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Building Blocks: Preliminary Thoughts on Theros Block Constructed
Posted on October 2, 2013 by Lee McLeod
Can you explain, why is blue weak in theros? Almost everybody wanted to play blue in the prerealese!
Whats bad about a counterspell? And blue has very good tricks, like “Triton Tactics”
Blue even has “hard removal” in “Curse of the swine” okay you have to deal with the boars, but they are much simple to handle than a big monster!
But I’m not an expert in Block constructed! I think blue can be a good support color! The tricks are good, and a counter spell to protect your board is good!
By the way I played green monsters with 5 blue “tricks” and won the prerealese. I think I would have lost without blue…
@random: I shouldn’t speak for Lee, but as I understand it, because of the limited mana fixing in Theros Block Constructed, blue can only reliably pair with green and black, missing out on the two better planeswalkers and also most of the good removal in the set (Hero’s Downfall excluded, though it costs 2 black mana to cast).
Also, Lee didn’t say that blue was bad in Limited (sealed, draft, etc.), rather that it didn’t have a chance to play the best constructed cards alongside a stable mana base.
Like PlanetWalls said, I think you need keep in mind how different games will be in block constructed vs draft. Draft is mainly about commons not mythics and planeswalkers. You also won’t always be able to draft and play a particular archetype like you could do with a constructed deck. There also doesn’t appear to be any disadvantage to your mana base to play blue in draft.
It doesn’t mean there won’t be a base blue deck that dominates block constructed at some point either. You just need to figure out how you can best take advantage of blue’s strengths and what you would pair it with to come up with a good deck for block constructed.
@random: My esteemed colleagues have deduced my thinking. Blue isn’t completely worthless – it’s probably just fine as a support color. But I can’t go into the format thinking “Man, blue is so good because of X card!” because there really is no X card to get excited about.
Tip tip and cheerio, esteemed lad. Would that I were silly enough to partake in revelry and cheer to talk like a fedora wearing hack, because then I would fit right in!
Master of Waves is a blue card to get excited about, same with thassa. Making them work is the hard part.
-orvn
I spent most of the day playing theros block constructed on mtgo. My thoughts are: monoblack is insanely good and the mana fixing is better than it looks. My fave deck to emerge was a four color wugr heroic deck. Polis Crusher and fade into antiquity kept whip decks under control while hoplites provided a fast beatdown that could get out of hand if not dealt with.