I’m not someone people usually think of as a deckbuilder. I’ve built several of my own decks, and I’ve done well with them, but I never really encourage other people to play them, so it’s unlikely that you’ve played an original deck I built.
Ordinarily, when I write about a deck, I say: here’s an idea I’ve been thinking about — it’s untested and untuned, and I don’t recommend playing it, but it has some reasonable building blocks to work from.
Today we’re going to do things a little differently. Today I think I’m actually onto something worth paying attention to.
Perhaps that claim will hold your interest while I go back a bit and talk through my thoughts on Standard without Shards (and with some new cards, I suppose…) In fairness to Scars, I’m actually excited about using a lot of the new cards, despite claims that Scars is a weak set for Constructed.
The Loss of Jund, The Rise of Red
With Jund finally leaving the format, I thought this might be my chance to build some tribal decks. Standard hasn’t had a lot of good tribal decks lately, with good reason. Tribal decks succeed by amassing synergies between several cards in play. Jund exists to keep the opponent’s cards off the battlefield. When you can’t plan on untapping with any particular permanent, it’s not useful to try to build synergies with those dead permanents.
But now, now that we’re free from that oppressive force, maybe I can look at all the sweet Elves, Goblins, and Architects in the format and try to make something work.
Then I remembered Forked Bolt.
Forked Bolt by itself wouldn’t be that big of a problem. I’ve been content to lose to Mono-Red for years. The problem is Koth. Well, not Koth himself, but his press. I’m not that scared of or impressed by the card Koth of the Hammer.
What scares me is the quality of red burn, especially when it comes to two-for-one-ing small creatures — the exact creatures that I want to try to build synergies with. Red may not start by maindecking four Forked Bolts, but between those, Staggershocks, Arc Trails, and Pyroclasms, I don’t like my little creatures’ odds of survival.
I wanted to start with a blue deck with something like four Vedalken Certarchs, four Riddlesmiths, four Trinket Mages, four Grand Architects, and a bunch of artifacts and see what I could do. After remembering Red’s position in this format, I decided that simply wasn’t realistic.
Bigger Blue
It was time to move away from little creatures (sorry guys — someday we’ll meet again).
You know what’s awesome about artifacts? They let blue do everything. You don’t need any other colors if you have enough artifacts. Spot removal, ramp, mass removal, finishers — it’s all there. Trinket Mage-ing for Everflowing Chalice and Expedition Map (with Mox Opal) allows blue to compete with green when ramping to Eldrazi mana, and playing blue means having a lot more control of what your deck’s doing.
Now I’ll get to the point. A decklist:
Creatures (9)
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (24)
Spells (26)
The most exciting thing to me about this deck — other than the fact that it maximizes the power of some extremely strong cards — is how customizable it is. The above list is one I’m very happy with, but there’s no reason the numbers have to be what they are. It’s all about predicting the field. You’ll notice that there are very few four-ofs in the maindeck, but there are a lot more in the full 75.
The removal in this deck is awesome. The ramp is awesome. The finishers are awesome.
The list above is how I’d build it for an unknown field where I wanted to be particularly prepared for aggressive decks. I don’t think a sideboarding guide does justice to the right way to look at sideboarding with this deck. Look at the final result as it changes for different opponents.
Creatures (7)
- 3 Trinket Mage
- 1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
- 1 Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
- 1 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
- 1 Wurmcoil Engine
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (24)
Spells (26)
Your goal is to overwhelm them with Eldrazi, which they have trouble fighting. Their best cards against you are Tectonic Edge and Ratchet Bomb, which can fight your mana. You want to focus on card draw to keep hitting your land drops and get to Eldrazi, but a few counters can help fight cards that can put you too far behind like Sun Titan or Frost Titan. Lux Cannon can be extremely good in this matchup, so it may be worth thinking about having access to another.
Creatures (10)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (24)
Spells (24)
Ideally, you can ramp while leaving just enough mana available to counter their ramp spells to get there first. Brittle Effigy is awesome here, as it lets you deal with any of their Eldrazi, and another one might be a nice card to find room for in the sideboard. I’m pretty sure Primeval Titan is scarier than any Eldrazi Titan in this matchup.
All the mass removal leaves because I’m assuming it doesn’t interact with them. This is picturing a match against a land-based ramp deck. If they’re ramping with Joraga Treespeakers and Overgrown Battlements, you might want some All Is Dusts. Wurmcoil Engine is there to put them on a clock to avoid eventually losing to a buildup of Summoning Traps.
