Into the Blue

A special guest post this weekend from a fellow Team Barnabus card-slinger and good friend Luciano Leon. Hope you guys enjoy it!

-Luciano

As of this writing, blue mages have been left out in the cold. In years past, blue was the go-to color of control and tempo. Blue had control, in the form of counter spells, and tempo, in the form of Memory Lapse and bounce effects. Most competitive forms of counters and tempo cards are pretty nonexistent at the moment. Anyone hoping to stand a chance at winning in the new standard piloting a blue deck must come to grips with how to deal with Jund, where WotC has decided to put most of its card advantage.

The main reason why blue-based control experiences such an uphill battle is that its control cards are roughly a turn too slow. That is to say, slow, compared to how fast an aggressive deck can deploy its beats. The only aggressively costed counter spells are Essence Scatter and Negate. The inherent problem with running these cards is, they can catch you in an awkward position of having brought the wrong weapon into the fight. Holding a Negate in your hand while facing down a Broodmate Dragon or Baneslayer Angel on the stack is just incredibly frustrating for control players. Standard desperately needs a simple two-mana counter that does not care what spell it targets. Now, I know we are not getting Counterspell back any time soon, if ever, but I think this format calls for something like Remand. Remand costs two mana, can counter anything, and even cantrips. It isn’t a hard counter, it’s more of a tempo swing, as it returns the spell back to the caster’s hand when it counters it. It is these little incremental tempo swings that blue-based control thrives on.

Another thing blue is in dire need of is card draw at instant speed. If WotC wants to make blue reactive, that’s fine, but going a turn without accomplishing anything is not ideal. Jace Beleren can only do so much in this aspect. A step in the right direction would have been to have made divination into an instant, instead of a sorcery. It wouldn’t be too much to ask, considering the power of counter spells has been throttled down.

Even when most have all but given up on blue, there are those who continue to play Islands. Not only play Islands, but also force their opponents to do the same. Zendikar’s Spreading Seas revisits one of blue’s more quirky abilities, turning lands into Islands. As the bulk of the current card pool hails from Alara block, there are a lot of color-intensive spells being cast. A single Spreading Seas on an opponent’s Savage Lands can leave them cut off from casting relevant spells. Multiple Spreading Seas can be debilitating. This tactic has never been as relevant in the past as it is now. It is mostly effective because there is a card in M10 that adds redundancy to the strategy, Convincing Mirage, giving you effectively 8 Spreading Seas. This from of mana denial strategy can buy you a lot of time if you hit the right lands, since your opponent will be left hoping to top-deck a relevant land.

I, personally, am looking forward to whatever Worldwake brings. Blue mages everywhere will rejoice if the set brings powerful tools to pair with the recently spoiled Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Hopefully that will be the case. Even if blue continues its slump, Standard will benefit from an additional set, as it will inevitably help create new archetypes and add overall variety to the format.