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For better or worse, blue has a reputation inMagic: The Gatheringas the thinking player’s color. Blue is often celebrated as superior to other colors due to its proclivity towards control-based strategies and its access to counterspells.
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However, these very same attributes can also be blue’s downfall. After all, control decks are the hardest kinds to play in Magic, and counterspells don’t actually advance the game state in your favor. Blue is arguably the most nuanced color of the entire Magic color pie, and players who know how to take advantage of its myriad effects usually find themselves a step ahead of the competition.
Blue’s Philosophy
From a narrative perspective, blue isprimarily concerned with accumulating knowledgeas a means to attain mastery over the universe. Blue believes that no destination is predetermined and that anyone can forge a path in the direction of their choosing as long as they’re willing to think about things logically.
Some of the mechanics of blue exhibit this philosophy througheffects such as card draw, counterspells, and copy effects.
Blue also prizes deception as well as the long con, taking its time to defeat an opponent while simultaneously lulling them into a false sense of security. The truth of the matter is thatthe longer a game goes, the greater the probability that blue will find the upper hand.
Blue is never in a hurry to get anywhere fast. Instead, it’s content to simply stall out a game until it finds the right opening to seize total control. Speaking of which, control is blue’s ultimate motive as it seeks to take over a game by every measurable metric before finally dealing the killing blow.
More often than not, players of other colors would rather concede than see a blue player slowly stride towards victory, as it can easily feel as though blue is simply showing off at a certain point.
Primary Mechanics
As previously mentioned, blue’s primary mechanics include card draw, counterspells, and copying effects. It’s also home to the large majority of the other abilities detailed in the table below.
Description
Counterspell
Counters a spell while it’s still being cast, preventing it from being played and sending it directly to the graveyard.
Draw
Blue is home to the best draw spells in the game, many of which are instants and sorceries.
Returns permanents from the battlefield to a player’s hand.
Mill
Places cards from a player’s library into their graveyard. A player who goes to draw a card and has no library left instantly loses the game.
Reduces a creature’s power and toughness by -X/-X.
“Cannot untap”
Prevents creatures from untapping during a player’s upkeep.
Permanent Theft
Steals a permanent from an opponent and places it under your control.
Flash
A creature keyword that allows a creature to be played at instant speed.
Flying
A creature keyword that makes it so that a creature can only be blocked by other creatures with flying.
Hexproof
A creature keyword that prevents a creature from being targeted by opposing spells.
Extra Turns
Effects that allow you to take another turn after the current turn ends.
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Key Creature Types
Each color is home to a characteristic creature type and an iconic creature type. The characteristic creature type is the most common at all rarities in the color. Meanwhile, the iconic creature type is one that best represents the color’s core philosophy.
Iconic Creature: Sphinx
In mythical fantasy, Sphinxes are creatures with the body of a lion, the head of a human, and feathered wings. They are known for their great cunning and boundless intellect as well as their role as safe-keepers of ancient mysteriesand powerful artifacts.
In Magic, Sphinxes are mana intensive flying creatures with respectable power and toughness. They’re not the biggest flying creatures in Magic, but they come pretty close. They also often feature a unique ability that allows them to draw cards, perform counterspells, and more.
Characteristic creature: Merfolk
Merfolk are half-human, half-fish-type creatures who live in great civilizations beneath the ocean’s waves. Some merfolk exhibit fishy tails, while others sport bipedal legs like most other humanoids.Merfolk often varyin appearance based on what plane they hail from.
Merfolk are well-known in Magic for being one of the most popular creature type decks in Modern for a long time running. While they have been less popular in recent years, the printing of Vodalian Hexcatcher has led to the deck rearing its head in the Modern metagame once more. Merfolk are best known for being tricky to block.
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Strengths
Blue’s strengths come from its core mechanics: card draw, counterspells, stalling the game, and evasive creatures.
Card Draw
It stands to reason that if you play more cards than your opponent, you are much more likely to win. However, the issue presented here is ensuring that you stay alive long enough to play the additional cards you draw.
Expending mana to replace a card with more cards is a great deal as long as you have the life points to survive the tempo loss of not adding anything to your battlefield. If you lose the game before you get a chance to deploy the extra cards you’ve drawn, then drawing additional cards hasn’t really done anything at all.
The best card draw spells are often instants as you may play them when you know your opponent isn’t going to be able to pressure your life total. In addition, you can hold them up alongside blue’s other greatest strength: counterspells.
Counterspells
Some players believe that counterspells are the best cards in the game as they can technically answer any card your opponent plays. While this is true, you can’t actually win a game of Magic by just casting counterspells. They don’t add anything to your board, and they don’t pressure your opponent’s life total.
Counterspells are at their best when used on your opponent’s biggest and baddest cards. They are also great for providing you with a mana advantage, as spending two mana on an Essence Scatter that counters an opponent’s four mana value Sheoldred, The Apocalypse puts you ahead on mana expenditure.
That said, the best opponents know how to make casting your counterspells awkward. At the end of the day, counterspells rely on your opponent casting a spell in the first place. The greatest Magic players can and will use this knowledge against you.
Stalling The Game
Whether it’s playing creatures with high toughness, bouncing permanents to an opponent’s hand, or preventing an opponent’s creatures from untapping, blue is the best color in Magic for stalling the game. This is a great boon, as blue is also the best color in Magic for winning in the late game.
However, it can often be difficult to know when you’re supposed to switch gears from stalling the game and playing defense to going on the offensive and closing out a match. The most control-heavy blue decks usually don’t need to worry about this issue, but most decks in the modern day of Magic are not this control-heavy.
The importance of this topic is explained in great detail in a timeless article known as “Who’s the Beatdown” by Mike Flores. Every Magic player can benefit from reading this article, so give it a look if you’re interested in becoming a better player.
Evasive Creatures
Unblockable, flash, and flying are all keywords that you’ll see frequently on blue creatures. You can use these keywords in tandem with blue’s other strengths to field an offense that your opponent will have a very tough time blocking. Blue rarely has the biggest creatures on the battlefield, but it does have the most cunning ones.
Weaknesses
Blue is extremely susceptible to strategies that are especially aggressive. Furthermore, blue has little to no removal in its card suite, making big creatures an inevitable problem that you can only delay and never truly deal with.
Aggression
Any deck looking to curve out and unload their entire hand onto the battlefield by the fifth or sixth turn is going to give you a very tough time. As previously mentioned, blue thrives on making it to the late game, where it can use its superior card draw to bury opponents in value.
Especially aggressive decks will never allow you to get to this stage of the game, effectively making all of your card draw spells and mana intensive cards completely useless. Any meta that’s home to a lot of haste creatures, burn spells, or generally quicker matches will be a hostile environment for blue.
Absence Of Removal
Seeing as blue has little in the wayof true removal, creature-heavy decks are also likely to give blue players a hard time. Thankfully, crafty blue players can make use of low mana value, evasive creatures, bounce spells, and counterspells to overcome the need for removal.
Decks that use this combination of cards to snag victories belong to an archetype known as tempo. While blue is primarily known for its reputation as the ultimate control color, players can still find success with blue in a meta where control fails by instead building tempo decks like a Mono Blue Tempo deck that exists in Standard.
