Patience. Cunning. Strategy. These are the traits that attract people to blue, and these are the traits that cause opponents to fluster and scoop. Blue is often called the best color in Magic, and with good reason. It has the answer to just about everything, contains some of the most powerful cards ever printed, and just like the tide, it's unyielding and inevitable. If your patience ebbs at your sixth land drop, this may not be the deck for you, but for the ones that like to play the long game and deal with threats before they even hit the battleground, this may be of interest.
In my local meta, this deck goes undefeated in nearly every tournament. It has only ever lost a tiny handful of games, to resolved early threats or dedicated blue-hate decks or the occasional unfortunate string of misplays on my part. Nobody's perfect, after all.
"The seas are vast, but the skies are even more so. Why be content with one kingdom when I can rule them both?"
Talrand is, obviously, the center of our game plan. Resource denial, disruption, and removal are all nice, but ultimately meaningless if we have no way to win. Talrand gives us our win condition incrementally, amassing a fleet of drakes slowly but surely to eventually beat our opponent into submission.
"There is nothing you can do that I cannot simply deny."
Counterspells are the backbone of the deck. You'll never be in any danger if the opponent is never allowed to resolve anything threatening. A good player knows what to counter, but a great player knows what not to counter. Your counterspells, while many, are not infinite. Why does it matter if the opponent ramps three times in a turn if they're never able to stick anything important?
A good number of the counterspells in the deck either have modes or other effects, like Cryptic Command, Mystic Confluence, and Rewind. There are some "free" counters as well, such as Thwart and Pact of Negation for when you need to tap out for a Caged Sun or the opponent reacts to a Blue Sun's Zenith. Abjure is especially interesting in this deck, since with Talrand on the board the Drake you sacrifice will be replaced by another, so it's effectively a one-mana Counterspell and in a pinch you can sacrifice an enchantment or even Talrand himself if you have to.
The vast majority of the counterspells included also cantrip, so in an ideal situation, you'll never be without one. As we all know, though, the flow of Magic is rarely ideal...
"You call it luck. I call it preparation."
This is where the dedicated cantrips come in. In the early game especially, setting up your draws is vital. You needn't wait until Talrand is on the table to use your low mana spells. All the counterspells in the world won't mean a thing if you can't hit that third or fourth land, and a board full of mana doesn't help much if your Braingeyser is eight cards down.
Brainstorm unfortunately isn't at its full potential without a myriad of fetches, but it's still an incredible turn one play. Ponder and Preordain are as good as they always are, and imprinting a Telling Time or an Impulse on your Isochron Scepter feels fantastic.
"It's hard to argue with a force made of divine will."
You won't always have the right counterspells at the right time, or have enough mana to counter every important thing the opponent casts. That's where the fallback cards come in. Bouncing permanents is something blue has in spades, but destroying or exiling them is not something blue does easily. There are a few dedicated cards that allow it, though, and odds are the new 2/2 boar or 3/3 ape is much less threatening than what you just removed.
"Friends teach what you want to know. Enemies teach what you need to know."
Card advantage is one of the absolute most important aspects in Magic, and it's one of the most often overlooked. The more cards you have, the more answers you have. When both players have exhausted their resources, mass card draw easily puts you back in the game. A resolved Stroke of Genius or Blue Sun's Zenith means that you have fuel again while your opponent doesn't. Sometimes it's good to stroke yourself in public...
"Life is a maze. This is one of its dead ends."
Sometimes the opponent has something just for you, or sometimes you're simply in a bad matchup. In cases like these, you just have to counter the uncounterable. Exiling cards while they're on the stack doesn't count as countering them. Dragonlord Dromoka simply can't contend with some well-timed meddling or time itself grinding to a halt.
"Wealth... but at what cost?"
This deck isn't exactly budget-friendly as it is, but if money is no object, there are upgrades that can be had. Wasteland is superior to Tectonic Edge in every way, and Jace, the Mind Sculptor is better as a whole than his Memory Adept version. Force of Will is the best counterspell ever printed, and just about any counter in the deck can be dropped in favor of it.
