here is my own, much less aggro, much more control version if the ever popular, evergreen merfolk deck, after witnessing the victories of merfolk, i decided to renovate my own merfolk deck into something else, something i felt had a real shot, at least at FNM...
so here i give unto you, a much less aggro, much more control and time oriented version of merfolk, with some interesting differences.
justifications - some of the cards in here and their amounts may seem almost heretical to some of you, but i assure you that i have thought them all through carefully.
only running 2
Aether Vial
: yes, because this strategy is much slower than previous merfolk builds, it doesn't need the hyper acceleration quite as much as previous builds, meaning it is less dependant, allowing me to free up slots for new cards. and we have a synergy with merrow reejery which gives us a greater use for actually casting our fish.
Aquitect's Will
instead of
Spreading Seas
while spreading seas is a great card, and it turns off three colour decks, i believe that aquitects will, for its ability to thin our deck, and place a much more difficult to remove island onto the battlefield wins out, as with the flood counter, it cant be removed by a
Abrupt Decay
or a
Reclamation Sage
, only to ruin your plans at the last minute, forcing them to take more drastic measures to block once more
3
Master of Waves
& 2
Mirror Entity
i like elementals, and master of waves is a great finisher, immune to red removal, giving your mutavaults +1/+1 and creating a veritable wall of creatures to defend yourself/crush your enemies with is pretty great, even with the 2/1 statline, however, if you were to say, utilise the
Mirror Entity
for even... 1 or 2 mana, then those elementals are also merfolk, and your merfolk are elementals, meaning that, say you have two
Lord of Atlantis
and a
Master of Waves
in play with the 5 elementals, your elementals are what you need to win the game, but you can't get past their wall of crap, so, you play mirror entity, activate it for... 2 mana, suddenly, all of your elemental tokens, which were previously 1/0's turned into 2/1's... are 2/2's by default, and with the three buffs from
Lord of Atlantis
1 and 2, as well as
Master of Waves
, you have 5/5 unblockable elementals, which is almost impossible to deal with, allowing you to dodge
Electrickery
's or a
Jund Charm
or
Seismic Shudder
or anything else capable of blowing up all of our 2/1's... and mirror entity is a kobold, and kobolds are cool
2
Monastery Siege
well we needed something to replace
Aether Vial
... so i was looking at anything that could help me draw extra cards, and i found this, being cheap in cost, allowing you versatility between drawing the extra card (which, i might add, spoils you for choice very quickly) and hating your opponents removal (not quite hexproof, but it does mean they have to shell out 4 mana Doomblade and 3 mana
Path to Exile
, and god's forbid if they have heroe's downfall...
1
Rootborn Defenses
sweepers... and combat tricks, it protects you from both, and might give you an extra elemental which is nice...
2
Celestial Flare
honestly, this one is here just in case boggles goes f*cking crazy one day...because it makes boggles sad... and it wrecks affinity if they only have one attacker...
1 [[celestial colonnade] ok, this is probably the weirdest one to see in a merfolk list but here me out... games go long, sometimes you can't attack on the ground, maybe they
Ghost Quarter
'd their only island, or maybe they have some malarky with first strike and deathtouch going on, for those occaisions, there is colonnade, in addition to providing both colour sources (albeit as a tap land) he also provides us with a beefy 4/4 flying elemental version of serra's angel... wait... elemental... master of waves makes it a 5/5! oh wait...
Mirror Entity
and a
Merfolk Sovereign
oh no, its potentially a 7/7 vigilance! i know it seems win more at first, but when you are stuck in that situation against say, the walls deck, you will be grateful of the extra power/mana sink.
sideboard stuff:
the sideboard is mainly removal and not much else as we hate on a lot of strategies mainboard with the amount of removal we run, but in the side board i include
3
Circle of Protection: Red
merfolk is usually a terrible match up against burn because of how fast they are, however, now that we are a lot slower, we need something to stop the burn decks claiming revenge, as a result, i have dug into the past, and realised, the circles of protection solve A LOT of problems.... it's not perfect, but you have more activations of your circle than they have skull cracks.
2
Merfolk Sovereign
in the sideboard: yeah... the reason its included is for the even slower match-ups, or the ones where you really want the extra devotion, or the unblockable creature...
and thats about it really, thats my list, try it out on xmage or cockatrice before you go off and buy all of it, and i hope that you have fun with this new spin on merfolk...
