Blue/White Midrange Delverless Deck (2nd Place at a World Magic Cup Qualifier)

June 11, 2012 | Posted by Dee

Updated June 24, 2012: Here’s a new version of the deck that I think is better.

Sam Black finished 2nd at a World Magic Cup Qualifier two weekends ago with a Blue/White (UW) Midrange deck. His deck looked very similar to UW Delver. However, it had no Delvers at all.

He had all the staple UW Delver cards (Snapcaster Mage, Restoration Angel, Gitaxian Probe, Ponder, Vapor Snag, and Mana Leak) but he removed Delver to go bigger. In its place, he played 2 Gideon Jura and 2 Tamiyo, the Moon Sage.

Also, because he made the deck more controlling and less aggro, he cut Geist of Saint Traft and replaced it with Blade Splicer.

But don’t confuse the deck for a control deck. It may be slower and bigger than your typical aggro UW Delver deck but it’s not really a control deck because it has 4 Blade Splicer and 4 Restoration Angel.

With these two cards, the deck can go on the beatdown much sooner than a control deck. By flickering Blade Splicer with Restoration Angel, you can have 10 power on the battlefield by turn four and just kill your opponent by turn six.

Check out Sam’s decklist below.

UW Midrange
Creatures (14)
Spells (23)
Lands (23)
Sideboard (15)

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With Blade Splicer in the deck instead of Geist of Saint Traft, you can argue that Restoration Angel is better in this deck than UW Delver. That’s pretty amazing considering how awesome the Angel is in UW Delver.

Blade Splicer and Restoration Angel are great at giving you a bunch of blockers to protect the planeswalkers. The deck relies on Vapor Snag instead of hard removal (like Doom Blade and Incinerate) so much of the time you’re not actually trying to kill their creatures. You’re just slowing them down to survive the early turns.

Vapor Snag is especially solid against Delver because they have to reflip it again. Delver only has a 33% chance of blind flipping.

You take over in the mid and late game with Golem tokens, Angels, Consecrated Sphinx, and planeswalkers. These cards are perfect for stopping all the aggro decks in Standard right now.

Blade Splicer gums up the ground while Restoration Angel is a bigger flyer than Delver. Consecrated Sphinx buries your opponent with card advantage and it’s a great blocker.

Tamiyo and Gideon are great all-around cards. They are both good at slowing down your opponent and once you have a better board position, they can go on the offensive. Gideon can attack for six damage. Not bad for a five mana card. Tamiyo can draw cards.

When you have both planeswalkers on the board, things get really insane quickly. Tamiyo taps creatures and Gideon destroys tapped creatures. Gideon protects Tamiyo and forces your opponent to tap his creatures and attack. Then, you can draw a bunch of cards with Tamiyo’s -2 ability by targeting your opponent. It’s really hard to lose when you get both of them on the battlefield.

I played against this deck with UW Delver. I had an early flipped Delver but he bounced it with Vapor Snag to slow me down. I replayed it but it didn’t transform right away and he soon took over the game with Angels and planeswalkers.

Filed Under Standard 

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