MTG Salvation

Style Points. Seriously, Talrand is great in the sense that he’s not a common monoU general and he certainly isn’t weak while not being over the top. Having a blue army is always, always cool. People will frown on you if you play a competitive Azami deck. People will be interested if you run a Talrand deck. Also, the number of Drake references you can get away with in-game makes playing the deck a great experience.

Nature of Token Army: they are all flying. This doesn’t seem like much but it already makes them superior to say, a 2/2 wolf army. This makes our creatures very evasive, and just to state the obvious, it usually means that our damage will go through unhindered.

Control elements: Board advantage and card advantage can both be achieved through effective use of counters and cantrips. Moreover opponents are less likely to save/focus counters on you since most of your spells, if cast would be cantrips and bounce. The good thing is that the deck isn't extremely control-oriented due to our win-con being so extremely, extremely Melvin. The perceived threat level is also a bit lower.

Fun to Play : seriously, it is fun to play. It is control without being draw-go, draw-go without being over-powered, aggro without being annoying, and annoying without being dominating. It strikes a delicate balance between attacking and controlling, between being aimed to win and aimed to be fun. It's not my strongest deck, but arguably it's the most fun.

Pretty bad without Talrand: tuck effects and numerous targetted kill effects, or cards such as Nevermore will set the deck back considerably. I’ve once had to pass-go until I died in a multiplayer game solely because of Warp World. Feels bad. Moreover most of our deck strategies revolve around Talrand: even Proteus Staff assumes you have a creature to begin with. This is also why we don't run Lightning Greaves, but more on that later on.

Snowball nature: The deck wins easily if it snowballs. In the same vein, it loses easily it’s set back early. An early Acidic Slime , for instance, can really swing the game in the opponent’s favour as we are running low mana ramp with minimal lands.

What Goes Around, Comes Around In this deck we run anthems and cards that slow our opponents down. We are also vulnerable to those cards. For instance, what if an aggro deck targets us in multiplayer? Most of our tokens would likely go to defending without killing. We'd be very behind then.

Multiplayer: I created this thread in the multiplayer section because I intended it to be playable in both formats, single or multiplayer. However it makes politics very important in multiplayer because if you focus one man down you are likely to make enemies and if you split your army you may become a threat to everyone. I find that playing it safe is good but it makes the deck slower, and thus weaker.

Your starting hand should ideally have 3 playable mana sources i.e. lands and cheap mana rocks. This is to ensure that not only can you draw enough lands for Talrand you also have enough to cast your basic spells. 2 land-hands are okay but not recommended unless you go second. As a mono-blue player, control elements are important so ideally your hand should look something like this:

• Island
  
• Island
  
• Island
  
• Counter
  
• Cantrip
  
• ??
  
• ??

Keeping in mind the deck's average mana cost, the two ?? should also ideally be around 2-3 mana max. Having cards like Proteus Staff or Coastal Piracy would be the exception because those cards generate a larger advantage in the mid game. Currently, the average mana cost for this deck is around 2.82. Meaning that in an ideal game, even if you are behind as long as your Talrand is out you should be able to cast over 95% of anything you draw.

Knowing that the average mana cost per card is 2.82 also gives you a rough idea of how many spells you should play per turn. For instance, assuming I want to dig through my deck with cantrips. How many cantrips should I use if I have to use them on my turn? (i.e. Ponder) Can I reliably chain my cantrips into more drake tokens without leaving my board open? You always want to keep mana open because of our high instant count. Safety takes priority over drakes.

As such, keep your spells until Talrand comes out. It's the simplest and usually the best method to play the deck. As such you are especially vulnerable early game without Talrand so play your cards at your own discretion. This is also the reason why we run low mana rocks. Mana rocks have a delicate position in this deck. While mana doublers are always good mana rocks are dangerous because they can break our tempo during crucial moments. They are mostly useful to accelerate a turn 3 Talrand and so on, but beyond turns 5-6 they tend to be rather lackluster.

With Talrand in play, keep cantrips and counters in hand. Never play any during your turn, but of course, if you need it, go ahead. Keeping mana open can be great for Whispers of the Muse and other cantrips. This goes for almost every stage of the game. However it is especially important here because mid-game is when we hit the peak of our mana-efficiency curve. With sufficient mana and sufficient cards in hand it is possible to generate around 3 tokens before our turns begin. Here is where we not only build up our drake army but also stockpile our control elements. Therefore it is crucial that we make full use of this part of the game before the board becomes finalised/ too developed.

