sideboard. I feel like control match-ups are the worst against us. That's why Linvala and Dusk // Dawn are here. The former shots down man lands and planeswalker while the second one gets all our critters back once they've been countered. Sunlance is there for creatures that need-to-be-bolted-but-we're-stuck-in-white like Noble HierarchSignal Pest and a bunch of others. BFT is a must for the Burn and Storm MU. Overrall I think the sideboard covers a lot of the meta, but I'd like to hear you guys.
Unless you're bringing in Burrenton Forge-Tender against Storm for Bolts or Angers, it's not going to do much for you in that matchup. When you cast Grapeshot, it puts extra copies of the spell onto the stack that are all seperate instances of Grapeshot. So if you sac Forge Tender to prevent, you only actually end up preventing 1 damage out of the double digit storm that's about to hit you, which really isn't worth it
1. Our most common kill condition is to have a bear in play and the ability to make 6 mana before casting Gifts. If you have Noxious in your deck, you can kill with the ability to make only 5 mana if your hand contains either a Manamorphose or a PiF
2. Noxious makes the deck less reliant on bears to kill. A common line you run with a Noxious is casting Grapeshot, cast Noxious to put the shot back on top, draw it again with either a morphose or a cantrip, and then grapeshot again. Realize that that is a double grapeshot for potentially only 4 mana with only a single copy of shot without a bear. Compare that to the other common line to double shot in the deck, going Grapeshot-Remand-Grapeshot; without a bear, that line costs 6 mana, which is considerably more challenging.
3. You can Gifts for a guaranteed bear by going Baral, Goblin, Noxious, other card (usually PiF or Grapeshot). Very valuable if your hand is poised to go off but needs the bear to beat counterspells for example.
4. You can get a guaranteed ritual with Rit, Rit, Noxious, other. Similarly, you can get bounce with Repeal, Wipe, Noxious, other. Basically any effect in your deck that you have two of (rituals, cantrips, etc) you can guarantee having one of by making gifts piles with Noxious
5. On a turn where you are land light and need to go off with a bear, and the opp has removal, Noxious makes the kill almost trivial. For example, if you have a hand full of rituals and already have a pretty stocked GY (meaning it would be easy to win if you can stick a bear), but you only have 3 lands which makes beating removal harder. In this situation, if you have access to Noxious either through your hand or in the GY after a PiF, you can play through the single removal spell, PiF, and then use Noxious plus a morphose or cantrip to get your bear back and finish the combo from there. That kill would be challenging without access to a second bear, which Noxious gives you
6. Having Noxious makes it alot easier to beat Surgical Extraction--this is not just a corner case. By prioritizing getting a Noxious online (either in your hand or active from a PiF in the GY) before you grab a Grapeshot with a Gifts pile gives the opp no window to ever hit your storm card with a Surgical. This requires some maneuvering, because you need to be careful about allowing a Grapeshot or Empty to go to the GY before you have the ability to cast a Noxious, but once you get it online their surgical is useless.
Those are the major points, there are a ton of small plays that come up every once in a while, but these stated reasons should convince you to keep Noxious in your decks. The card disadvantage argument is not valid to discredit the level of flexibility that Noxious gives your deck; just look at all the top finishing storm decks from the past few months and you'll see that they've reached the same conclusion.
And humility is a virtue for the record
His play are not "unexpected", as his sideboard strategies have been written about by both himself and by Emma Handy on SCG. His lack of success with his online stream is due to 1. Trying out new ideas every stream that may or may not work, and 2. Trying to simultaneously answer chat questions while playing an already difficult deck, which undoubtedly creates some mistakes.
How is finding ANY specific card in Fetch storm easier than Fetchless? Variance reduction due to a greater number of cantrips increases your odds to find any individual card. Just because you struggled to find an Empty in your "few" playtested games does not imply that the math is worse for Fetchless to find its cards. I suggest you refer to introductory statistics if you have inquiries about this idea.
I take no issue with Fetch Storm at all; both decks, while still running the core Gifts kills, are looking to achieve that goal through slightly different avenues, with Fetch storm looking to force medallion bears onto the table while Fetchless is designed to be less reliant on the bears and have greater velocity. They both obviously compete and have their own pros and cons.
As a community, we cannot embrace this closed-off mindset. We should be excited that there appears to be TWO very viable strategies for the deck, with each having slightly different playstyles and lines to take. Feel free to disagree with me, but I am not afraid to call out toxic commentary when I see it.
Vial is also really important against those strategies to deny them of resources with Flickerwisp. Having the ability to blink a Baral or Goblin Electromancer for the storm player's entire turn usually can prevent them from going off that turn, and sometimes denying a land or blinking a Phyrexian Unlife against Ad Naus can buy you the extra turn you need to win.
