The answer to the two questions posed in the title are: No, he didn't and not much. I've been spending the last few weeks reading and re-reading some recent articles about Mono-Blue control which found its roots from the deck challenge that the esteemed editor of this site (watch me get published.... brown-nosing works [It really doesn't. - Knut, publishing this in spite of the nosing]) presented to several top players. You can follow the theory trail from Osyp Lebedowicz's Unspeakable deck to Jim Ferraiolo's U/W board control deck, to Mike Flores' great articles about MUC, and to a lesser extent, Brian David Marshall's Blue arcane scepter splice deck. As I learned more and more about the "savage" deck that is Mono Blue by reading about it from Mike Flores, Knut, and company, the more interested I became.... so much so that I soon traded a wad of rares for Extended that I had been saving up for the long winter of Goblins and Combo and Reanimator and Madness and Affinity. I didn't care though, I was enamored with the prospect of beating people's heads in with my Italian Keiga. I dropped the cash and did some bad trades for Marches, Duplicants, Temporal Adepts, more big Blue dragons, and Briberies; though I was lucky enough to crack three running Melokus from a wad of boosters that I should have saved for drafts.

I put the deck together, and started testing. Unfortunately, I don't have enough time to test like a madman regularly anymore. I would prefer to go to regular Type 2 tournaments, but my recent finals schedule has been interrupting the testing process. I still get to test every Thursday afternoon at Neutral Ground, but I have to fight tooth and nail through the throngs of Yu-Gi-Oh and Vs. players to find some Magic players, only to find them drafting and not giving a damn about Type Two. Though I haven't done as much as I would prefer, I've done enough to arrive towards a few conclusions about Mono Blue. Here is the list I've been working with:

Mono Blue Control
19 Island
4 Stalking Stones
2 Blinkmoth Nexus

4 Mana Leak
4 Hinder
4 Annul
3 Condescend

4 Relic Barrier
2 Inspiration
4 Echoing Truth
4 Vedalken Shackles
4 Thirst For Knowledge
1 Keiga, The Tidal Star
1 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror

Sideboard
4 Temporal Adept
4 March of the Machines
3 Bribery
1 Meloku, the Clouded Mirror
1 Keiga, the Tidal Star
2 Duplicant

It's more or less on the same page that most people are on. This one is an amalgamation of the more popular lists. I've seen builds that have multiple Keigas, no Barriers, etc. There is some room for change. Easily noticed are my two Nexus, as opposed to having four for maximum beatings. The thing is, in a mono-colored deck like this with Adepts in the sideboard, and some double Blue stuff in the main, I didn't want to get stuck at X colorless and one Blue too short of using a game swinging card. It felt that dropping the magic bug lands and adding an Island in its place also gave me another slot with which to squeeze yet another threat in. Plus Nexuses (Nexi?) are pretty tough to get at a reasonable price because of the demand in a lot of the more relevant decks in Standard. I'm not sure yet completely of how large the effect of missing a few man-lands are, but if those two Nexuses get cheaper anytime soon, I'll definitely try to get some in my main deck.

What can I say that the pros who have worked on this before haven't said already? Its more or less tuned to play in an environment populated by Affinity and other artifact-based or Affinity hating decks. Play reactively with counters, jack creatures with the mind controlling manacles, and swing with the man-lands till the bad guy isn't moving anymore. Oh I know, what do you do if your Affinity opponent has just ripped a God hand and vomited it onto play by turn 3, shrugging off some early soft counters? What do you do if the opponent has countered your relevant counters and played Rude Awakening for a boatload of man land damage? How do you beat the bad draw, which this deck gets a lot of (or maybe its just my really really bad play that's screwing it all up)?

I don't really know what the best thing to do is, but I'll be damned if I don't make any suggestions. I'll try to sweeten up the deck's flavor, tuning it to be more resilient to Affinity, if that is possible. First things first, let's look at what seems to me is the weakest link in the deck, Thirst for Knowledge. There are a lot of cards you pitch to Thirst that a turn or two later, you would kill to have back in your hand. This isn't U/G, which has Witnesses to get the cards back. Whether its that extra Island you thought you didn't need on turn 3, a Relic Barrier against a land screwed Affinity deck, a Mana Leak on turn 8 when they have just enough to cast the Land Tickler spell of Doom and kill you with it, Thirst dumps them all in the graveyard, something that you feel like you had to do but hated doing.

Thirst feels like a card that just doesn't belong in this deck. Sure they're instant speed and can work on three mana as opposed to Inspiration, but often you'll find that you're drawing one card when you needed two. The artifact count is pretty low, and the ones in it you want to keep, as Barriers and Shackles are very good at slowing down affinity and screwing up their math. My solution would be to add a couple of Seats of the Synod (hooray for Wizards not banning these beauties) in place of two Islands. I wouldn't want four for fear of March screwing me up as well. They're functionally the same as Islands, but you can pitch just one card as opposed to two more often. Yes they are vulnerable to Oxidize and sex monkey/Shaman and Hearth Kami, as well as a bazillion other Affinity hate cards out there, but the primary concern here is to be able to draw cards to keep them.

