Modern

Playing with Mono-Blue Delver

Some of you may have gotten a glimpse of this deck during the video coverage of GP Indianapolis a while back:

Mono-Blue Delver by Arthur Fusco

[deck]
[Lands]
1 Flooded Strand
9 Island
1 Misty Rainforest
2 Mutavault
1 Polluted Delta
1 Prairie Stream
3 Scalding Tarn
[/Lands]
[Spells]
3 Cryptic Command
1 Deprive
4 Disrupting Shoal
4 Gitaxian Probe
3 Psionic Blast
1 Redirect
4 Remand
4 Serum Visions
4 Vapor Snag
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
4 Delver of Secrets
4 Snapcaster Mage
4 Thing in the Ice
2 Vendilion Clique
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
1 Redirect
3 Hurkyl’s Recall
3 Commandeer
3 Vedalken Shackles
2 Hibernation
2 Geist of Saint Traft
1 Jace Beleren
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

The deck, due to Arthur Fusco, found itself at 10-1 during the Swiss before petering off a bit in the final rounds of the tournament. Naturally, the deck missing top 8 would not come as a surprise to many. Still, given my occasional penchant for running unplayable 75s (I have registered [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card] in Modern events before), I decided to purchase the 3 copies of [card]Commandeer[/card] I was missing and try this deckat a weekly or two. Prior to playing, I made a few quick changes:

1) Redirect is unplayable and, for the life of me, I cannot figure out what possessed Fusco to run it. As a means of countering your opponent’s spot removal it is brutally inefficient in a Path / Bolt format. You’re better off just playing more universal counters like [card]Mana Leak[/card] or a second Deprive if that’s your goal, in any case. And besides spot removal, what are we redirecting in this format (at least name something that comes up in a popular archetype)? In any case, I quickly cut the card from the main for a copy of [card]Spell Snare[/card] – a trusty counterspell that is valuable as a way of making hands better on the draw. I like making these kinds of decisions in Modern Delver shells where you need to keep in mind that aggressive starts with Delver on the play only encompass a small portion of your games.

2) Predictably, I cut the second Redirect (from the sideboard) and replaced it with another [card]Spell Snare[/card]. In some sense I knew this was a mistake: I ought to have found space for the second Snare in the main, really, but was lazy. To this end, perhaps the 4th copy of [card]Vapor Snag[/card] could have been moved from main to board?

3) Thinking that three [card]Vedalken Shackles[/card] would be too many, but that I still wanted something to interact with opposing creatures, I trimmed the third copy for a [card]Dismember[/card]. In hindsight, as we shall see, this was a mistake.

I did not, in fact, get around to playing this deck at a weekly or two. That is to say, I played no weeklies at all with it. Which is to say, really, that I played zero games with it prior to registering it-as a matter of (what turned out serendipitous) “necessity”-at a recent 401 Games tournament with a [card]Library of Alexandria[/card] on the line for first place.

I say necessity with scare quotes because, while it was the only deck I had access to at the time (the remainder of my collection sitting in a room in my parent’s place), nobody coerced me into playing the event. Prior to registration, Edgar Magalhaes even asked me why I was deciding to throw 25$ at the wall. I responded with a shrug and a smirk. There are days where I just don’t care.

Naturally, I won the event, losing once in the Swiss rounds for a record of 7-1-1 on the day. Here’s a quick rundown of some highlights before I offer some remarks on why the deck just might be reasonable.

Stuff That Happened in the Tournament

In round one I faced Ad Nauseum. This was somewhat humorous because this was precisely the matchup that I had first seen my deck played on camera at GP Indy. Fusco lost that round. Not a good omen…

Well, I beat my opponent. Games one and two were nothing to write home about, but game three had a climactic moment where, having boarded out my [card]Vapor Snag[/card]s for a second [card]Spell Snare[/card] and three copies of [card]Commandeer[/card], I managed to steal my opponent’s Ad Nauseum. I didn’t get to draw any cards with it, unfortunately, because he promptly scooped. How unlucky.

In round two I took my only loss against Red-White Soul Sisters featuring [card]Return to the Ranks[/card]. As you might imagine, this matchup is nigh-unwinnable (keep reading, though). I won’t comment on why that’s the case, nor what happened in the match. [card]Norin the Wary[/card] is broken.

And, you know, bouncing your opponent’s creatures with [card]Thing in the Ice[/card] is not very good against them.

In round three I faced UWR control. I can’t pretend that the matchup is spectacular, though I managed to fight my way through by leaning heavily on [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card] and [card]Psionic Blast[/card]. My opponent took 12 damage off Blasts in one game, which was alright. I also found that it was just right for killing his [card]Celestial Colonnade[/card]s. Geist was a house. So it goes…

Round four faced me with BW tokens. I aggressively dispensed [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card]s to protect my [card]Thing in the Ice[/card]. It was around this point that I began to realize how unbelievable [card]Thing in the Ice[/card] really is for turning your matchups against horizontal aggro decks from unwinnable to kind of okay. [card]Psionic Blast[/card] was insane once again, as I dealt 8 damage to my opponent who had already taken some life-loss from his own [card]Bitterblossom[/card].