There have been a variety of different decks that have come and gone. The usual suspects are Kozilek ramp, Marath goodstuff, mono-b Sidisi combo,
Trostani tokens, Teferi Stasis, Geist tempo, and Animar aggro. The only real unfavorable matchups so far have been Kozilek and Animar if they manage to go off on T3 or 4, or Marath with a T2 Cavern of Souls for Elementals followed by a Voice of Resurgence. Even then, the deck has managed to muscle through an unchecked Cavern a few times before.
Some cards seem pretty win-more, or sub-optimal to me.
For example Bident of Thassa, it costs the same as your general, and it's only good when you're already winning (= swinging with Drakes). Same goes for Caged Sun, 6 mana is a lot. Thought Vessel feels a bit random.
How can you not play some of the best draw cards like Preordain, Think Twice and Flash of Insight? They are great in most blue decks, and here the flashback of the 2 last cards is even more relevant with Talrand's ability.
Also 38 land seems a bit low? In most matchups you want to guarantee land drops during the 6 first turns (cause if you play Talrand turn 4, any good opponent will handle him right away), all the more reasons to play low cost draw cards like Think Twice to thin out your decks during the first turns if you don't need to counter anything.
Generally, I'd play less permanents and more instants/sorceries.
Bident of Thassa's card drawing is nice, but its primary purpose is to help remove nasty early-game threats that I didn't have the mana to counter or couldn't deal with at the time like Grand Abolisher and Voice of Resurgence. I can force them to attack and just block with enough drakes to kill whatever it is that's causing me problems. Caged Sun is a lot of mana, but this deck needs all the mana it can get. It has some cheap counters, but most are in the 3-4CMC range because they cantrip. Without some kind of mana doubling, it's a much more difficult game. As for Thought Vessel, the deck draws so many cards that I often find myself discarding every few turns. First-world MTG problems, I know, but it's my second copy of Reliquary Tower. Vessel is a happy medium between Spellbook and Venser's Journal, and managing a T3 Talrand occasionally (if it's safe to play him) is gravy.
I find 38 lands to be the magic number with four mana accelerants in the deck. I usually count ramp spells and mana rocks / doublers as half a mana, and I try and shoot for 40 if the deck has a high-ish curve. With as much dig and cantrip as the deck has, I've only ever been mana screwed once or twice. I've had to burn an Opt or an Impulse on a land before, but 38 lands plus the artifacts feels right.
I already have Preordain in the deck; I assume you missed it? Think Twice was originally in the deck, but it ultimately got cut for something else. It's solid, but it's pretty expensive and for 3CMC I'd rather have an Exclude or Impulse. As for Flash of Insight, I've been running this deck for months and I hadn't even thought of it. That's amazing, and it's going in the deck as soon as I can get one. Same with Mystic Confluence. At absolute worst it's a Jace's Ingenuity, and often it's more value than Cryptic Command. Yes, please!
Before I comment on your list, let me pose a few questions: first, how long have you been playing this deck? Have you tested the deck against a gauntlet of tier 1 decks? Lastly, how do the tier 1 commanders in your meta (Marath, Sidisi, Geist, etc.) stack up against optimal decklists of the same commanders?
I've been playing it off and on for a few months now. It's gone through a few changes here and there, but for the most part the deck is the same as it started.
It's gone up against some of the high-tier decks, and I've proxied out a couple others and had people pilot them against it. Imperial Animar is hit-or-miss. If I have a counterspell available for Recruiter or a Rift or Snap for Animar, I can usually keep them off the combo until I stabilize. If they're on the play and I don't see a two-mana counterspell or a bounce card, the deck's victory may not be so inevitable. Geist isn't too threatening. I often get whittled down a bit, but Geist is a fairly slow deck and once I'm set up, I can force Geist to trade with a Drake by bouncing what's making it evasive. Marath is kind of a rough one, since if it ever resolves I can't stick Talrand, but if I can get it in the command zone again, I'm good.
