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A Durdle’s Guide to Gatecrash – Blue

One of the strange things about multicolour sets is that the mono-coloured sections are often very small and short on bombs. White had some interesting cards that started me thinking, but nothing really shook my foundations. Let’s see if blue can do any better.

Blue

[card]Cloudfin Raptor[/card]
If the dominance of UW Delver taught us anything, it should be the value of undercosted blue fliers. Getting the Raptor to a 2/3 isn’t hard in a traditional Delver shell (Augur and Snapcaster will do it in any order), and adding [card]Restoration Angel[/card] will make him a 3/4 with ease. The intrinsic restriction of playing Delver, being that you need a lot of instants and sorceries, is not an issue with the Raptor, but as a trade-off you lose the “turn 2 blind flip, free win” possibility that the accursed Human Insect gave you.

Blue aggro decks, if they are viable, have a couple of great advantages in that they can work in tempo elements that other colours don’t have, like cheap countermagic and bounce spells. I don’t think there are enough good aggressive options in blue right now to make the deck dangerous, but maybe a two- or three-colour option could both evolve the Raptor reliably and provide enough beats and tempo to create a strong deck.

[card]Enter the Infinite[/card]
Last summer, [card]Omniscience[/card] was spoiled. Nobody thought it would be any good, because it cost ten mana. Then someone realised it could be played with [card]Show and Tell[/card] in Legacy, and suddenly it was a highly sought after foil. Then Travis Woo and Ali Aintrazi started messing around with it in Standard, and before you could say [card]Worldfire[/card] it was the new hotness. [card]Omniscience[/card]…was…playable?

Here we are now in February, the summer delights forgotten as we huddle under a blanket with the wind howling and the snow falling. We know a ten-drop can be played in Standard, and that it can be hard cast. So with that in mind, can we just slot [card]Enter the Infinite[/card] into [card]Omniscience[/card] decks in Legacy and Standard? We’ve all seen [card]Omniscience[/card] hit the board and not win the game, but wouldn’t Enter just make sure that never happened? Draw your deck, play ALL the spells, win the game?

No. Just no. The main reason being that [card]Enter the Infinite[/card] is just no good without [card]Omniscience[/card]. Don’t fall into this trap folks, it won’t end well and there will be nobody there to wipe your tears and tell you everything will be OK. This card is trash, don’t play it.

What? Oh of course I will try it. You knew that before you started reading this section. I’m already fairly sure there will be an achievement or two to unlock here, one of which will almost certainly be to hard cast it. But I’m hardly your regular player, and I know it’s bad before I even start. I just need to hit it ONE TIME…

[card]Hands of Binding[/card]
It’s been a general rule for me for the past few sets that if a card is insane in Limited, it is at least worth trying in Standard. It worked with Olivia and Jace Memory Adept, it worked with [card]Champion of Lambholt[/card] (to an extent), it even worked fairly well with [card]Mercurial Chemister[/card]. Pack Rat continues to elude me. However I’ve had enough success (measured in terms of an FNM brewer) to want to continue this line of thought.

[card]Hands of Binding[/card] has, in my limited Limited experience with Gatecrash, been a beating. Getting it on an early guy lets you hold down their most recent drop or most dangerous threat while getting some beats in. Later on you encode it on to a flier, tap down theirs and commence smashing. So how can we transfer this to Constructed?

Well, we have a much better assortment of evasive dudes for one thing. I’ve tested it in a deck with [card]Quirion Dryad[/card] (which grows every time we cast it off Cipher) and Delver (which it flips of course) and it worked VERY well. Some stuff you bounce, some stuff you tap down, and by the time they find answers to the creatures doing the locking, they’re close to dead. [card]Invisible Stalker[/card], [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card] and [card]Cloudfin Raptor[/card] are also fine choices on to which we can encode.

I feel like all the Cipher spells have to be evaluated on how bad they are if you can’t encode them, and Hands is probably one of the better ones in that regard. You might not be happy to cast a one-creature Sleep for 1U, but it beats drawing a card for 3U (for example). Keep an eye on this one.

[card]Rapid Hybridization[/card]
Has it really been only four months since my beloved [card]Beast Within[/card] left us? It seems like forever ago that the best removal spell green has ever had was in Standard (and all my decks). [card]Bramblecrush[/card] is a poor replacement, and nothing else comes remotely close. The 3/3 Beast token was so inconsequential most of the time that you simply ignored it, then romped to victory.