Fabricate is also situational. With low lands, getting Caged Sun / Gauntlet of Power is good if you have low mana. Proteus Staff is good for upping the pressure, and so is Gravitational Shift], which serves as both a Propaganda-type effect (minimise damage) and a good anthem for your board.

1v1 wise your mid-game has to be your mid-game phase. This is because as a tempo-based deck you can speed up the game in your favour to close it out before your opponent gets major threats out.

There isn't much to say about the late-game.

Now you should have a large hand-size and sufficient mana to control the game. From here on out it's mostly protecting your deck from sweeps and closing out the game with Coat of Arms, et cetera. As we run no combos and no extra turn spells, we have to ensure that we can win in one sweep or over the course of a few turns rather that protract the game into an extended arms race. Even though we have flying tokens we are nonetheless vulnerable to aggro decks, especially R/G should they run trample-type effects. As such, attacking in the late game is usually a matter of personal discretion. Can I afford to go all in with my tokens? Can I generate enough tokens during his/her turn to protect myself? How long will it take me to end the game?

Note that of course, most multiplayer games naturally enter this stage due to multiplayer dynamics. Unless you aim to take out all players from the get-go most EDH players in my experience will build up their forces and prevent themselves from being the target of the entire group. As such, few players lose the game before the late-game phase, and this is usually the most difficult part of Talrand to deal with, given that we excel at tempo-based control and aggro. Try not to stagnate in this stage too long. Ideally you should focus down major threats in the match and then pick the rest off.

In a similar vein simply by entering the late-game phase, we can still rapidly create an army at EoT, but its effectiveness may be therefore limited. Fabricate here would go for Coat of Arms, most of the time. Consider using Opposition for closing the game out.

Talrand decks, as I've seen on the forums generally go down two major routes: what I like to call Cantrip Tea, and the basic mono-blue control route. Both are decent and efficient ways to run Talrand focusing on his two strengths. While I have modified my deck to go down both paths simulataneously, both decks are decent deck archetypes and I welcome you to try them if you want.

Cantrip Tea: These are the decks that run Reach Through Mists. While I removed that card solely for essentially being nothing but a 2/2 drake, the deck used to run this way by chaining multiple cantrips at EoT to get out a large drake army. This would work well in a sweep-heavy or creature-filled format. Moreover through multiple cantrips the deck can reach its control elements, which are usually low. However in my experience this method of playing is counter-productive since you usually reach a point where you run out of cantrips. Fun, a 'glass-cannon' build and really fast, but lacks a back-up plan. It gambles on the fact that you can draw into multiple cantrips. In my opinion, a better strategy would be to use cantrips that may cost a bit higher, but do something relevant, such as running Cerulean Wisps if we have creatures with activated abilities, or cutting it when we ourselves cannot use it, or removing pretty much useless cards such as Leap. These cards may help in multiplayer (I Leap your creature, go whack my enemy) but they are too situational for this strategy.

Mono-blue control: Simply counter the spells and get a token whenever. It isn't the most ideal mono-blue deck but it is certainly not a over-powering or extremely threatening one. You can then protect yourself with the tokens until you get out your wincons. The difference here of course is that now your drakes are not your wincon, compared to Cantrip Tea which focuses completely on getting an army. In my opinion, a number of decks outclass this role, such as Vendillion Clique or even Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur decks.

One common problem with Talrand is that it suffers a lot in multiplayer. Plenty of your spells become ineffective in multiplayer: even in a mono-blue control shell you become essentially a control/combo deck. Not my favourite playstyle if your wincons are just combos. They render you vulnerable to being ganged up on or targeted i.e. Praetor's Grasp, etc. Like I said, the deck suffers if you get put behind early, so attracting too much hate is bad in multiplayer.

Your wincons for this deck are your drakes, but you can't keep too large an army out until you can ensure that you are in no danger i.e. blue player tapped out/about to die, no sweeps, etc. The drakes also work well with Windreader Sphinx and [CARD]Coastal Piracy
[/CARD]. What you could do in multiplayer is engage in politics. Attack some players with drakes at times, 1-2 at a time, focus the major threat, bounce your opponent's creatures to save them, etc. You can draw cards and keep safe this way. Then when major threats are out you can try and take over the game entirely. Remember, you are still a monoblue deck. Your aim is to ultimately control and win the game.