I agree with including Noxious Revival; I was a naysayer of the card in the past, but it actually opens up so many additional lines to kill with that it's indispensable. There will be times where it's a dead draw, but you can say that about many of the cards in the deck.
My feeling is that the distinction between the two builds--the fetchless versions with more cantrips and the 4 Remand 4 Grapeshot version--will eventually take the same shape that ANT and TES do in Legacy in that both decks, while moving towards a similar win condition, take relatively different approaches to get there. This results in two legitimate options that any storm pilot can use.
Be aware that cutting Delve creatures generally makes the big mana matchups worse because the YP clock can't kill as reliably as a quick Tasigur. I'm definitely going to try it out though, I haven't sleeved up mys YP's in a long time
- Scour digs deeper than Remand, as it lets you see 3 cards instead of 1 fresh one. Occasionally Remand lets you see 2 if Baral is out.
- Scour doesn't require your opponent to cast something. If you need to cast Remand on one of your own spells for the cantripping ability, you would have probably been better off just Scouring on an earlier turn so you didn't have to be put into that situation
- Remand is really bad against burn most of the time. Yes, countering a turn 2 Eidolon is good, but it sucks against the majority of their spells, and is not something I want to be seeing in postboard games. I do agree with you that Remand is really good against all the Tron variants. I will say, however, that basically the only turn 2 plays that could completely shut us down are Eidolon, Thalia, and potentially Leonin Arbiter depending on what your hand looks like. Chalice on 1 doesn't affect us much, and the odds of Etron hitting natural tron into Chalice on 2 turn 3 is pretty low, so I see that as a corner case. RIP can also be a challenge, but if you were expecting it your SB plan should be able to get around that
- Caleb actually did lose in the quarterfinals against Etron. He also lost to 2 Grixis Shadow decks in the Swiss, but his sideboard looks pretty good for that matchup and Remand is again not fantastic against Shadow because all of their spells are really cheap
- And I totally agree that Pieces is excellent, I'm running a couple at the moment in the board.
Remand is not an incorrect card to play by any means, but I think if you want to use it you want to be further on the Grapeshot-Remand-Grapeshot gameplan like some other lists we've seen here in the thread. The minimization of variance in those decks' cases is the fact that they can make that specific line quite often because they run 4 Remand and 3-4 Grapeshot
Scherer also dropped Remand from his list, which I personally like. By reintroducing Thought Scour into the deck and playing 2 Peer, the card velocity of the deck increases. You see more cards, which in turn makes the deck more consistent. For those of us that were on previous iterations of the deck with Pyromancer's Ascension, you'll remember that card velocity was one of the fundamental principles that made the deck tick, and even though this version of Storm is a bit different, the underlying idea that velocity lowers variance is still there. Just look at Death's Shadow, for example; they churn through their deck with cantrips and Street Wraith, and each of their games plays very similarly because this variance is reduced. With us, we need to churn through more of our deck to ensure we're mitigating variance as well. This is especially pertinent for Storm because we need so many pieces to come together at once, with Gifts being the keystone of the whole plan.
While we do lose out on the Grapeshot-Remand lines, playing 3 Grapeshot somewhat mitigates this issue. Scherer said on Twitter that Remand either wins the game or is a dead draw; I tend to move away from cards that are either amazing or dead manindeck, especially in a deck like this, so I believe that there's justification for cutting Remand.
This deck is all about statistics, and this build is an excellent example of minimizing variance
This is the same reason that casting a Grapeshot doesn't immediately double your storm count; if you cast a Grapeshot with a storm of 10, and then cast another Grapeshot after the first and all of it's copies resolve, your storm count will only be 11 instead of 21
Also note that because the copies of Grapeshot are not cast, Thalia's tax does not apply to them. So the original Grapeshot will have a tax imposed (base cost will be 3 instead of 2), but all of the Grapeshot copies will be unaffected. Same thing goes for Empty the Warrens
Now this isn't to say that discard is bad for us; I've been running a couple Thoughtseize in the board for quite a while now which has been great against Tron and combo. All I'm saying is that the more we move into maindeck discard, the quicker we become bad Shadow
It's still solid against any of the CoCo variants, which can be problematic for us if they ramp too quickly and hit on their companies. I think it's worth at least a 1-of in the board for the utility
Unless you're bringing in Burrenton Forge-Tender against Storm for Bolts or Angers, it's not going to do much for you in that matchup. When you cast Grapeshot, it puts extra copies of the spell onto the stack that are all seperate instances of Grapeshot. So if you sac Forge Tender to prevent, you only actually end up preventing 1 damage out of the double digit storm that's about to hit you, which really isn't worth it