Round five I faced Eldrazi & Taxes. This was my first time playing against the deck. My first play was a Delver. His first play was a plains. After my Delver flipped, he tried to Path it in my main phase. Letting me hit my second land drop before doing so proved problematic for him, as I promptly cast Deprive on the Path. I figured that whatever deck leads with a basic Plains is unlikely to have much spot removal, and perhaps that meant I could close the game out on the back of an early Delver. Facing lethal, a timely [card]Eldrazi Displacer[/card] came in off of [card]Aether Vial[/card] and stalled out the game long enough for him to crawl back in. It proved too much for me to overcome.

Game two was better; my [card]Thing in the Ice[/card] flipped and gave me back two spells hidden under his [card]Tidehollow Sculler[/card]s. In game three, a long and grindy affair culminated in my finding a [card]Vedalken Shackles[/card] for his [card]Eldrazi Displacer[/card]. This completely warped the game in my favour, as I was even able to activate it by tapping my [card]Mutavault[/card] for colorless. Even without access to such an effect, however, stealing the Displacer meant that my fliers could actually go to combat.

Round six was an intentional draw against what I think was TitanShift. The top 8 had four [card]Scapeshift[/card] decks in it, of different varieties, along with myself, the Soul Sisters player, Bant Coralhelm, and Burn.

In the quarterfinals I had to play against Soul Sisters again. I figured that this was my worst fate next to, perhaps, Burn. In any event, after losing game one I managed to actually present real damage with two flipped [card]Thing in the Ice[/card] while my opponent drew the parts of his deck that, for the most part, didn’t gain life. In game 3 I survived with one life. [card]Thing in the Ice[/card] was, for the umpteenth time, the only reason I got as far as I did.

Better lucky than good-the theme of the day. I beat my Burn opponent game one by being, somehow, even more aggressive than him. And by ‘somehow’ I mean that he only drew one land for the whole game. Outplayed.

Game two I got mowed down by Nacatls. This was the first match where I felt like being light on actual removal spells was problematic. I think I played correctly in saving my [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card] for his [card]Eidolon of the Great Revel[/card] but it just wasn’t enough.

Game three was very interesting. I had to make a lot of decisions and can hardly remember them all. Wondering whether to block Nacatls with [card]Thing in the Ice[/card] before trading my Thing for whatever burn spell would finish it off came up several times. In the end I waited it out, took as much damage as I could, and flipped my Thing in the Ice-putting him on the back-swing. He died to [card]Psionic Blast[/card] with me falling to six life. I am under no delusions about being fortunate here.

The finals consisted of two games-one lame and one awesome-the first of which consisted in my Bant Coralhelm opponent never hitting a second land while I had an aggressive Delver draw and several Remands for his mana dorks. The second game showcased, for the first and only time, the power of [card]Hibernation[/card] which bounced, among other things, three copies of [card]Knight of the Reliquary[/card], a [card]Voice of Resurgence[/card], and a [card]Noble Hierarch[/card]. After this, two [card]Thing in the Ice[/card]s were cast. One got Spell Quellered. The other did not. Soon I Upheaval’d him for the second time. I may have cast some Snapcasters and Vapor Snags as well.

Tyler Nightingale shook his head from the crowd (a crowd consisting of precisely Tyler Nightingale) and asked me how I got away with playing bad decks. Again, I had to shrug.

So… Monoblue Delver…

After the event, the only thing I surely want to change is cutting the [card]Dismember[/card] for a third [card]Vedalken Shackles[/card], as I mentioned above. The card just does too much to swing games. It’s really quite insane but doesn’t have many decks playing it right now.

The better question is whether I ever ought to register the deck again in an event costing more than five dollars for entry. I am not sure what the answer is. What I can say is that this deck, while it is a Delver deck, feels much more like a control deck a lot of the time. Many games revolve around figuring out where to stick (and how to protect) [card]Thing in the Ice[/card] before becoming aggressive. Other games revolve around protecting Delver. Some games revolve around [card]Cryptic Command[/card], [card]Psionic Blast[/card], and Snapcaster Mage chains to out-value the grindier decks. There is a lot of dynamism here that is, I think, missing from some of the more to-the-point Delver decks currently in the format. Granted, dynamism is not in itself a reason to favour one archetype over another related one: sometimes the linear deck will just be more powerful. I am happily agnostic about whether one should favour a list like this over its cousins that play red.

There are a few desired items that I’ve yet to discover, however:

1) A card that is a house against Tron but also has some game against other archetypes that isn’t [card]Commandeer[/card]. Commandeer’s role against Ad Nauseum is rather fringe; it is just supplementing the existing stock of counterspells with the potential to steal Ad Nauseum’s namesake card in order to recover from the card disadvantage. Elsewhere, [card]Commandeer[/card] fails to be of much value-does one spend three cards on an opponent’s [card]Scapeshift[/card]? [card]Goryo’s Vengeance[/card]? All of this being said, the potential to just steal your opponent’s Karn / Ugin might just be enough to deserve 3 slots in the board.

2) A resilient threat like Geist that is better against BG(x) decks. I am pessimistic about this deck’s chances against BG(x) in general, so perhaps there’s not much value in attempting to shore up those matchups, but while Geist is great against UWR and related decks, it is rather mediocre against BG(x). I would, ideally, like to find a way to play a threat that does well against both. Something like [card]Stormbound Geist[/card] (yes, I know it gets Path’d), but actually powerful.

What do you all think? Was my tournament win a fluke or a confirmation of this archetype’s power?

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