I'd like to quote rockondon's awesome Arcum Dagsson primer regarding politics:

1) Have fun. If you do nothing but whine and complain then people might target you out of spite.
2) Establish trust. Try to seem fair when ‘helping’ others with their threat assessment. If you say things like “I hate to say this but if I were you, I would probably attack me with that creature since I have no blockers” it is usually worth it to take a minor hit if it convinces people that you are honest and fair. This will help you sway them with your biased suggestions later.
3) Sincerity – players like this so once you learn how to fake it, you got it made.
4) Try to avoid douchebag wincons. If you establish board-control and drag out the game into a long, boring, painful gaming experience then people will surely gang up on you that game and probably gang up on you in further games above and beyond what they normally would.

- Remember we want to refresh our hand with cantrip tea. This is also a major design element for the deck: if my memory serves me correctly, we are currently running 26 cards that create card advantage (e.g. draw at least one card)

- Remember that there is a reason why we do not need/want to run Lightning Greaves: not only is attacking with your non-flying creatures not as crucial ,you also want to keep your general and creatures exposed so you can bounce them back to hand. This is good against tuck effects and for your major 3 creatures, kill-spells. Windreader, Jin and Tyrant can win the game on their own if you can get them out and get them to stick. I understand that you could simply give them shroud to protect them, but I prefer not having them fall prey to sweeps and other similar effects. Due to the sheer power these cards bring, it's best to always have them safe and in your hand if they die. Blue has no reanimation.

- Remember: you can use Unsummon to get rid of two attackers. You can thus bounce an attacker and create a token to block. This may seem like it isn't much but it could help prevent general damage or reduce Trample damage. Likewise with Think Twice. Basically you can Unsummon at the beginning of the combat step and block with a token, getting rid of 2 potential attackers. I'm not sure whether you can do the same thing at the end of the declare attackers step but the idea is the same.

- Likewise, the fact that Talrand creates a token by casting any instant/sorcery regardless of resolution is important to note. This is basically why Talrand is good: you essentially will never lose board/card advantage if you count the tokens...

- Logic Knot: remove land cards and otherwise useless cards. This is important to note compared to simply removing everything because you are running Elixir of Immortality. Time Reversal could be used too.


- Proteus Staff Package: The Trio of Windreader Sphinx, Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur and Tidespout Tyrant can win you the game if you can get all three out. It becomes very difficult to recover against all three at once. This is also why we run minimal creatures as well. By casting spells to create tokens, we basically Polymorph our tokens into terrifying monsters. Alternate decks may consider cards such as Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir or Stormtide Leviathan for additional power and control elements. We don't really prefer big creatures as opposed to creatures which grant an immediate benefit to our board advantage, so things like Inkwell Leviathan aren't good here.

Proteus Staff is underrated in the sense that it is also a powerful artifact outside of fetching aforementioned creatures. Not only is it a way to help find your general in case he gets tucked, it can also repeatedly tuck your opponent's generals, especially when playing against blue decks which run low creatures. In a sense, Proteus Staff counts as a wincon for this deck.

Talrand, Sky Summoner: Our boss, our lord, our king, our love. He is the Drake to our Amanda Bynes.

Windreader Sphinx : I loved Coastal Piracy so much, I decided to run another version. This is better because our currentiteration of the deck lacks a tutor effect, and this can be fetched out with Proteus Staff. Moreover, this doesn't limit itself to just our creatures or dealing damage- as long as any creature with flying attacks, we draw a card. Sounds really good to me.

Tidespout Tyrant: Control element. With most of our instants, we can dominate the game with an early Tidespout Tyrant. Imagine getting him out on turn 5 and then bouncing 2-3 lands on turn 6. Madness.

Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur : My friends told me not to run him because he's countered by Reliquary Tower. Well, guess what. Not everyone gets that land out easily. Moreover the first effect is much more interesting: drawing 7 cards a turn can't possibly be bad.

Portent , Serum Visions , Sleight of Hand , Ponder , Preordain : deck fixing on cheap cantrips. Mostly run for the cantrip effect, but the deck fixing makes them inherently superior to 'pure' cantrips like Reach Through Mists.

