CASUAL FRIDAYS #144: The Sapphire Hall Of Fame

I start off the blue section of the Hall of Fame pretty much the same way every time. Here’s why blue has a lousy time in multiplayer – its natural strength in duel is its major weakness in group.

Blue is stellar at stopping large, expensive threats. What will probably stop Biorhythm from being tournament viable, even in a slow environment like Onslaught Block Constructed? Countermagic. What was so good about Absorb and Undermine? They were three casting-cost counterspells that fit the tournament deck curve and could stop mid-sized to huge threats easily. Why was Gainsay a maindeck consideration in Invasion Block Constructed decks? Because everyone played blue – because blue can stop any given thing from happening.

It does so at instant speed – at the point the spell was cast. And that’s where blue’s strength theoretically ends. Once things hit the board, the most blue can usually do is bounce the card so that they can try countering it again later. That’s a heavy investment even for one threat – and when each opponent is laying down multiple threats, the blue mage just can’t keep up with traditional control strategies.

This is why Upheaval is somewhat offensive to many casual players. Not only does it have the”Stasis” effect of slowing the whole damn game down, but it also gave blue a (comparatively) cheap way to handle multiple permanent threats at once.

Here are the biggest guns in blue’s arsenal:

Blue’s Blues

One thing I noticed as I rated blue cards was that I was giving an awful lot of cards high marks in one category, but not so often in more than one. (See: Misdirection, Upheaval, Reins of Power, Timetwister.) Usually, the midrange cards in a color seem to blend two or more 5s – but that wasn’t the case with blue. In large part, this is because blue is the first color we’ve seen that has many instants. Instants automatically lend a high spider rating (and blue easily outstrips the other four colors in that category), but by their nature they don’t warn off opponents, nor can they repeat their effects. Add to that blue’s inability to affect the board consistently, and you have very few other categories where blue can make a consistent impact.

Because blue has many spells that do one thing very well, its list is less spectacular – but more solid – than other colors. It has a paltry six cards that rate 4.0 or higher – but only three that rate less than 3.0 (recall the numbers from past colors: Eleven high and six low for green, eight high and nine low for red, ten high and seven low for black). It would be too silly to dig deep into a variance analysis across colors, but I think this result would seem sensible for most experienced group players: like green’s stigma in tournament play, blue can support just about any color extremely well in multiplayer, but cannot provide enough heft of its own.

The few blue cards that are at least average along multiple dimensions therefore manage to slide high up the list. Arcanis the Omnipotent and Quicksilver Dragon, the two best multiplayer creatures for blue by these ratings, would be only the sixth and seventh best creatures if they were green (and they’d be far away from the top ten total cards of that color as well). And I’ll admit that I tend to be more starry-eyed about new cards than I often should be – future Halls may have one or both creatures with lower ratings, once we can all see how they truly play out.

This ought to make sense to most readers who have tried to make mono-blue creature decks in multiplayer – the wide pool of powerful creatures just isn’t there. Morphling, incidentally, works okay in group play, though it’s a heck of a magnet for removal and requires constant access to mana to survive and be effective. My ratings were 4-3-2-1-2-4, which had it just miss the Hall by a smidge. Reasonable voices might crank the rattlesnake and cockroach enough to get it on the list, but I keep thinking of all the islands you have to leave untapped through multiple turns for this thing to stay frosty.

Stealing And Deflecting

Whereas traditional mono-blue control suffers in group play, there are two aspects of blue that gain quite a bit from the dynamic – stealing and deflecting. Both mechanics push their cards higher in the pigeon category, quite simply because the quantity of targets must rise with each additional player – and often, so does quality.

Start with stealing. Here, instead of stopping the threat with a Counterspell – which then sits in your graveyard while additional threats pile up – you seize the resource and can use it against those additional threats. (With something like Reins of Power, you can sweep the board without too much trouble.)

On to deflecting. Deflection or Misdirection is more like the Counterspell, in that you nearly always cast at instant speed and do not expect to seize an additional resource. But what you are doing is protecting a resource you have – and slamming a threat elsewhere.

Blue Staples

Cheap, quick answers are particularly helpful for the blue mage in multiplayer – unlike in duels, you can’t afford to go down to five life before your deck starts to reassert control. Within the ten cards below are representatives from all the classic aspects of blue – countering, bouncing, stealing, and small clever creatures. All are uncommon or common.

• Fog Bank, one of the most durable blockers you’ll find (and the last time Wizards will make it blue),
• Prodigal Sorcerer, another creature you’ll never see in blue again,
• Phantom Warrior, which I trust will stay very blue if it sees reprint,
• Man o’ War, a card that must come back for blue someday, with its original Visions artwork,
• Puppeteer, which can have a hard time keeping up with multiple bombs,
• Complicate, three spells in one, two of which are uncounterable,
• Withdraw, usually superior to Boomerang in group play,
• Dominate, because you’re not leaving a Control Magic enchantment hanging on the thing,
• Impulse, which just about any blue deck in group play needs to be able to do, and
• (Technically uncommon but may as well be a rare) Force of Will, which along with Thwart and Foil give you surprise opportunities to counter enormous bombs.

Another”staple” of blue is the Big Blue Flyer (see Quicksilver Dragon in the Hall). Conventional options include Mahamoti Djinn and Avatar of Will – and, of course, Morphling.

I’ll be very interested to see the direction blue takes in Onslaught. With an increasing number of viable wizards, certain theme decks that may have been impossible in the past may become available. Ironically, the fact that R&D is seeking to power down blue a bit may actually end up seeing it get played more often, and in more creative ways.

Peace,

Anthony Alongi

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