Another approach would be to leave the Cannons and Keys in and try to go for mana denial rather than trying to attack (or maybe rather than trying to draw cards). I’m not sure which plan is best yet.
Creatures (7)
Lands (23)
Spells (30)
There’s no reason to do anything big or fancy here. Just find and protect Wurmcoil Engine. I’ve left one Eye of Ugin in the deck despite cutting the Eldrazi Titans because it can still be used to tutor for Wurmcoil Engine. That might be wrong. Another Foresee might be better.
If this matchup is still problematic, an Elixir of Immortality in the sideboard, or just some more Flashfreezes, might help substantially, but I suspect this deck can usually play Wurmcoil Engine before Red is prepared to deal with it.
I wanted to write about building against Fauna Shaman decks next, but I think it depends on exactly what they have. Basically, you want four All Is Dusts, and you don’t want to change much else.
Note that if graveyards become a problem, the deck can easily sideboard in one Bojuka Bog and one Nihil Spellbomb. The Bojuka Bog could theoretically go into the main if it was that important or if you needed the sideboard space — another colorless land isn’t the end of the world, and the deck currently has no lands that enter the battlefield tapped; although given how good the deck is at spending one mana at a time, that’s a huge feature.
Card Choices
I think it’s pretty clear by now what the deck is capable of, so I’ll move into talking a bit about the specific card choices.
Mana Leak
This is a blue deck that’s not playing Mana Leak.
Yes, I don’t think Mana Leak is a card you have to play. It’s fine, but nothing special. This deck wants to develop its own board early, and Mana Leak is likely to go dead late.
Yes, sometimes you can easily leave two mana up because you’re planning to use it on Expedition Map at the end of their turn, and that helps when you side in counterspells, but it’s a corner case. The deck’s strengths are the quality of its threats and removal. It has so much mana that it, like Mythic, can’t afford to go one-for-one-ing people.
Contagion Clasp
The deck has one Contagion Clasp and no way to search for it. I started at two or three, but playing against artifact-based white aggro decks made it clear that the card didn’t do enough, fast enough, and I needed more Ratchet Bombs instead. Proliferate is an excellent mechanic in this deck, and I want to have access to it, but it’s not necessary, and you don’t need two. If there are a lot of Birds of Paradise and Lotus Cobras, one more in the sideboard might be excellent.
One Jace, the Mind Sculptor
This is the number I’m least sure of. More or less could easily be right. If you cut it entirely, you can always All Is Dust to your heart’s content, and nothing of value will be lost. The deck is bad at defending Jace, so you’ll often only get one use out of it.
Fortunately, it’s well positioned to make good use of that one activation, getting rid of extra Moxes or an extra Eye of Ugin or an Eldrazi Titan you’re not ready to use. Jace is also clearly extremely powerful if it lives.
Foresee is awesome in this deck, in that you’re often just trying to find one of either mana, sweepers, or finishers, and the deck has enough of each that Foresee should be able to get you exactly what you need. It sounds better to me than Jace, honestly, but I’m not prepared to drop Jace from the list without mentioning him, and he’s probably great against control decks.
It’s also possible that the deck has enough momentum that it just doesn’t want card draw. The build here is built for an aggressive field where I want to be able to spend as little mana as possible not impacting the board. It might just be correct for the deck to commit to that direction and drop all the card draw from the main and possibly even sideboard. I’m worried about the high mana count in that case though.
Four Preordains
Preordain is just an outstanding card. This deck has fifteen Islands, so it’s pretty hard to imagine not playing it. There’s a little bit of tension though. Trinket Mage and Expedition Map are very mana hungry, and early turns want to be spent playing artifacts to turn on metalcraft for the Mox Opals. Filtering is so powerful in this deck, for the same reasons Foresee is awesome, discussed above, that I just couldn’t leave Preordain out.
Two Ulamogs, Zero Emrakul
Emrakul is extremely expensive. You can cast him in control matchups, but so often, it’s just terrible to draw him, and he’s rarely necessary. These days, I expect Brittle Effigy + Trinket Mage out of opponents to decrease his stock even further. I can see switching it back if I regularly find myself missing him, but I think I’d rather increase the strength of the cards I naturally draw.
