Mind's Desire
Storm's defining liability and its defining payoff in one spell. Where Tendrils of Agony drains a fixed two per copy and Brain Freeze mills a fixed three, this one copies an effect whose value scales with whatever your library is hiding: each copy shuffles, exiles the top card, and hands you a free cast. The friction is that you have to convert those free cards back into storm count, which is why this was never a finisher so much as a doubling engine. Cast enough rituals and cantrips to build the count, resolve Mind's Desire, and the copies chain into more spells, though the original cast never benefits from the cascade it sets off (storm copies on the stack count only what was cast before, not the free spells you generate while resolving). The mandatory shuffle is the catch the wishful player forgets: it scrubs any top-deck setup you have done, so the engine is built on volume and free mana, not on stacking the deck. The free-cast clause is what lets a deck keep going off without ever touching its mana again. The design tension it resolves is how to make a single payoff snowball off your own engine rather than off a static count, and the answer (copy a free-cast effect rather than a fixed one) is exactly why it reads as fair on paper and obscene in practice: a six-mana sorcery that doubled as a turn-three kill.








