Sometimes a weird idea pops into my head and I'll theory-craft it for a while and eventually I'll throw something together. Sometimes those things work way better than they should, and I'll write down the list for future reference; I decided it was time to start sharing some of my favorites.

Here's today's list - Unfortunately this deck is a little steep to casually throw together unless you happen to have 32+ [[Shadowborn Apostles]] laying around as they're currently just under $4 per copy. Fortunately I did just-so-happen to have them from back when they were Standard legal and draft-chaff. This is also one of the few decks where a couple of cards that ARE required for the deck to work are expensive. I'm sorry, but this is "No Budget" jank, so it was bound to happen eventually.

Where did this come from?
This one came from 2 places.

First off, I've been having fun messing with one of my friends who is a Legacy Storm player by building decks that are objectively Storm decks, with non-traditional win conditions, in weird color combinations. This deck ended up being my penultimate deck in my quest for the stupidest Storm deck I could build.

My love of storm decks and trolling aside, the inspiration for this specific deck was when I came across the card [[Nantuko Shrine]]. Everything about this card speaks to me as a Magic player. I love incidental squirrels, and I especially love when I can take a card that has no place in EDH and break it wide open (like [[Extruder]] in my Marchesa deck)

What has come before?
After bouncing this idea around the back of my head for a couple months, I decided to do a bit of pre-brewing and I built a handful of variants of it myself using Athreos and Karador in different incarnations of the deck. I wanted to see how the Apostles handled, how they'd interact, how other people would interact with them... and this is actually when I realized I could build a full-on storm deck that worked, instead of just a funny "occasionally I make squirrels" deck.

And just for completeness, if you filter Meren by Nantuko Shrine, you get 2 decks... Weirdly only one of them uses Apostles, or the Rats that you can have multiples of... I don't know what the other guy is thinking. If you filter Meren by Shadowborn Apostle you get 17 decks... So either way, we're pretty far off the beaten path, here.

Notable cards and functions:
[[Shadowborn Apostle]] - Of course this is the most important card in the deck, and running a critical mass of them is how we make everything work. Notably if some of my other more-meme-ish inclusions don't tickle your fancy because you want more power, cut them and just add more Apostles.

[[Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx]] / [[Gaea's Cradle]] / [[Crypt of Agadeem]] / [[Songs of the Damned]] - these cards allow us to generate massive amounts of mana, which is required to win through our primary plan. All of them except for Cradle are required for this to work consistently, and having Cradle is a massive boost to the deck as we can get it pretty consistently.

[[Fecundity]] / [[Grim Haruspex]] / [[Skullclamp]] / [[Smothering Abomination]] - These are the cards that let us draw a massive number of cards.

[[Ashnod's Altar]] / [[Phyrexian Altar]] / [[Viscera Seer]] - instant speed sac outlets are a MUST and Phyrexian Altar is the best one that we have.

[[Razaketh, The Foulblooded]] and [[Rune-Scarred Demon]] - These let us turn our Apostles into a win condition.

[[Thrumming Stone]] / [[Bloodbond March]] - These are cards the cards that enable us to play all of our Shadowborn Apostles, one way or the other.

[[Aetherflux Reservoir]] / [[Nantuko Shrine]] / [[Kessig Cagebreakers]] / [[Concordant Crossroads]] - These are how we kill everybody.

Gameplan
This deck is a little more confusing than most to pilot, so I figured I should give an actual explanation of what exactly you're trying to do, as it may not be apparent just by looking at it what's listed up above.

Typically, the first 6 to 10 turns of the game are spent setting up our big turn. Setting up means trying to assemble as many of the following pieces as possible: * Get a sac outlet (preferably Phyrexian Altar).
* If your sac outlet isn't Phyrexian Altar, you will probably need one of the big-mana generators.
* Get a way to draw extra cards (preferably Grim Haruspex / Smothering Abomination).
* Get 6-8 Shadowborn Apostles.

Now you should be able to see where this deck is going.

We're going to use the Apostles to grab Razaketh (Rune-scarred is our fallback), then use Razaketh to grab us Thrumming Stone or Bloodbond March, Then use Razaketh again to get the most appropriate kill condition. We're then going to draw and play as much of our deck as we can and kill the whole table through some combination of Reservoir and / or combat damage.

The name comes from the fact that if you happen to assemble Nantuko Shrine, a way to sacrifice your apostles, and Thrumming Stone before you cast even a single Apostle, you can generate this weirdly specific number by casting all of them in one turn and sacrificing them as they resolve.

Since both Shrine and Thrumming Stone are cast triggers, you stack each Ripple trigger on top of the Shrine trigger. Once you're done rippling, the last Shrine trigger will resolve for 0. You then resolve that Apostle. Then in response to the next Shrine trigger, you sacrifice it. The second-to-last Shrine trigger resolves for 1 and you put the second-to-last Apostle into play. You then unwind the stack like this and when the first Shrine trigger finally resolves, you'll have a total of 496... My record is just under 300 squirrels.

What's fun about piloting it is that early turns of the game, you durdle incredibly hard. You cast a bunch of weird cards, draw a handful of extra cards, nobody really pays attention to you other than jokingly going "Oh no, he's going to get get a demon, Oh-Em-Gee!" or whatever other nonsense. To them all your deck is capable of is durdling... but at some point you actually get to durdle so hard that everybody dies.

Finally, Meren herself wasn't a random pick - she provides recursion so you can sacrifice apostles more readily during the early turns to draw extra cards each turn, then get them back. We have a lot of ways to draw cards and tutor and you can get REALLY deep in a single turn using our silly little 1/1's for 1.

Conclusion
I'm going to give Meren's "Exactly 496 Squirrels" Storm a solid 10/10 on the "How drunk was I when I came up with this?" scale. I literally have no memory of putting this deck together the first time, and when I took it up to the shop the next day I was crushing my opponents in progressively weirder ways due to how the pieces in this deck interlock... Then I handed it to somebody else and watched them struggle to get it to work, until they gave up - there's a weird amount of depth to a deck that's fully one-third Apostles

This deck is an absolute blast and represents everything I love about EDH as a format - you can pick almost any strategy, and if you do it well enough, it can still be powerful. This deck varies between a pile of utter madness and a well-oiled machine, and it's SO much fun to go off with.

People generally aren't that concerned by the Shadowborn Apostles deck, but my meta quickly learned to fear this one as it regularly was winning out of nowhere by putting together a turn where you do everything your deck possibly can, all at once.