They can also act as good buffers for Molder Slugs, which can kill Shackles very easily. Maybe playing Counsel of the Soratami would also be a viable way to draw more cards. I like Inspiration as the next best card drawing spell in the format that isn't Black. I like it so much that I even sought out the "Serena Williams" art from Visions. But it's just oh so clunky and expensive to cast. Serum Visions doesn't draw enough cards, though the scry is very good. Gifts Ungiven can be very powerful, but not in this deck. U/G has a good time with this card because they have Eternal Witness to recur the cards they lose upon resolution. What I would do for a Deep Analysis kind of card right now... I have very little qualms about paying life for cards in any format

Another possible solution is to have a small splash of Black. Adding Black can jack up the amount of possible cards we can play while destroying our consistency. Cards like Echoing Decay (a choice card against animated lands), Night's Whisper (the best card drawing spell in the format), Terror, Barter in Blood, etc. can drastically improve the matchups against some decks. Echoing Decay, in particular is fantastic against many of the decks in the metagame today. I have played many a game against Affinity where I was able to resolve a March on turn 4, and still lost. Two Frogmite, 2 Disciples of the Vault and an Arcbound Worker by turn 3 can still kill you if you don't draw any removal, which in Mono Blue is Echoing Truth or Shackles. And sometimes, bounce isn't enough to beat other decks.

So what if you gain some tempo advantage when your best threats won't make it in play until turn 5 or 6? A lot of the non-Affinity creatures have comes into play activities, like the Sad Robot, Viridian Shamans, and Eternal Witness, which you really don't want your opponent to be able to reuse. Echoing Truth doesn't help at all against an entwined Rude Awakening, while Echoing Decay can. Where a small amount of splash can't help, more bounce can. Star Wars Kid wrote that Echoing Truth is great against a fully pumped Ravager, Moriok Rigger, or Atog, and how great it is to bluff against players who might be afraid of bounce, and I wholeheartedly agree. The problem is, a lot of the better players will still go all in and sac their board to power up their dudes even in the face of two untapped Islands. And since you only have four of these spells in your deck, the chance that you will have one even after digging through your deck isn't that great.

I remember during Odyssey Standard season when Unsummons became regular parts of Madness decks, because the ability to bounce a ridiculously sized Wild Mongrel and Psychatog was just too good to ignore. [Actually it was more to combat Elephant Guide in R/G and opposing Wurm tokens... - Knut] Now there are creatures again that can kill in one, huge attack, so it seems like a good idea to me to include a few Unsummons somewhere in the deck. Maybe two in the main or three in the board can help against matchups where a single unblocked creature can spell doom to the Mono-Blue player. Imagine if an Affinity player sees no fliers, only one untapped Island, smells blood, gets greedy, and sacs their whole board to put 15 modular counters on a Nexus or Ornithopter. Imagine their face when you gain something like fifteen-to-one card advantage. I'd be surprised if the Affinity player didn't start crying.

The power of the couterspells in this format isn't that high either. Sure Mana Leak is great in the early game, and Hinder is a great hard counter any time, and Condescend has scry, but they are either next-to-useless in the late game and has a difficult cost to pay. Maybe I'm thinking too far ahead but Champions of Kamigawa has some counterspells that we can consider playing. We have Hisoka's Defiance and Thoughtbind. Hisoka's Defiance seems to me like a great card against any deck that uses a lot of Kamigawa stuff, as a lot of the good spells are either arcane or spirits. Being able to say "No" to a Kokusho or Jugan or enemy Keiga or any Arcane spell can mean the difference between a win or another notch in the loss column. A lot of Arcane spells are being played now as well. Everything from Cranial Extraction, to Glacial Ray splicing a bajillion other spells, to Kodama's Reach are also vulnerable against Hisoka's Defiance.

Thoughtbind is a little harder to make a case for, but I think that this spell has its merits as well. It seems to me that Wizards is never going to stop printing counterspells, but they will keep making them steadily worse and worse. Not to say that Thoughtbind is total trash, actually a startling number of spells in many decks cost four and under to cast. The only spells off the top of my head that is over four mana to cast is Myr Enforcer, Somber Hoverguard, Broodstar (I love you Broody Baby), Tooth and Nail, Death Cloud, and Arc-Slogger. Thoughtbind stops the rest of the spells in the environment cold, and totally neuters lower tier decks like White Weenie and those weird Sligh Decks. People were willing to play with the ridiculously underpowered Vex during Mirrodin Block, so maybe Thoughtbind should be given a try. My own testing with Thoughtbind has been very positive, but there were still times when I couldn't counter the spell I wanted.

The sideboard, for the most part, seems pretty sweet to me. Temporal Adept protected by counters can annihilate Tooth and Nail, and in conjunction with Duplicant (this card should really be called Duplican since he's such a star) and Bribery, can easily put Mono-Blue atop the silly Timmy deck. I might consider cutting a few of these Tooth cards in favor of Time Stop or Jushi Apprentice like other players, but Tooth is popular in my corner of New Jersey. March is supplemental hate against Affinity, and the extra Keiga and Meloku can come in against decks where you need to find a threat quickly.

All in all, Mono-Blue is a real contender in this format, and it would be just oh so much more powerful with the presence of the original Counterspell. It has good counters, great finishers, and excellent sideboard options. Don't let my bitching over what could make the deck better dissuade you over playing this deck, as it has great game against most matchups. If you need a better reason to play this deck other than it isn't Affinity, then go play U/G, which plays very similar to this deck.

"Frank" Guevara
fishinapuddle AT hotmail dot com