As for the actual deck compositions, they're pretty close to optimized. The Animar guy doesn't have Recruiter, but he still has some infinite combos and nasty fatties like the big three Eldrazi. Sidisi is solid too, with a bunch of infinite combos, disruption, removal, and wrath effects. Teferi is a little loose, but he has the Stasis control package and High Tide combo shenanigans that (I assume) most Teferi decks have.
All in all, I wouldn't say that the meta is full of $1000 completely-streamlined decks, but the ones that keep being played are definitely cutthroat enough.
You can sometimes gain a slight advantage by using Snow-Covered Islands with your extraplanar lense that is a trick that I use.
I considered it, but honestly the small edge it'd give me is outweighed by my wanting to run lands with a bunch of different art. If you really want to 100% optimize the deck, it's an option.
Lens is honestly a waste of a turn, and usually a two-fer.
Lens is only a waste if it gets countered or destroyed. There's no way I'd cast one if I didn't think I could protect it. Mana doubling is fairly important in a deck that has a higher curve like this one. If I had a bunch of Dazes and Negates it'd be meh, but it lets me cast a Rewind on T5 into a Stroke of Genius for 5. Remember, this deck really wants to play the long game.
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"Drake at'cha."
-Talrand, probably
Patience. Cunning. Strategy. These are the traits that attract people to blue, and these are the traits that cause opponents to fluster and scoop. Blue is often called the best color in Magic, and with good reason. It has the answer to just about everything, contains some of the most powerful cards ever printed, and just like the tide, it's unyielding and inevitable. If your patience ebbs at your sixth land drop, this may not be the deck for you, but for the ones that like to play the long game and deal with threats before they even hit the battleground, this may be of interest.
In my local meta, this deck goes undefeated in nearly every tournament. It has only ever lost a tiny handful of games, to resolved early threats or dedicated blue-hate decks or the occasional unfortunate string of misplays on my part. Nobody's perfect, after all.
1 Ertai, Wizard Adept
1 Guile
Enchantments (4)
1 Jace's Sanctum
1 Propaganda
1 Rhystic Study
1 Standstill
Instants (35)
1 Abjure
1 AEtherize
1 AEtherspouts
1 Blue Sun's Zenith
1 Brainstorm
1 Capsize
1 Counterspell
1 Cryptic Command
1 Cyclonic Rift
1 Dig Through Time
1 Disdainful Stroke
1 Dismiss
1 Ertai's Meddling
1 Evacuation
1 Exclude
1 Foil
1 Impulse
1 Into the Roil
1 Mindbreak Trap
1 Opt
1 Overwhelming Intellect
1 Pact of Negation
1 Perilous Research
1 Pongify
1 Rapid Hybridization
1 Reality Shift
1 Remand
1 Rewind
1 Scatter to the Winds
1 Snap
1 Spell Burst
1 Stroke of Genius
1 Telling Time
1 Thwart
1 Time Stop
1 Braingeyser
1 Curse of the Swine
1 Devastation Tide
1 Gitaxian Probe
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Mystic Speculation
1 Ponder
1 Portent
1 Preordain
1 Treasure Cruise
Artifacts (8)
1 Bident of Thassa
1 Caged Sun
1 Extraplanar Lens
1 Gauntlet of Power
1 Isochron Scepter
1 Runechanter's Pike
1 Thought Vessel
1 Vedalken Shackles
Planeswalkers (2)
1 Jace, Memory Adept
1 Tamiyo, the Moon Sage
Lands (38)
1 Command Beacon
1 Dust Bowl
30x Island
1 Myriad Landscape
1 Mystifying Maze
1 Reliquary Tower
1 Tectonic Edge
1 Terrain Generator
1 Thawing Glaciers
"The seas are vast, but the skies are even more so. Why be content with one kingdom when I can rule them both?"
