Basic Strategy
Essentially this is a tempo deck. You play your stuff while stopping or slowing your opponent's ability to play their stuff, and you win by pecking them to death with little buzzing faeries before they can get their plan together. Simple (not really). It's important to note that because the deck has no card advantage engines it is not a control deck. You need to establish a clock early as you won't necessarily want the game to go long. Being able to get a clock while simultaneously disrupting your opponent is the art of this deck, and getting it right is challenging, interesting and very satisfying.
Playing the Tempo Game
The most critical feature of the deck is that it plays almost entirely at instant speed due to it having only instants and faeries with flash (
Faerie Miscreant
being the exception). In this manner it has similarities to draw-go control decks - you usually draw your card for the turn and then pass. You play faeries at various steps during your opponent's turn or you cast a spell in response to an opponent's actions. Like control decks your lands are untapped during your opponent's turn, and because they know you have counters considerable inferred pressure is created. Playing at instant speed gives you a lot of flexibility in your decision making, the most amount of information possible with which to decide your play, and a strong capacity to maintain high mana saturation. Thus the deck is highly responsive, efficient and frankly full of neat little tricks.
Because you are on a tempo plan you usually want to cast a faerie if you don't cast disruption. Unlike pure control decks lost mana is a significant issue for us. Cards like
Vendilion Clique
are best used early to slow your opponent's development rather than holding on to them to maximise their disruptive power against specific threats later on. Often in the early game you cast
Mana Leak
,
Remand
or
Spellstutter Sprite
, followed up by larger faeries to get the beats happening. Because of the instant speed nature of the deck, you can play the control game and present little threat, only to resolve a
Mistbind Clique
or double
Scion of Oona
(one at their EOT, the other during your declare blockers step) and suddenly have them on a short clock. Usually you want to play aggressively so don't hold up blockers unless absolutely necessary. As we receive no damage from our lands we can often soak up a few turns of damage that other decks cannot. Also, as our creatures are small and we need them to damage our opponent as soon as possible they do not make very good blockers, so
Vapor Snag
and
Pestermite
need to do the heavy lifting on the defensive front.
Disruption
One of the weaknesses of the deck is that it has very little permanent answers to our opponent's threats. This means two things; firstly, keep up
Mana Leak
for the big nasties,
Spellstutter Sprite
for the little nasties (like
Death's Shadow
and
Tarmogoyf
), and use
Remand
and
Vapor Snag
for everything else. Secondly, timing is everything (it is a tempo deck after all). Cards like
Vapor Snag
can be leveraged very well if you know how. As an example - an Affinity player sacrifices all their artifacts to make a lethal
Inkmoth Nexus
using
Arcbound Ravager
. You can Vapor Snag the Inkmoth in response to the Ravager's modular trigger and they get no counters, no artifacts and have an Inkmoth in their hand.
Remand
ing suspended cards like
Lotus Bloom
and
Ancestral Vision
makes their controller wait eons for them to do anything.
Vendilion Clique
and
Dismember
give us some permanent solutions as well. Using the right disruption against the right target at the right time can be difficult but often we have good answers even if they are mostly soft answers.
We also have good responses to negate our opponent's disruption.
Quickling
and
Vapor Snag
allow us to return a creature to our hand in response to removal.
Scion of Oona
helps protect our bombs as can our counterspell package. The best part is that nearly all of our creatures have etbs that can be reused once they are returned to our hand!
Sideboarding
I'm not going to go into detail about sideboarding against all the decks currently in the meta, as there are a lot of different decks around and the meta changes fairly frequently. Instead I'll look at some archetypes and how to think about boarding against them.
One thing to note is that some of our sideboard option are sorcery speed, which can throw off our usual strategy a bit. The payoff is that they are strong answers to our opponent's game-plan. However, if a card is just so-so, or you're unsure if it's good, then the best thing to do is leave the sideboard out. Don't fall into the trap of oversideboarding as our deck is highly synergistic and highly synergistic decks don't appreciate overboarding! Because our deck runs on faerie synergies I rarely sideboard out more than one or two of them at any given time. Our flex slots are almost always our instant spells.
Big Mana
Big mana decks usually spend a lot of cards getting the mana together to play their big threats. This makes counters good at tempoing them out - let them spend turns getting their mana together and then counter their big threats.
Remand
and
Vapor Snag
are great for making them recast expensive spells.
Mana Leak
is hit-or-miss for this however as sometimes these decks have some mana to spare and so can be a good option to board out.
Spellstutter Sprite
is solid for taking out mana generators like
Expedition Map
or
Arbor Elf
and helps us to get our damage in faster, which can be important as these decks have some super topdeck draws.
Echoing Truth
can be good to board in, as can
Negate
if they are running big planeswalkers or land tutoring sorceries like
Search for Tomorrow
. Against tron we have heaps of answers, including
Spreading Seas
,
Pithing Needle
(naming
Expedition Map
or Karn/Ugin), and
Ceremonious Rejection
.
Combo
Generally we like playing combo. I divide combo into three flavours:
-
Creatureless Combo - dropping
Vapor Snag
and
Dismember
is a no-brainer here. Bringing in
Negate
and
Dispel
does wonders. This makes our counter game very strong. Usually this is a pretty sweet matchup.
-
Graveyard Combo -
Vapor Snag
is often dropped here too, as it doesn't help if they do their mass reanimation thing anyway.
Relic of Progenitus
is the big in here.
Negate
can be useful for hindering some of these strategies, being good at countering stuff like
Living End
or
Conflagrate
. It certainly has more utility than
Vapor Snag
in the majority of cases.
-
Creature Combo - this is often not a great matchup, as they usually have some level of redundancy.
Dispel
is a counter-intuitive choice, but works reasonably well as most creature combo decks use some form of tutoring such as
Chord of Calling
,
Summoner's Pact
or
Collected Company
. Sometimes
Relic of Progenitus
is useful if their combo cares about the graveyard (such as Knightfall combo).
Aggro
Remand
tends not to be good against the low curve of aggro decks. Lots of these decks like tokens or play lots of four-ofs and so
Echoing Truth
can be handy. Aggro decks come in lots of flavours so you need to think about how they tick.
Relic of Progenitus
isn't bad for turning off
Tarmogoyf
or delirium for
Traverse the Ulvenwald
against Jund
Death's Shadow
for instance.
Ceremonious Rejection
is an obvious in against Affinity. Just remember in these matchups you're the control deck and board accordingly.
Control
In these matchups you're the beatdown, so often the changes don't come so much from your board but how aggressively you play. Taking out
Vapor Snag
for
Negate
and
Dispel
is often good if they don't have creatures so you can try to win counterspell wars. They can also help keep your opponent from removing too many of your threats if they run a removal style control deck such as Grixis Control instead of a counter style control deck. Usually I drop some combination of
Mana Leak
and
Remand
for some combination of
Dispel
and
Negate
depending on the situation.
Midrange
Midrange decks can be tricky as it's difficult to tell if you're the beatdown or not. If you are the beatdown we have no good options in our sideboard to become more beatdown as the modern meta is very aggressive and our sideboard reflects the need to adopt the control role against a wide range of aggressive decks. Because most midrange decks are made up of 2-4cmc creatures
Remand
,
Mana Leak
and
Vapor Snag
are all quite good. It can sometimes be worth it to bring in
Dispel
if they are running
Collected Company
, which is a favourite of midrange decks.
Pithing Needle
can come in if you find they are running Gideons or Lilianas. It can be difficult to choose what to shave, but if they are running lots of etb creatures or few creatures look to drop
Vapor Snag
. Often you won't choose to change much against this matchup.