Two Voltaic Keys
This number probably looks a little weird, and Voltaic Key doesn’t do all that much in this deck. Turbo-charging Ratchet Bomb is sometimes nice, but it’s not that important. Getting more mana off Everflowing Chalice can be huge, but again, it’s something of a corner case.
The card is clearly there primarily to power Lux Cannon, which I think goes from terrible to excellent if one Voltaic Key is in play. The issue is that you don’t want two Cannons because only one can take advantage of the key, and they’re very slow. So the deck has to play a low number of Cannons, which means you won’t always have one for the Key.
In games where you do have Lux Cannon, Voltaic Keys are often the best things you can draw, so I want to be able to Trinket Mage for a second one. It’s possible that that’s going too far, but I think they have enough side benefits — like turning on metalcraft and giving Wurmcoil Engine “vigilance” — that it’s worth it. (It’s even better when untapping Wurmcoil Engine as a “trick” because your opponent isn’t used to the interaction.)
Most of the other numbers are probably pretty straightforward, or they’re predictions based on curve and expected metagame that I’d be completely comfortable shifting slightly.
One card that didn’t get mentioned because it’s a direction I decided not to go is Skittering Invasion. It’s possible that Summoning Trap makes defending against ramp decks by using countermagic awkward enough that you don’t want to go that way and would rather just have to race them. If that’s the case, I think siding in more Eldrazi and a bunch of Skittering Invasions is a great way to just get there first.
When I woke up Sunday morning, I was hoping to be able to look at the results of the first Standard tournaments and tweak this deck to a known metagame, but the fact of the matter is: States really is the first tournament with this set. Yes, Scars was legal last weekend, but I think the results made it pretty clear that card availability was a serious issue.
By this weekend I expect far more people will have the cards they need for new decks. The result is a situation where it’s going to be a bit more difficult to feel out local metagames, so I’d say try to get to the tournament early, talk to people, and be prepared to switch some cards around at the last minute based on what you see.
Finally, I’d like to leave you with some other mono-blue deck ideas that I haven’t fleshed out as much.
You see, I haven’t lost all hope for Grand Architect. I think the key is to use him with Molten-Tail Masticore, which is the best way to take advantage of the fact that you have to play a bunch of lame blue creatures and of all the extra mana you’ll have.
One direction is to really focus on the graveyard with Vengevines and Kuldotha Phoenix while still playing mono blue. You can get them into the graveyard through a combination of Enclave Cryptologist, Hedron Crab, and Riddlesmith.
Riddlesmith is particularly good if you’re really working for Kuldotha Phoenix, since you’ll be playing enough artifacts anyway. Note that, particularly if you’re using Hedron Crab, you may not need four Phoenixes. Also, remember that the Masticore is another discard outlet.
Getting enough artifacts can be a challenge, particularly since you need them to be cheap enough to turn on metalcraft — they can’t all be Wurmcoil Engines and Mindslavers. Consider:
- Everflowing Chalice (possibly as a singleton for Trinket Mage to find, seriously)
- Brittle Effigy (This is great for metalcraft, since it’s cheap and sits in play — I wouldn’t mind playing several of them.)
- Ratchet Bomb (I don’t recommend going this way, since you’re likely to have permanents in play at all casting costs.)
- Memnite (Play several if you’re playing Hedron Crab and Trinket Mage, so you’ll always have one left — this card actually does a lot of what you’re looking to do quite well. Remember that with Grand Architect, he lets you turn U into two colorless.)
- Flight Spellbomb (I’m not entirely sure it isn’t a realistic option if you’re desperate enough — the ability isn’t irrelevant.)
Another option is to play creatures that are harder to kill and more valuable; maybe start with Kraken Hatchling and move into Lighthouse Chronologist and Grand Architect. You won’t get two-for-one’d off a burn spell if all your guys have two or three toughness. These creatures will either stay in play or draw serious removal, which will do an excellent job of clearing the way for your Molten-Tail Masticore or Wurmcoil Engine to win the game. This deck could even play or sideboard Turn Aside to good effect.
I might revisit some of those ideas later, but for now, they’re relatively fresh, and I’ll leave it to interested readers to flesh out initial decklists for those strategies.
I’m looking forward to being able to play single-color decks again. It’s been a long time since you could suggest playing mono-blue in Standard and expect to be taken seriously. It’s sometimes nice not to have a gold set around.
Thanks for reading,
SamÂ