Gitaxian Probe : Cantrip, can be cast for 2 life to increase our spell count. May be replaced with Peek. It's also a good card to pay 2 life to use, to make sure our blue playing opponents have no answers to our shenanigans - check for counter spells, etc.

Fabricate : Crucial for finding our mana doublers, Coat of Arms and of course, Proteus Staff.

Talrand's Invocation : Tokens. This is really good, because it creates 3 at one shot. It feels underwhelming on paper but it immediately ups our threat level. I use it when I'm either ahead or behind, but never when I'm on par. Also our general is Talrand, it only feels fitting.

Wash Out : It's useful bounce, a smaller Inundate, certainly not as good, but it is what we need.

Rhystic Study " target="blank">Rhystic Study , Coastal Piracy" target="blank"> Coastal Piracy, Bident of Thassa " target="blank"> Bident of Thassa : Draw. Lots of draw. Especially in multiplayer where you have more ways to draw cards off slower decks trying to catch up.

Opposition" target="blank">Opposition More control, great to lock the game down when we want to win.

Leyline of Anticipation " target="blank"> Leyline of Anticipation : Great card to have. It complements our EoT strategy so we can refrain from casting sorceries during our turn. It makes all of our 1 mana spells cantrips.

Gravitational Shift " target="blank"> Gravitational Shift : a win-more effect/ finisher. It reduces the number of drakes we need to win. Moreover it slows down other aggro decks.

Tamiyo, The Moon Sage : The one and only planeswalker in this deck. Let's cover why we run her over the other mono-blue planeswalkers.

1. In keeping with our tempo-based strategy, her +1 ability is good for doing so. We can tap down important mana sources, terrifying activated abilities and whatnot. It is good. We could even soft lock a deck that is based on general damage and evasiveness to win, if possible.
2. Her -2 ability is really synergistic with our own strategy. We can swing with our drakes and then -2 during postcombat.
3. Her ultimate is a pseudo infinite-combo with Rewind and it gives us the power to almost win the game immediately thanks to abusing our cantrips.

Other planeswalkers: The Jaces are always welcome in any blue deck, but I chose not to run them, mostly because they are 4 mana and below when Tamiyo is mostly used once we get Talrand online. She seems pretty underwhelming and vulnerable otherwise; the Jaces would essentially be free targets until I can get my Drakes out. Jace Beleren has interesting multiplayer potential and we could benefit from Jace, Architect of Thought's ultimate, but it'll take too long to get. Likewise, Jace, the Mind Sculptor is too expensive for me. I'd totally run him if I could though. Thanks to his -1 and 0 ability I would not mind risking an instant kill for that long-term utility and OPness. We don't really benefit from Tezzeret, the Seeker because he becomes an expensive Fabricate or a second Coat of Arms. I suppose he could save us some mana but it seems pointless.

Elixir of Immortality " target="blank"> Elixir of Immortality : Our strategy can result in drawing out most of our deck. This card can save us from decking out, and enable us to send our key cards back into the deck, i.e. Counterspells and our creatures.

Sapphire Medallion " target="blank"> Sapphire Medallion : The BEST means of mana ramp for this deck. The mana savings are ridiculous. A lot of our spells become 1 mana or less. Sapphire Medallion is like a mana rock in this deck. Every blue spell we cast costs 1 generic less. If we play 2 blue spells, it's basically a Sol Ring. So on and so forth.

Sol Ring " target="blank"> Sol Ring : You may notice the stunning lack of mana acceleration. While earlier in the post I mentioned how we want to get Talrand out as quickly as we can, with calculated risk, of course, I find the mana rocks very underwhelming. There isn't enough reason for me to run mana ramp when we do not need as much mana anyway. Sol Ring is always good since it will always give +1 mana, so there's that, but currently the others are underwhelming.

Isochron Scepter : Isochron Scepter works well: our wet dream is to play scepter with Boomerang. Imagine that tempo swing. Isochron works great to bounce and counter repeatedly. Note that since it's counted as casting the card, we actually get to put a drake into play.

Proteus Staff " target="blank"> Proteus Staff : our tutor, our wand, our Drake's Pimp Stick. Find that golden trifecta. Run the game over. Or slap some generals into oblivion. The choice is yours. This is a key card of this deck. A useful thing you could do with this card is to finish our 'triforce' of creatures, then reorder your entire library to set up some completely broken draws.


