Dime a Dozen #15: Fae Valentine

Hi everyone! I want to (preemptively) wish you all a Happy Valentine’s Day. If you don’t have a valentine this year, fear not! There’re plenty of unsuspecting Pauper novices to take your aggression out on, and I have just the deck for the occasion.

Today’s deck is Mono-Blue Fae, also commonly referred to as Mono-Blue Delver. It certainly has a lot of things going for it, and is widely considered a top tier strategy. I decided to play this deck for a few reasons: first, it’s hard to justify not playing one of the “best decks” in the format, especially when other players have put up such impressive numbers with said decks in the past. Next, Mono-Blue Fae allows me to do two things that I particularly enjoy. Those two things are to beat down, and to draw cards!

In this article, I will break down the elements of my Mono-Blue Fae list before taking that list into a Daily Event. Afterwards, I will make some suggestions on how to improve the deck. Let’s go!

So let’s start with the land count. 18. Why? When in doubt, play more lands, that’s why! I should tell you that the norm for this deck is 16 or 17, however. I’ve played that many lands, and it usually works just fine. With this list, I have access to Frostburn Weird and Serrated Arrows in the sideboard, so I wanted to be able to support those cards with an extra land or two. You will see in the videos that (spoiler alert) 18 lands was actually a bad decision. This might be because we tend to see a lot of cards with this deck, and therefore will see more lands on average.

Delver of Secrets is the creature we need to discuss first. This is, of course, the optimal play on Turn 1, and can decide the entire game. That’s right. Turn 1 win condition. While this card has been talked about a million times before, I’ll quickly go over why it’s so good. A 3/2 flier often just flies over everything that other Pauper decks are doing early in the game, and provides a faster clock to boot. In a mono-blue shell, enemy’s answers can be countered and bounced long enough for us to simply win.

I sometimes feel like Cloud of Faeries is far too good to be a common. First of all, it’s free. Free! In some decks it actually nets you mana. It also adds to the faerie count for Spellstutter Sprite, and it cycles later in the game. Sheesh. Let’s play four of these!

Spellstutter Sprite makes for great tempo plays, and is one of the best creatures to bounce with Ninja of the Deep Hours. Sometimes it’s even correct to target her with a Snap while something threatening is on the stack.

The 2/2 body on Ninja of the Deep Hours is just about its only weakness. It obviously sucks if you have no creatures on the board, but otherwise it re-buys your guys and draws you cards. It’s a good way to punish non-interactive decks or to bury topdeckers in card advantage. I sometimes think that this card is win-more, but it does a good job of keeping enemies from attacking because they don’t want you to connect on the backswing.

Rounding out the creatures is Spire Golem, with a 2/4 body that stops aggro cold and sometimes costs nothing. I think four is the correct number here.

Despite being a blue deck, Fae tends to run out of gas during certain stages of the game. For this reason I’m packing four copies of Accumulated Knowledge. It fits well with the “leave mana open”-premise of Cloud of Faeries, and becomes extremely cost-efficient after the first one is cast. There’s also a single Gush for the same reason, and we usually cast it for the alternate cost. Try to hold this one back when possible, so that you still have adequate lands on the table.

The suite of countermagic that accompanies Spellsputter Sprite includes Counterspell and Daze. I like three copies of Daze because it’s nice to have one in most games, but multiples tend to diminish in value. This is another spell that will be cast almost exclusively for its alternate cost, and therefore can be detrimental to our mana development. It also tends to get worse later in the game, so sometimes it is correct to cast this before it becomes irrelevant.

Snap is just an all-around powerful tempo card, providing an Unsummon effect while leaving up mana to counter a subsequent play. I don’t have any other creature control in the main deck, which could be a problem depending on the field.

Lastly I’ve got a few sorceries that are integral to our game plan. Four copies of Ponder, which I’ve opted for over Preordain and Brainstorm. I’ve been very happy with this card, which is essentially here to help out Delver. It also fishes very deep for lands (or whatever it is you need at the time). I think it’s important not to dilute your deck with too many of these effects, and instead run more of the effects you’d actually like to find with them.

The three Gitaxian Probes allow us to shape our entire early game around trumping the opponent’s opening sequence of plays. This card has some of the same characteristics as Daze: it’s good to have one per game, multiples are usually not needed, and it’s at its best early rather than late.

As far as the sideboard goes, Curfew works well against the “all-in on one creature” strategies such as GW Hexproof and Infect, whose creatures tend to be impossible to target anyway. Echoing Truth may no longer be needed due to the banning of Empty the Warrens, but was an auto-include at the time I recorded these videos. Dispel combats the Cloudpost and blue control decks, but also has other applications besides just winning counter wars.

Frostburn Weird is nice as a Plated Seastrider vs. aggro, and can come in against Cloudpost if you want to have a higher threat density. Hydroblast can fend off Goblins, Affinity, and Cloudpost as well. Finally, Serrated Arrows makes mincemeat out of small creatures and can swing games in our favor.

You’ll find that this deck gets “free wins” on the back of Turn 1 Delver, backed up by some combination of Cloud of Faeries, Counterspell and/or Spellstutter Sprite. Swinging for 4 or 5 damage in the air while disrupting your opponent’s relevant plays is a joy for you, and hell for them. This is far more “fair” than some of the other free wins in the format (R.I.P. Storm), but is not always the optimal route to take in a game.

Without any further ado, here are the matches!

So we ended up facing Mono-Blue. All. Day. Long. This wasn’t the best sample size, but it did teach me one very important thing about the deck: 18 lands is too many! I began siding out two lands in every game, because the consistent flood I experienced in the late game was very frustrating. I think that 16 lands is certainly doable, so I would do something like this with the main deck:

-2 Island
+2 Frostburn Weird
OR
-2 Island
+2 Dispel

This simultaneously adds oomph to our maindeck while freeing up space in the sideboard. As you probably know by now, the stock value of Echoing Truth has dropped off a bit due to the banning of Empty the Warrens. This potentially gives us even more sideboard space! I’m not sure what to do with it yet, but I think having a bit more creature removal would be nice. I wouldn’t cut down on Curfews yet, despite the banning of Invigorate. There are still Silhana Ledgewalkers and Slippery Bogles running around in this format. Who knows, Infect may still be played regularly even without its free uber-pump.

Here is a list of cards that might be welcome additions to the sideboard:

Annul (Affinity, Hexproof, White Weenie)
Curse of Chains (Affinity, Goblins etc.)
Curse of the Bloody Tome (Cloudpost, MBC)
Frostburn Weird (extra copies, mostly for aggro)
Serrated Arrows (extra copies for aggro and the mirror)
Weatherseed Faeries (this is relatively popular, but I don’t know if it’s needed)

I’m sure I’ve missed some cards, so let me know!

End Step

Well that wraps it up for today. In all honesty, I had a pretty abysmal showing with Mono Blue Fae (this was my worst Daily Event in a long time). If you’d like me to revisit the deck, or if you’d just like to point out my blunders, please comment and let me know. Thanks for reading, thanks for watching, and happy Valentine’s Fae!

Okay, that could honestly be the worst pun ever. At any rate, don’t forget to comment!

You can find Jason
co-hosting the Pauper’s Cage podcast
on MTGO as BambooRush
on Twitter @dimecollectorsc
and on Youtube at youtube.com/dimecollectorsc