Talrand is, obviously, the center of our game plan. Resource denial, disruption, and removal are all nice, but ultimately meaningless if we have no way to win. Talrand gives us our win condition incrementally, amassing a fleet of drakes slowly but surely to eventually beat our opponent into submission.
"There is nothing you can do that I cannot simply deny."
Counterspells are the backbone of the deck. You'll never be in any danger if the opponent is never allowed to resolve anything threatening. A good player knows what to counter, but a great player knows what not to counter. Your counterspells, while many, are not infinite. Why does it matter if the opponent ramps three times in a turn if they're never able to stick anything important?
A good number of the counterspells in the deck either have modes or other effects, like Cryptic Command, Mystic Confluence, and Rewind. There are some "free" counters as well, such as Thwart and Pact of Negation for when you need to tap out for a Caged Sun or the opponent reacts to a Blue Sun's Zenith. Abjure is especially interesting in this deck, since with Talrand on the board the Drake you sacrifice will be replaced by another, so it's effectively a one-mana Counterspell and in a pinch you can sacrifice an enchantment or even Talrand himself if you have to.
The vast majority of the counterspells included also cantrip, so in an ideal situation, you'll never be without one. As we all know, though, the flow of Magic is rarely ideal...
"You call it luck. I call it preparation."
This is where the dedicated cantrips come in. In the early game especially, setting up your draws is vital. You needn't wait until Talrand is on the table to use your low mana spells. All the counterspells in the world won't mean a thing if you can't hit that third or fourth land, and a board full of mana doesn't help much if your Braingeyser is eight cards down.
Brainstorm unfortunately isn't at its full potential without a myriad of fetches, but it's still an incredible turn one play. Ponder and Preordain are as good as they always are, and imprinting a Telling Time or an Impulse on your Isochron Scepter feels fantastic.
"It's hard to argue with a force made of divine will."
You won't always have the right counterspells at the right time, or have enough mana to counter every important thing the opponent casts. That's where the fallback cards come in. Bouncing permanents is something blue has in spades, but destroying or exiling them is not something blue does easily. There are a few dedicated cards that allow it, though, and odds are the new 2/2 boar or 3/3 ape is much less threatening than what you just removed.
"Friends teach what you want to know. Enemies teach what you need to know."
Card advantage is one of the absolute most important aspects in Magic, and it's one of the most often overlooked. The more cards you have, the more answers you have. When both players have exhausted their resources, mass card draw easily puts you back in the game. A resolved Stroke of Genius or Blue Sun's Zenith means that you have fuel again while your opponent doesn't. Sometimes it's good to stroke yourself in public...
"Life is a maze. This is one of its dead ends."
Sometimes the opponent has something just for you, or sometimes you're simply in a bad matchup. In cases like these, you just have to counter the uncounterable. Exiling cards while they're on the stack doesn't count as countering them. Dragonlord Dromoka simply can't contend with some well-timed meddling or time itself grinding to a halt.
"Wealth... but at what cost?"
This deck isn't exactly budget-friendly as it is, but if money is no object, there are upgrades that can be had. Wasteland is superior to Tectonic Edge in every way, and Jace, the Mind Sculptor is better as a whole than his Memory Adept version. Force of Will is the best counterspell ever printed, and just about any counter in the deck can be dropped in favor of it.
There have been a variety of different decks that have come and gone. The usual suspects are Kozilek ramp, Marath goodstuff, mono-b Sidisi combo,
Trostani tokens, Teferi Stasis, Geist tempo, and Animar aggro. The only real unfavorable matchups so far have been Kozilek and Animar if they manage to go off on T3 or 4, or Marath with a T2 Cavern of Souls for Elementals followed by a Voice of Resurgence. Even then, the deck has managed to muscle through an unchecked Cavern a few times before.
