Yoink!

Commander / EDH* Counterspell Flash Mono-Blue

freddiefrick

Yoink! (19)

• 1x Blue Sun's Twilight
• 1x Entrancing Melody
• 1x Vedalken Shackles
• 1x Control Magic
• 1x Mass Manipulation
• 1x Rite of Replication
• 1x See Double
• 1x Tempted by the Oriq
• 1x Acquire
• 1x Bribery
• 1x Invoke the Winds
• 1x Modify Memory
• 1x Sakashima's Protege
• 1x Spelltwine
• 1x Stolen Identity
• 1x Blatant Thievery
• 1x Astral Dragon
• 1x Clone Legion
• 1x Mnemonic Deluge

Lands (35)

• 1x Exotic Orchard
• 1x Halimar Depths
• 28x Island
• 1x Isolated Watchtower
• 1x Mystic Sanctuary
• 1x Path of Ancestry
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Riptide Laboratory

Ramp (15)

• 1x High Tide
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Arcane Signet
• 1x Drain Power
• 1x Fellwar Stone
• 1x Mind Stone
• 1x Prismatic Lens
• 1x Sky Diamond
• 1x Thought Vessel
• 1x Bonder's Ornament
• 1x Decanter of Endless Water
• 1x Midnight Clock
• 1x Replicating Ring
• 1x Skyclave Relic
• 1x Gilded Lotus

Interaction (10)

• 1x Counterspell
• 1x Narset's Reversal
• 1x Negate
• 1x Theoretical Duplication
• 1x Domineering Will
• 1x Desertion
• 1x Gale's Redirection
• 1x Spell Swindle
• 1x Gather Specimens
• 1x Karn's Temporal Sundering

Shutdown (5)

• 1x Mass Diminish
• 1x Exhaustion
• 1x AEtherize
• 1x Reins of Power
• 1x Aetherspouts

Commander (1)

Value (15)

• 1x Portent
• 1x Preordain
• 1x Sleight of Hand
• 1x Ideas Unbound
• 1x Muse Vortex
• 1x Frantic Search
• 1x Haughty Djinn
• 1x Silundi Vision  ^Flip
• 1x Wavebreak Hippocamp
• 1x Concentrate
• 1x Drawn from Dreams
• 1x Flow of Knowledge
• 1x Flow of Ideas
• 1x Dig Through Time
• 1x Treasure Cruise

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Maybeboard

Yoink! (11)

• 1x Dominate
• 1x Sakashima's Will
• 1x See Double
• 1x Stunt Double
• 1x Undercover Operative
• 1x Mind Control
• 1x Keiga, the Tide Star
• 1x Agent of Treachery
• 1x Commandeer
• 1x Myojin of Cryptic Dreams
• 1x Expropriate

Shutdown (2)

• 1x Cyclonic Rift
• 1x Hullbreaker Horror

Interaction (9)

• 1x Swan Song
• 1x Wash Away
• 1x Arcane Denial
• 1x Archmage's Charm
• 1x Unwind
• 1x Cryptic Command *list*
• 1x Insidious Will
• 1x Rewind
• 1x Overwhelming Intellect

Busted Blue Cards (2)

• 1x Jin-Gitaxias, Progress Tyrant
• 1x Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur

Value (7)

• 1x Delver of Secrets  ^Flip
• 1x Faerie Mastermind
• 1x Ledger Shredder
• 1x Ingenious Mastery
• 1x Windfall
• 1x Arcane Endeavor
• 1x Overflowing Insight

Ramp (3)

• 1x Realmbreaker, the Invasion Tree
• 1x Sceptre of Eternal Glory
• 1x Echo Storm

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The ultimate shadow wizard money gang deck. We love casting spells because we barely run creatures! Steal your opponents' creatures as they attack to make up for your lack of creatures, use Fellwar Stone to power your opponents' activated abilities, and show them a new way for mono blue to be the most annoying color. In the early game, opponents should be scared to attack your seemingly underdeveloped board lest you steal their creatures. By the end of the game, your board should be almost all pieces from your opponents. All suggestions are welcome! I used to think this deck becomes a copy of the strongest deck at the table, but that was wrong. It does one better -- it becomes a copy of the best parts of everybody else's decks.

Be warned: tell your opponents what this deck does before you play. It assumes there will be at least one player at the table running big powerful creatures and tries to use that against them. Often, at low power tables, everybody is playing decks like that. This deck essentially hard counters their gameplans unless they all focus you early. Once I get 15 mana on the board, draw 20 cards and drop a Thought Vessel, the game is effectively over but not deterministically over. Those last few turns can be high pressure -- everybody knows you've won, but you need to find the way to do it. And you need to figure that out quickly so that you're not wasting everybody's time durdling around.

More sorcery inspiration can be found here.

Ramp

Goal 1: get Gandalf out on turn 3. We have a lot of 2 drop mana rocks for this. It's not a big deal if you can't play Gandalf before turn 4, though -- the most important thing is just having open mana on the board.

Goal 2: get enough mana for our big spells. The deck has a pretty high CMC relative to other decks I run and is very mana hungry for those big flashy sorceries and stuff like Astral Dragon. For this reason, I'm running Skyclave Relic, Gilded Lotus, Midnight Clock, and other >3 mana rocks.

Ancillary benefits: Thought Vessel and Decanter of Endless Water give us no max hand size. Some of the rocks can produce mana of any color so we can use activated abilities on creatures we steal. Midnight Clock is mill protection and can help if we run out of gas.

