Description
A primarily mono-blue control deck that focuses on hanging by the skin of your teeth until your able to get your win condition cards rolling. Your ideal start goes with a
Frost Augur
or
Witching Well
, these both fix your draws and ensure you're getting the cards you want. The cards you want early is the lands, you ideally want to play a land every turn that way turn 6 you're able to shift the tides of the game with your
Icebreaker Kraken
or
Blood on the Snow
. Every other card is there to support this playstyle of Tank-it-til-you-make-it.
Card by Card Breakdown
Frost Augur
- A fantastic card that let's you draw the top crad of your deck if it's a Snow card, there are 38 total Snow cards so theoretically you should draw that card every other time and even if you don't draw it, knowing what it is can be super good too. Typically a turn 1 play if possible. Turn 2 you'll have the option to hold an
Essence Scatter
or use
Frost Augur
's ability alongside with an
Opt
or if you're lucky, you
Witching Well
before your Frost Augur's ability to nearly guarantee you do draw that card. There's a few awkward choices you'll hav eto make like do i use
Opt
or Frost Augur's ability first? I say you should use the Opt then use Frost Augur's ability. This maximizes the amount of cards you look at. It's just great card draw that you'll slowly realize is really doing work. As per a lot of activated abilities I would say play it on your opponent's end step to maximize secrecy, unless you haven't played a land that turn and want to try to topdeck it to play another card. Take your chances!
Opt
- Super nice card to have. You're not trying to do anything crazy with it, just a simple deck thinning card that works to get you the cards that you need. As previously mentioned, order of cards and abilities used does matter. Frost Augur + Opt
is a nice synergy that does need to be played in that order so you are able to maximize the amount of cards you get through in your deck.
Witching Well
- An artifact that lets you get some early scry and a mid-late card draw machine. Works great and it's never a bad draw. Pair it with
Frost Augur
and you have yourself some real nice filtering. I'll typically play this turn one unless I have the
Frost Augur
for that efficiency. I have been known to draw the cards and hope I topdeck a land, which once again, we need to play every turn. If someone is weird enough to destroy it, it's not a big deal! One mana to scry 2 isn't bad value.
Bubble Snare
- A life-saving enchantment that keeps a creature tapped. Use the Bubble Snare + Icebind Pillar
combo to immediately perma-tap that creature.
Ascendant Spirit
- Another one-drop creature that serves a multitude of purposes. It can be used as an attacker, a defender, a mana sink, a sacrifice :) People are really scared of a 1/1 for some reason but that makes sense, I don't know why blue has such a good creature to be honest. I would always recommend buffing it at the last possible moment to throw their calculations off. Note that the 2nd buff makes it a flyer, really good and enemies don't read that part for some reason. I wouldn't prioritize making it a 6/6 compared to other things you can do, like counter a spell or use activated abilities just because it's 4 mana which is a lot.
Essence Scatter
- A card that counters our worst enemy, creatures. tyically we don't care about 2 or even 3 mana creatures sometimes but we counter depending on the value that creature would give the opponent. If you have this card in your starting hand, i would recommend holding it forever until you do counter a creature, it would be a sham to spend all your mana just for the enemy to play a hige card like
Gigantosaurus
just because you wanted to use all your mana efficiently and not effectively. A boarwipe in the deck that we'll discuss later,
Blood on the Snow
, creates a genuine question for us, should we focus on countering before or after we can play
Blood on the Snow
? My answer is, do what you need to do to win.
Saw It Coming
- A nice counter to prevent most permanents from entering the battlefield. I generally wouldn't recommend using the foretell aspect because you need to keep the mana possible, but if you're able to get the most value from your cards, mana, and abilities, then that's awesome. Always prioritise using
Essence Scatter
if possible, that way you use your counter that's limited to creatures first so you can
Saw It Coming
potentially a non-creature card.
Icebind Pillar
- A premiere artifact that effectively nullifies most creatures. A simple tax of one mana per round is worth it but it can throw off your mana calculations. There's not too much else to it, play it, prevent damage.
Nadir Kraken
- An interesting early aggro creature that will most definitely die instantly. Assuming it doesn't die, it yet taxes you another 1 mana per round to grow your board presence. It's not always the best move to pay the tax if you're able to hold a counter. A card that has tricky timing as to when to play but when on the board can be very daunting. Can be used with the activated ability of
Witching Well
to trigger two instances of the draw effect of
Nadir Kraken
.
Charix, the Raging Isle
- A 0/17 blocker that can be used to attack but at a 3-mana tax. I would recommend keeping your mana up if you're holding a counter as countering a spell is more valuable than killing a creature that you can likely do next turn. A lot of folks don't understand that you can use his ability as an instant so that's really convenient. In regards to the part where enemies have to pay 2 mana to target it, it's not a big deal but it can be a nice extra use of mana of they kill it and end up using all their mana for that turn.
Blood on the Snow
- The only reason we run black, is for this boardwipe that is a snow card, and brings a creature with cmc 6 or less back to the battlefield. This card wins games and without it, the whole deck falls apart. The difference between keeping creatures tapped compared to destroying the creatures is that any abilities or activated abilities still exist. Surviving until we're able to play this is the goal because that's the true start of the game. After wards, hopefully we have a
Witching Well
on the board to let us draw cards and get the game going and chances are we have an
Icebind Pillar
and all of a sudden the game isn't looking too good even if they play a creature.
Icebreaker Kraken
- A nice creature that we can play as early as turn 6. Works really well with
Icebind Pillar
the turn prior so you can keep those creatures tapped. Note that this creature doesn't tap anything, it simply prevents creatures from being untapped for one turn. It's ability to return it to your hand isn't great by any means, in most situations having the lands is more valuable than saving the creature. Interesting thing, you can't return this creature back through
Blood on the Snow
.
Q&A
Q: Why use
Blood on the Snow
compared to
Doomskar
?
A: Bringing a creature back is incredibly inmportant in terms of getting your
Frost Augur
back to regain your card advantage, or
Nadir Kraken
to generate your board presence, or
Charix, the Raging Isle
for some defense if a token spawned somehow and you're sitting at 2 life. I have played
Blood on the Snow
just to bring a creature back. Also,
Doomskar
not being a snow card affects the abiity to draw it from
Frost Augur
.
