https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/playing-pauper-zubera-storm
Decklist to follow along with: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/2074621#paper

Chapter one: Overview

Zubera Storm is a tier two combo deck that is based around the card Floating-Dream Zubera. Repeatedly sacing it and then bringing it back from the graveyard allows you to draw a ridiculous amount of cards until you find Ember-Fist Zubera. It’s a challenging deck and requires the user to have a deep understanding of probability(and luck). You are going to have to take risks to find the cards that you need. The decks main shortcomings are the lack of backup plan and an inability to sideboard effectively. The main strengths are a relatively low average turn of combining off(4-5 is very common, 2-3 is possible), and a fairly consistent ability to find combo pieces thanks to shred memory. In a slow meta, this deck can be very competitive.

Chapter two: The Basics

Zubera Storm is an extremely complicated deck in some ways, and relatively easy in others. The basic combo is very simple, get a Floating-Dream Zubera on the battlefield along with a sac outlet and ways to bring it back to the battlefield repeatedly. This allows you to draw through your deck to find more mana and more ways to recover your Zubera until you finally have enough mana and ways to recover ember-fist Zubera that you kill your opponent. The difficult part of the combo is managing your resources, your deck will have around 13 sources of mana and 15 ways to recover Zubera’s. You have to balance both as you go through the first few repetitions of Zubera sacing. The general rule of thumb is that if you have 5 mana and 3 ways to recover your Zubera, you should be able to combo off 95% of the time. The difficult part is when you don’t have that much and you have to take risks. That is why Zubera Storm is so tricky at times.

Chapter 3: Basic combo play pattern

One of the trickiest parts of Zubera Storm is how the stack interacts. When a Zubera is saced after undying evil or supernatural stamina is played on it, the undying evil/supernatural stamina trigger will happen before the Zubera’s card draw trigger. The means that you can actually sacrifice it twice before drawing cards. This allows you to draw an extra card because the original card draw trigger counts both deaths to count towards the number of Zuberas put in the graveyard this turn. You will want to use this whenever you have an exhume or unearth in hand to bring it back from the graveyard. This can also be used without an unearth/exhume, but it is risky because you can get unlucky and not draw into a way to bring it back/a new one. In general when attempting to combo off you will want to alternate undying evil/supernatural stamina with unearth/exhume as much as possible. Once you find your ember-fist Zubera and have racked up 7-8 Zubera kills this turn. You will want to use lotus petal to get the red mana to cast it, so make sure that you save at least one throughout the entire combo turn.

Chapter 4: the risks

At times you are forced to attempt to combo off without having the golden 5 mana and 3 recover pieces(and even worse without a sac outlet). Here is a situation for example;

You have on the table a viscera seer, a Floating-dream Zubera, 4 lands which all produce black as well as 1 undying evil and 1 unearth in hand:

At this point you have a pretty good shot of going off, you can draw 7 cards(4 off sacing twice with undying evil, and three more after unearthing) as well as scry 1 three times(viscera seer) to find a way to produce mana(cabal ritual/dark ritual/culling the weak/and lotus petal) And bring the Zubera back(exhume/unearth if you scry 1 three times and draw 7 or exhume/unearth/undying evil/ supernatural stamina if you scry 1 twice then draw 4). After that, if you manage to find both, you have a good chance of managing to fully combo off.

Chapter 5: pre combo turns:

An important part of the deck is protecting your combo pieces. You have lots of ways to bring back Zuberas and sac outlets. However, every time you bring them back you make it harder to combo off later on in the game. Against an opponent who is playing a slow controlling deck, it is often correct to hold onto your sac outlet until the turn you try to combo off. Generally you will want your Zubera out the turn beforehand so that you have more mana to play with, but if he game goes long it can be a good idea to hold it as well. You should use shred memory on turn three if you can, so play tap lands on earlier turns if it is in your hand. You have every piece of the combo that you could need as singletons so that you can tutor them up with shred memory Bloodthrone vampire as a sac outlet, floating Dream Zubera, cabal ritual if you will need more mana, and exhume if you need more ways to recover zubera’s.

Chapter 6: the sideboard

You can’t really sideboard with Zubera Storm, it’s very challenging. Your entire mainboard is dedicated to the combo. You can take out shred memory(and the cards in it’s package for more combo pieces if you want to play a riskier(but faster)) gameplan. This is by far the weakest area of my build of this deck. I would gladly take suggestions for it if you have any.

Chapter 7: Conclusion

Is Zubera Storm for you?

Do you enjoy doing math in your head?

Do you enjoy drawing a ridiculous amount of cards?

Do I want to play a all-in combo deck?

Am I willing to have games where I get unlucky?

If you said yes to these questions you might want to try Zubera Storm. It’s a very fun deck that while known, isn’t a very common deck at the moment. If you have any questions and or comments please post below. I will do my best to answer any that I can.

TLDR: Zubera Storm is complicated but fun and semi-competitive.


2022 : https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/4914792#online
2023 : https://mtgdecks.net/Pauper/zubera-storm-decklist-by-peppyon-1573453