Interaction

Goal: Stop our opponents from slowing our gameplan, in particular by countering stax/prison pieces. Use Narset's Reversal to steal good spells opponents play (or copy our own spells). We almost always want creature spells to resolve because we can steal them, so don't worry about countering those. Other counters (like Gale's Redirection and Desertion) allow us to counter the spell and get it for ourselves -- big value from these 5 mana instants. Finally, Theoretical Duplication and its big brother Gather Specimens help us take opponent creatures before they have the chance to give them hexproof or otherwise defend them.

Shutdown

Goal: counter "go wide" decks, usually white or green with lots of tokens. The usual AEtherize and Aetherspouts accomplish this quite well; Mass Diminish can help as long as there aren't many other effects buffing creatures (although it's probably better against stompy or Eldrazi decks). Exhaustion is a good way to lock out a player if they're a turn away from winning. Reins of Power can completely change the game mid combat (especially if you only have Gandalf) or prevent an opponent from using activated/triggered abilities to get a win.

Value

Goal: dig for mana rocks, big flashy spells, and keep our deck cycling. The deck might need more early game draw, though. I prioritized using cheap sorceries here (over the usual cheap instants like Impulse) as in the early game you can play them on your turn (to look inconspicuous) and once Gandalf is on the field you can play them whenever you want. This part definitely needs some playtesting. Silundi Vision   is another card I'm on the fence about; we'll see if I keep it in.

Bigger draw spells like Dig Through Time, Flow of Ideas, Treasure Cruise, and Muse Vortex are in here for top end. Some late game turns you might not want to steal anything and instead leave mana up for counters. If you don't end up using that mana, these are excellent big sinks for generating card advantage. Leverage Gandalf to cast these whenever you want!

Finally, I run Haughty Djinn and Wavebreak Hippocamp -- they're no-brainers in this deck.

Yoink!

Goal: take everyone else's toys. There's a million ways to do this in blue. I kept most of the methods as sorceries to synergize with Gandalf so we can steal creatures at instant speed. There's a variety of straightforward effects like Blue Sun's Twilight, Invoke the Winds, and Control Magic. Acquire and Bribery allow us to tutor opponent libraries, which always feels great to do. Modify Memory type effects let you choose when people can win. Stolen Identity is crazy on a creature with unblockable or trample -- you can cipher it into copies of itself and yoink more creatures. Finally, Mnemonic Deluge is a game ender -- take one of your opponents' big instants/sorceries, or get 3 copies of a yoink spell that you've already cast.

Two creatures make the list here: Sakashima's Protege and Astral Dragon. Sakashima's Protege is amazing for those big ETB effects and stealing Eldrazi. Astral Dragon is even crazier -- although it doesn't have flash, it lets us copy noncreature permanents. With this, you can yoink the best parts of opposing prison decks or grab a big enchantment.

Lands

Pretty self-explanatory. I kept them simple and chose to build a mono color deck because I didn't want lands to cut into the cost.

Notable non-Islands:

• Exotic Orchard: make mana of opponents' colors so you can use activated abilities on their creatures.

• Isolated Watchtower: helps if you're behind on lands. I might remove this.

• Riptide Laboratory: protect Gandalf!

• Reliquary Tower: we love no max hand size effects.

Update 6/23/2023: I played this deck in person for the first time at a mid power table against an upgraded Frodo/Sam precon and an upgraded Sauron precon (using Sauron, the Dark Lord instead of Sauron, Lord of the Rings). We only played one very long game but Gandalf came out on top! The game went like this:

• Lots of draw and value for about 10 turns, minor yoinks using Vedalken Shackles and Entrancing Melody, struggled to stay alive against big Grixis beaters and the Frodo ring-bearer. Came very close to death once Frodo, Sauron's Bane came online, but stole their heavily pumped Sam, Loyal Attendant using Control Magic to stabilize my board.

• Mnemonic Deluge targeting Flow of Knowledge in my graveyard to draw 27 and discard 6. Hit a Thought Vessel on the next turn and my gameplan started to accelerate.

• The Sauron player knew I had tricks up my sleeve and decided to force my hand, swinging their entire board at me. I flashed in a Clone Legion, then assigned the clones to all block their respective attackers for a flavor win and a one-sided board wipe.

• I untapped alive, cast High Tide into a 20 mana Mass Manipulation to take the entirety of the Frodo/Sam player's board. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Sauron player scooped. Frodo/Sam player put up a few blockers, but when my turn came around I had more than enough yoink spells to take them for myself and swung at him for a kill with the team he'd spent all game pumping.

Update 6/25/2023: played at a low power table and learned that this deck is too strong against creature heavy decks unless they all focus you. There was a Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm deck which I copied early using Theoretical Duplication to get my own Miirym, then I used various spells to copy my own Miirym, which created even more copies because of Miirym's ability. I got 7 Miiryms on the battlefield and was about to cast Astral Dragon to make 8 Astral Dragons and 28 of the tokens it creates (probably cloning Sol Ring), but one of the players board wiped with Blasphemous Act and the original Miirym player gave his commander double strike and swung at me for the kill. I would have stayed alive had we been not been playing with 30 life, but that taught me a big lesson about threat assessment and about what this deck can do. I really love the capability that this deck has to mimic and change its gameplan -- it's intensely interactive and runs totally differently based on the other decks at the table -- but with great power comes great responsibility. Tell the other players what this deck does before you play it!!

Date added	1 year
Last updated	1 year
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	3 - 0 Mythic Rares 39 - 0 Rares 15 - 0 Uncommons 15 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.85
Tokens	Copy Clone, Replicated Ring, The Ring, The Ring Tempts You, Treasure
Folders	my decks, Commander Decks, Decks, Commander decks