[card]Pongify[/card] was a hilarious card in Planar Chaos. I would be very surprised if it wasn’t the inspiration behind [card]Beast Within[/card] in the first place. It is of course totally out of the colour pie in normal circumstances: mono-blue creature distraction. Planar Chaos was hardly normal circumstances so it could be justified as blue’s scientist aspect turning one creature into another. They’d done this before on [card]Polymorph[/card], so it kind of fit. If it was going to be printed again, Simic seems like a perfect place.

History lesson aside, this card is mental. Aside from being one-mana unconditional creature kill in blue, it also turns your bounce into hard removal and can be used to keep the pressure on or salvage something from your own creature being removed.

For one mana. One blue mana. And it makes FROG LIZARDS. How awesome is that? I want a pet one.

[card]Simic Manipulator[/card]
I wasn’t going to talk about this card, but then it was played against me in testing. Then I reread it. Now I want it and want it badly. First of all, you steal the creature permanently. As in forever. Even when Manipulator dies (and it will, normally right after you start stealing things and right before they grab the card, read it, shake their heads and toss it back to your side of the board in disdain), you keep the purloined goods. Second, it costs nothing to use each turn. Even if you only steal one opposing creature, for 3 mana you have yourself a bargain. Manipulating the game state to make that one theft a good one is not tough in Standard: [card]Gavony Township[/card] is a thing, and virtually any creature we play makes our Manipulator bigger. We can even Scavenge if we really want to.

One thing to bear in mind is that stealing a creature will lower his power/toughness again, making him easier to evolve. The downside here is that stealing a second big creature becomes unlikely without shenanigans. Also be aware of pump spells in response to the ability, which can counter the activation and leave you with a smaller Manipulator and no new creature. And yes, [card]Illusionist’s Bracers[/card] would be a nice little accoutrement for this guy. Probably a nice sideboard card against midrange decks or those with mana dorks.

[card]Spell Rupture[/card]
[card]Mana Leak[/card] is gone. If it ever shows its face in Standard again, I for one will be very surprised. As far as replacements go though, [card]Spell Rupture[/card] is pretty darn good. Early on it will be as good as a hard counter, as aggro decks will be tapping out in the early turns and even having something as small as an [card]Augur of Bolas[/card] will be enough to say no. Later on when you have your finishers in play, the spell does more work for the same mana cost. A conditional counterspell can be bad by its very definition, but one that scales up as the game goes on while still leaving mana open to fight a counter war has definite appeal for me.

How often will the card be dead in your hand? Well obviously it depends on your deck and the opponent’s deck. [card]Mana Leak[/card] was dead in your hand some percentage of the time, but it always at least made the opponent pay an extra 3. [card]Spell Rupture[/card] will occasionally do literal nothing, but the upside of sometimes making the opponent have to pay 8 to resolve their miracled Terminus might well be worth it. Counters for 1U have generally proven playable (except [card]Corrupted Resolve[/card], and I even got that to work in UG Turbo Infect), and I don’t see any reason this one should rupture that trend.

[card]Stolen Identity[/card]
I have to try this. I have to make it a thing. I’m a huge [card]Cackling Counterpart[/card] fan, and having the ability to cast it every turn makes me giddy. Being able to copy an artifact will randomly be relevant, but the real strengths here are the fact that we’re making a TOKEN copy, and that we can encode on to something evasive for additional shenanigans. My immediate thought is to copy some Biovisionaries, because you know THAT will be an achievement.

The problem of course is that it costs six. While that’s likely to mean that we have some juicier targets to choose from, it also means we could be dead by then. The neat tricks like being able to copy the Angel token from [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card] are less impressive at that stage of the game. That said, copying [card]Thragtusk[/card] is rarely unimpressive, and copying a [card]Thundermaw Hellkite[/card] is enough to convince me I might be wrong. You can encode on to the token you make, which makes it a dead card less often. Keep an eye on this one, it could be worth a try in a slower Standard deck.

[card]Voidwalk[/card]
This card has been much maligned by many people, but really it’s just misunderstood. It is by no means a constructed all-star, but the first time you encode this on a [card]Restoration Angel[/card] and start giving your [card]Thragtusk[/card] vigilance, you will never want to play another card in that deck. Trust me, I have done this and it is foul. Putting it on something with first strike lets you wreak havoc with an opponent’s blocks. Once your opponent knows you have this and sees what it can do, he will have to think long and hard to avoid walking into the blowouts this can cause on a well-placed attack.

Thoughts on Blue

A lot of my thoughts here will depend on Cipher being good in Standard. That is far from a sure thing, but of course it won’t stop me from trying! [card]Rapid Hybridization[/card] makes me happy, and [card]Spell Rupture[/card] has a real chance to be a major player in the format.

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