In my article last week, I mentioned how I thought Mono-Blue Devotion was the best deck in Standard. It may not be the most powerful or most flashy deck, but it simply offers a large amount of consistency while still doing something worth doing by virtue of the devotion mechanic. Today I decided to put that claim to the test by battling with it against some of the heavy hitters in Standard.
The decklist is still the same as last week.
Creatures (28)
- 4 Judge's Familiar
- 4 Frostburn Weird
- 4 Cloudfin Raptor
- 4 Nightveil Specter
- 4 Tidebinder Mage
- 4 Thassa, God of the Sea
- 4 Master of Waves
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (5)
Spells (25)
W/R Aggro
Mono-Blue Mirror
R/W Devotion
Mono-Black Devotion
Esper Control
One thing I really like about Mono-Blue Devotion is that you are rewarded for playing tightly. I made a number of mistakes over the course of these games, and you can directly see that some of them ended up costing me a bit of value here and there. It didn’t always end up mattering, but sometimes it did. For example, if you look at game 1 against Mono-Black Devotion, I made enough small mistakes throughout the game such that the aggregate result was that I ended up losing the game. Had I made the right play with Rapid Hybridization early or attacked with everything later on to prevent him from drawing one extra card with Erebos, I might have been able to prevent him from finding the second Gray Merchant to finish me off.
Things like that are why I love playing Magic. It’s refreshing to know that the lines of play you take actually matter and that Magic is still a skill game. It’s easy to get lost in the idea that a lot of Magic comes down to how lucky your draws are, but that simply isn’t always the full story. In that game, I was frustrated that I kept missing land drops, but at the same time with tight enough play, I could have overcome that and ended up winning anyway.
Do I recommend playing Mono-Blue Devotion this weekend? Yes, I do. I think the deck is still well positioned. It boasts a strong matchup against aggressive decks, and you can actually grind out control decks and Mono-Black Devotion thanks to cards like Bident of Thassa.
Will I be playing the deck moving forward? That I don’t know for sure. I plan on playing in an SCG Classic Series in Virginia Beach this weekend, and right now I’m going to play either Mono-Blue Devotion, the W/U/R Heliod deck I talked about in my article last week, or the R/W Devotion deck that Chris VanMeter beat me with in these videos. I think the R/W deck is extremely powerful, yet it isn’t exactly my style of deck. The Heliod deck is a lot more fun for me and a lot more up my alley, so it’s certainly possible I will be battling with that.
If worse comes to worst, I know that I can’t go wrong with Mono-Blue Devotion. It’s simply a solid choice, and hopefully these videos have given you some insight into how matches with the deck can play out and what lines of play you should take (and not take) in order to be successful. Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions for this format, and whether this is something you care about seeing more of moving forward.
And if you just want to talk about just how nasty a turn 3 Thassa can be, we can do that too.