Vedalken ShacklesA useful rattlesnake card. We're vulnerable to quick aggro or resource denial, but the Shackles help send people elsewhere. You attack me? I take your general.

Gauntlet of Power " target="blank"> Gauntlet of Power , Caged Sun " target="blank"> Caged Sun : Mana doublers, anthem effects.

Coat of Arms " target="blank">Coat of Arms This usually ends the game in one shot. Upon my first game after adding in the Proteus Package, I managed to create 390 damage on board in one shot.

This is the bulk of our deck. I will divide most of the cards by function as most of them do the same thing.

Deck-fixing Package

• Opt
  
• Brainstorm
  
• Whispers of the Muse
  
• Thought Scour
  
• Blue Sun's Zenith
  
• High Tide

Our remaining 1-mana cantrips (excluding Disrupt.) Opt is to smooth out our draw, so is brainstorm. Whispers of the Muse is by far the best amongst the three if solely for repeated usage. Thought Scour is basically Mental Note for anyone, and can be used to mess up Vampiric Tutors. I put High Tide under this package, because this is what you use to get your instant-speed deck-fixing going: High Tide into various draw and bounce cards for an instant army.

Deck-fixer/Draw-fixer Package
Think Twice
Telling Time
Impulse " target="blank"> Impulse :

Draw cards, fix draws. Impulse is great in this deck. Telling Time hasn't been too optimal but it's never been completely disappointing.

Counter package:

• Counterspell
  
• Arcane Denial
  
• Logic Knot
  
• Muddle the Mixture
  
• Memory lapse
  
• Negate
  
• Dispel
  
• Disrupt
  
• Spell Syphon
  
• Stoic Rebuttal
  
• Hinder
  
• Spell Crumple
  
• Dissipate
  
• Rewind
  

I aimed to run counters with as low a CMC as possible. As such we didn't run powerhouses like Time Stop, choosing more situational cards such as Spell Syphon instead.

Spell Syphon, Logic Knot, Disrupt. These punish opponents for tapping out and are most efficient early game. We usually seek to use these first if we can. Logic Knot is good since we can sieve through our graveyard to make Elixir of Immortality more useful. Spell Syphon is great at two stages: early and late game. It works well as a Mana Leak early, and it works great when we have a large army of drakes.

The rest of the package is self-explanatory except for maybe rewind. Rewind is particularly
interesting as it allows us to untap up to four lands, which is ridiculous when we have Caged Sun or Gauntlet of Power. It gives us more mana to play with. I once survived a lethal swing with 2 mana left by casting Snap into Rewind, then overloading a Cyclonic Rift with Caged Sun out.

Bounce Package:

• Unsummon
  
• Vapor Snag
  
• Echoing Truths
  
• Boomerang
  
• Cyclonic Rift
  
• Whirlpool Whelm
  
• Into the Roil
  
• Snap
  
• Repulse
  
• Whiplash Trap
  
• Wash Out
  

We have 13 ways to bounce cards in this deck, and 10 of them are instants. This is also what makes this Talrand deck unique. Most decks I've seen run high cantrips, but choose not to run that many bounce cards. While initially I added these cards because they were cheap and low mana, I realised that they were also a form of card advantage: they help your tempo by setting opponents back. Opponent tapped out for his/her general? Bounce that, counter it later.

Talrand is a tempo-based deck. 2/2s are really underwhelming late-game unless you have anthems out. Thus we want to be faster than our opponents. By having a bounce package we can slow our opponents down immensely through bouncing their key cards. I've used it in conjunction with Tidespout Tyrant to bounce 3 lands in one turn and winning the game soon after.

Cyclonic Rift and Echoing Truths serve as sweeps as well, with Echoing Truth sweeping most token-based decks, or getting rid of Cloned creatures with the new Legend rule. Likewise, Whiplash Trap can be amazing: bounce a creature an opponent just summoned, and if he/she casts it again, bounce 2 creatures. Poof, you're suddenly up 2 creatures - no wait, 3 creatures. Whirlpool Whelm is janky, but it is a cheap way of pseudoremoval.

Island: 33 is a decent amount...

Buried Ruin: In case our artifacts die, we can get them back. We need our artifacts too.

Reliquary Tower We'll be rolling in blue cards. We usually are able to continually cast our spells, most of which are self-replacing in terms of value. This is a card we will aim to drop as soon as possible.