It may well be true that Serum Visions was the card to cut, but that wasn’t what my preliminary testing and consultations showed. I do ask around and try out decks before starting the testing and while it was close, Sleight was the pick. The problem I had wasn’t fizzling during the combo, I think that happened ten times total, but getting to the point where I *could* combo. The majority of my losses were becauseI just couldn’t find all the pieces I needed to actually go off before I died. Having Merchant Scroll for Gifts may have solved that problem, but I can’t say for certain. The fact that Sleight was better midcombo was largely irrelevant as far as I could tell; I needed the extra looks from Visions. That’s why I kept it.

As for just playing more cantrips, I’m not certain there’s room for that. Storm is a pretty tight list and I don’t think Gifts is cutable. It appeared better to me to keep that package and just run 8 cantrips.

Yes. Yes they were. I’ll be fixing that.

In storm, preordain (digs up to 3 cards deep* on combo turn) is better than serum visions (always 1 card deep). Sleight of hand (always 2 cards deep) is also better than serum visions in a combo deck of this kind.

As others have mentioned, serum visions was the card to cut for preordain, not sleight of hand.

Also, the power (and potential problem) of having more “good” cantrips in a format like Modern is that you get to play more of them in your deck! If you’re just subbing out like-for-like and basically building the same deck again with one marginally better cantrip instead of another, I’m not surprised you didn’t see much improvement.

That said, 3 cards deep* is a lot better than 1 card deep. I realise you’ve done the testing now and put the hours in, but it might be worth consulting your audience (or at least a focus group) before making cuts or replacing cards like you did with Storm here.

Thanks for all the work though bud. You’re putting a lot of effort into this.

* 3rd card is random if you choose bottom-bottom on your scry.

And, on an empyrical level, i play a lot of combo (mostly ad nauseam) ive lost a lot of games by visions not being preordain (A LOT) but ive never felt bad casting sleight