Bident of Thassa's card drawing is nice, but its primary purpose is to help remove nasty early-game threats that I didn't have the mana to counter or couldn't deal with at the time like Grand Abolisher and Voice of Resurgence. I can force them to attack and just block with enough drakes to kill whatever it is that's causing me problems. Caged Sun is a lot of mana, but this deck needs all the mana it can get. It has some cheap counters, but most are in the 3-4CMC range because they cantrip. Without some kind of mana doubling, it's a much more difficult game. As for Thought Vessel, the deck draws so many cards that I often find myself discarding every few turns. First-world MTG problems, I know, but it's my second copy of Reliquary Tower. Vessel is a happy medium between Spellbook and Venser's Journal, and managing a T3 Talrand occasionally (if it's safe to play him) is gravy.
I find 38 lands to be the magic number with four mana accelerants in the deck. I usually count ramp spells and mana rocks / doublers as half a mana, and I try and shoot for 40 if the deck has a high-ish curve. With as much dig and cantrip as the deck has, I've only ever been mana screwed once or twice. I've had to burn an Opt or an Impulse on a land before, but 38 lands plus the artifacts feels right.
I already have Preordain in the deck; I assume you missed it? Think Twice was originally in the deck, but it ultimately got cut for something else. It's solid, but it's pretty expensive and for 3CMC I'd rather have an Exclude or Impulse. As for Flash of Insight, I've been running this deck for months and I hadn't even thought of it. That's amazing, and it's going in the deck as soon as I can get one. Same with Mystic Confluence. At absolute worst it's a Jace's Ingenuity, and often it's more value than Cryptic Command. Yes, please!
I've been playing it off and on for a few months now. It's gone through a few changes here and there, but for the most part the deck is the same as it started.
It's gone up against some of the high-tier decks, and I've proxied out a couple others and had people pilot them against it. Imperial Animar is hit-or-miss. If I have a counterspell available for Recruiter or a Rift or Snap for Animar, I can usually keep them off the combo until I stabilize. If they're on the play and I don't see a two-mana counterspell or a bounce card, the deck's victory may not be so inevitable. Geist isn't too threatening. I often get whittled down a bit, but Geist is a fairly slow deck and once I'm set up, I can force Geist to trade with a Drake by bouncing what's making it evasive. Marath is kind of a rough one, since if it ever resolves I can't stick Talrand, but if I can get it in the command zone again, I'm good.
As for the actual deck compositions, they're pretty close to optimized. The Animar guy doesn't have Recruiter, but he still has some infinite combos and nasty fatties like the big three Eldrazi. Sidisi is solid too, with a bunch of infinite combos, disruption, removal, and wrath effects. Teferi is a little loose, but he has the Stasis control package and High Tide combo shenanigans that (I assume) most Teferi decks have.
All in all, I wouldn't say that the meta is full of $1000 completely-streamlined decks, but the ones that keep being played are definitely cutthroat enough.
Is it really a "trick" this many years down the line?
I like saving my Smash to Smithereens for your Lens to get a 2-for-1 and a Lava Spike for my 1R.
Steel Sabotage'ng Orbs of Mellowness since 2011.
But a well timed counterspell nixes your smash to smithereens or your lava spike.
Being that I play predominantly red with the exception of this deck I see your point.
Anyway back on topic I still use Mulldrifter in my deck even if it isn't a spell.
Mulldrifter is good in some decks, but in here it's a waste. With Talrand out, Divination literally does the same thing for 2 less.
I considered it, but honestly the small edge it'd give me is outweighed by my wanting to run lands with a bunch of different art. If you really want to 100% optimize the deck, it's an option.
Lens is only a waste if it gets countered or destroyed. There's no way I'd cast one if I didn't think I could protect it. Mana doubling is fairly important in a deck that has a higher curve like this one. If I had a bunch of Dazes and Negates it'd be meh, but it lets me cast a Rewind on T5 into a Stroke of Genius for 5. Remember, this deck really wants to play the long game.