I'm trying to keep everything at instant speed in order for the counterspells to be the most effective. Being a tempo deck, it's crucial that we maximize our mana usage. To keep up a counterspell, we sacrifice our turn, for the most part, but if that counterspell goes unused, we say: flash! A-ah!
The deck consists of 4 main components:
Tapping;
bounce for recursive ETB triggers;
bounce for tempo;
and counterspells.
Tap
Mistbind Clique is the strongest card in the deck. A 4/4 flier for to all of our opponent's lands, making them unable to play anything that turn. Exiling another faerie is rarely a problem either, since you often have Faerie Miscreants on board or a Spellstutter Sprite that can return to the battlefield later for another ETB trigger. The only way to respond to this play is throwing an instant before your draw step to kill whatever is about to be championed or countering Mistbind. Usually, we can chain Mistbinds together to lock down multiple turns while beating them down. So powerful.
Bounce
Quickling is an undercosted creature with a downside, classic, but we can really play around with this downside, often making it a slight tempo loss with the upside of recasting another faerie for ETB effects (think Mistbind Clique, Spellstutter Sprite, Faerie Miscreant). We can also bounce a faerie being targeted by removal or was about to chump block something.
On the flipside, we can bounce our opponents stuff as well with Vapor Snag. This is huge card disadvantage for us, so we have to be really careful with this. This deck puts a lot of pressure on the opponent, so being able to slip in a bounce spell for somewhere usually means we won't have to see that problem again, or at least delay them for a full turn. The added 1 damage is helpful, but it shouldn't discourage us from targetting our own creatures if it means bouncing a Mistbind, returning a Spellstutter countering something and later recast Mistbind to prevent them from getting up their defenses.
Counterspells
Counterspells are Blue's only effective removal. The downside is that we need to keep up mana beforehand, not knowing if there will be anything worth countering. This is negated by the fact that 85% of the deck can be played at instant speed (lands excluded). The upside is that counterspells are much more diverse than any other form of removal, even negating ETB effects.
Remand is a gem in this deck. We've already gone over the subject during Vapor Snag and the same applies here. If they tap out on turn 4 and get remanded, they've lost the entire turn. This is a tempo deck, and trust me, this sort of play works. An added benefit is that we thin the deck out in hopes of a devestating Mistbind or multiple copies of Faerie Miscreant.
Summary
That was it. There are soo many cool synergistic plays you can make with this deck, as pretty much everything chains together one way or another. Basically, you come because Spellstutter Sprite seems like fun card to build around and stay because Mistbind Clique is such a treat to beat people down with.
The weakest cards right now are undoubtedly Zephyr Sprite and Pestermite. When they release more faeries, it's going to be very interesting to see this deck get even more tight-knit.
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