You know the names, you've heard the stories, and you've seen the legends in action. These cards represent the powerful, the tricky, the mental anguish and incapacitation that is the color Blue. Blue has always had a reputation for being powerful. Let's take some time, bow our heads, and figure out why Blue is this way.
How Blue Messes With Your Mind
“I hate that card. Why the hell would they print something that powerful?! That card is broken in half! It should be banned.” We have all either heard or said something along those lines before, and of course, we were all either talking about a Blue card or an artifact. But since this article doesn’t involve artifacts, let us assume that you were talking about a Blue card.
Blue is inherently powerful because of what Blue was designed to do: counter spells, draw cards, and take away opportunities. Since Alpha, Blue has been overly powerful. Just take a look at the most expensive 9 cards in Magic: 3 of them are Blue. If you add up all the banned cards in every format, you will get 89 cards. Of those cards, 22 are Blue -- that’s 25% of the banned cards in the history of Magic. In comparison, five of those banned cards are White (6%), 14 are Black (16%), seven are Red (8%), 11 are Green (12%), 21 are artifacts (22%), and 10 are lands (11%).
But the fact that Blue is powerful just isn’t in its card pool (though it helps); it is also in the mentality of any opponent of a Blue deck. Once Mono-Blue drops their second and third lands of the game, you start getting very cautious of what spells you will choose to play because of their counters . It is part of what I call “The Paranoia Factor,” and each color has its own methods for this. Black has creature removal and hand disruption, Red has creature removal and land disruption, White has RFG and life gain, and Green has pump and artifact/enchantment removal. But Blue is on a whole other level when it comes to “The Paranoia Factor.” With each other color, there are only a few cards that cause this disruption, but Blue has a list of cards that can, and will, mess with your opponent.
Just to begin to make my point, here is a list of the counterspells that are currently legal in Type 2:
I counted 16 spells, with six of them being “hard counters” that can counter anything. Five of them are specific "hard counters." The other five require the original spell's caster to pay mana, which can end up being like a hard counter. That is a pretty impressive list, with only five sets legal in Type 2 at the moment.
Blue's Powerful and Historic Cardpool
Blue is going to go down as the color that redefined how to design cards in Magic. Blue cards get more playtesting than any other type of card, aside from artifacts as of late. What Blue does is just too powerful.
But after all of these ridiculous cards and effects, you have to be saying to yourself that there is no way Blue cangetanypowerfulcreatures. Well a guy can be wrong once in a while can't he?
But having powerful cards doesn't mean a thing unless it can translate into some powerful decks. Lets go and take a look and a look back at Blue's powerful decks since the new millennium.
Deckin' It Out with Blue
Mono-Blue decks are very powerful on their own. Just look at Standard Pre-Ravnica. The format was dominated by Tooth and Nail combo decks, Mono-Blue, and Blue Tron. And when push came to shove, Mono-Blue Control and Blue Tron performed very well, while Tooth and Nail, despite running Boseiju, Who Shelters All performed worse. And even when facing uncounterable spells, Blue was still the Number One contender. But that was Pre-Ravnica. Let's see what Blue has been doing since Mirrodin cycled out.
If you thought Blue was powerful on its own, wait until you see what happens when it joins up with a color or two. I can't tell you why it is so powerful, because frankly, I have no idea how people think up these decks, but I'll show you what I'm talking about. Let's take a look at the current Blue runner in Standard, Marcio Carvalho's Top 8 Deck from Worlds 2005.
This deck takes the most agonizing pieces from Blue and combines them with some of the most frustrating pieces from Black. Games against this deck usually go like this:
Player A: Land, Go.
Player B: Land, Pithing Needle, Go.
Player A: Land, ~Creature~, Attack, You're at 19, Go.
Player B: Land, Go.
Player A: Land, ~Spell~.
Player B: "Counter that spel.l"
Player A: Go.
Player B: Land, Go.
Player A: Land, Attack.
Player B: "Last Gasp."
Player A: Go.
It goes on like that for a while until Player B has so much mana that he can play Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni and still have enough to counter a few spells and kill a few creatures. Then at that point, Player A is taking 5 damage a turn and player B is just collecting Player A's creatures for fun and profit. Or playing a Meloku and making an absurd about of 1/1 flyers. The amazing thing about this deck is that it has a decent match-up against aggro decks and combo decks, because it has the counters and the creature removal. But what I really like about this build here, and what sets its apart from other / builds, is that it runs Hideous Laughter main. Sometimes this card is completely useless, but against WWr and /, this card can clear the board and turn the tables in your favor.
Now if we will turn our attention to the Extended format, we have two fantastic decks to explore.
I will start off with the current re-incarnation of Blue/White Control.
Lookin' pretty spiffy, Chris
U/W Control by Shaheen Soorani, GP Philly PTQ, 1st
This is a classic Blue/White Control deck. It uses lots of counters and mass removal to stall the game until it wins with either Meloku, Eternal Dragon, or Decree of Justice tokens.
This next deck is a bit more, shall we say . . . aggressive than the last one. But unfortunately, the biggest and baddest version of this deck rotated out when Ravnica rotated in, but this deck is still a very good way to see Blue's power. And without further ado, Psychatog:
This deck is based around perhaps the most power creature ever printed: Psychatog. The point here is just to keep feeding cards into him and poke in the win. This was the pinnacle of Blue decks back in the day. You would have to kill Psychatog and keep him dead; otherwise he would just kill you.
Blueberry Pie
Aunt Mae's Pie
Did you think I could make an article about Blue with talking about the color pie? Well, here comes Blueberry Pie.
To understand why Blue is this way, we have to look no further than the basis for card creation, the color pie. Blue has had this craziness in its blood since the day Richard Garfield invented this silly ol' color. Blue was designed as the color focused on trickery, knowldege, and the power that comes from said knowledge. Original Blue, like today's Blue, was designed to draw cards quickly and react to undesirable creatures and spells quickly. Blue was also designed to have a lot of instants and an underwhelming set of creatures. But this odd combination is the one that has made Blue the most powerful color in the history of Magic.
Tune in next time when we see what happens when you give a Kittybread a Flamethrower.
/
builds, is that it runs Hideous Laughter main. Sometimes this card is completely useless, but against WWr and 
, this card can clear the board and turn the tables in your favor.
