Constructed Decks of Yore: Blue-Green Aggro-Control (2005)

To prove that I wasn't always a limited snob, I thought I would go back to the past and try to reassemble some of my favorite lists from the time when I actually played constructed Magic.

While not exceptionally powerful, today's deck was one of my favorite archetypes, a hybrid aggro-control blue and green deck from summer of 2005, when Ravnica Bloc, Time Spiral Block and Tenth Edition were legal. Behold:

Click to embiggen

I won't go over all the cards individually, but there was a smattering of everything in this one.

• Birds to ramp and color-fix mana
• Card Selection and advantage with the looter and Call of the Herd or Moldervine Cloak
• Disruption with Remand and Mystic Snake
• Six ways to counter targeted removal with Plaxmanta and Stonewood Invocation
• and of course, blue burn with Psionic Blast

Some of the numbers are strange, such as two Breeding Pool, but that was what I owned at the time. 

The idea behind this deck was to get off to a relatively quick start, then protect your team with countermagic or instant-speed shroud, often while advancing your board using the multi-purpose creatures.

I am thinking of this archetype specifically today because I have been looking at Theros spoilers and have an inkling to bring back the Aggro-control deck, if only in theory since I never play constructed.

Theros spoilers after the jump again.

But this time, we don't even need green. We're doing this mono-blue style.

This feels spicy, but I'll never know for sure.

This is a Thassa-Master of Waves deck, through and through. Our game plan is blue devotion beatdown, countermagic and disruption. 

We have 8 one-drop fliers. 

I actually like the improved Flying Men. It means that spot removal and any back-breaking spells have to wait a turn, even if we are tapped out of countermagic range. Then if we can untap with an army on the board and a counterspell in hand, we should be in good shape.

We have devotion-enabling, multi-purpose beaters.

We have the big guns.

That is a big girl. In this deck, she should be a 5/5 indestructible beater for three mana that smooths our draws and sometimes gets our team in for lethal.

The Master can create A LOT of power out of nowhere. Tokens are always a fun strategy, but 2/1 tokens hit really hard and if this guy can bring 3-5 waves with him, we will be happy.

Then the support suite should take care of countermagic, card draw/selection or all of the above.

If you've never played with it before, scrying is very powerful. That's why it is on 12 of our cards. The bident may be too cute, but I've been trying to make Cloud Sprites + Coastal Piracy work since Mercadian Masques in 1999.

Did you see all the freaky stuff hybrid mana allows us to do? We have white, red, and black cards in our "mono-blue" deck, and we can fit 12 black sources on top of our 20 blue sources by using Blood Crypts, which won't stop us from playing Frostburn Weird or Nightveil Specter on time. That is saucy. 

I don't know if a deck like this that wants to curve out can stand the temples that come into play tapped, but I love the idea of paying one mana to scry without using a spell slot.

What are we weak to? 

Ugh

Why can't Supreme Verdict be countered? We could fight it with the owl and our counter suite, but no, that wouldn't be fair. The only other idea I have for fighting back is with Rootborn Defenses in the sideboard, but that would require ditching the Dukmantle Seers, which I quite like. I think SV is the proverbial spanner in the works that mucks up this whole deck idea. 

Back when I though it could be countered, I was having fun putting together a sideboard to take on the control menace, featuring Gainsay and Swansong as one-mana couunterspells to augment the Familiar. 

But that won't work, so now what? Thanks for playing, move along, sir, nothing to see here, it was fun while it lasted.