Budget Magic: $20 Mono-Blue Towns (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic. Or maybe Meme or Dream? Or even Against the Odds! Somehow, today's deck seems to be all three. We're heading to Standard to play a super-budget-friendly $20 Mono-Blue Towns deck that originally came from an infamous small Japanese tournament and, at least on paper, looks very against the odds. The goal is to overload on Towns, which power up payoffs like Travel the Overworld to draw tons of cards, PuPu UFO to smash for a bunch of damage in the air, and even Balamb Garden, SeeD Academy, all while (hopefully) staying alive by bouncing our opponent's stuff with Jill, Shiva's Dominant, Desculpting Blast, and Summon: Leviathan! Can the plan work? Can Towns compete on just a $20 budget? Can we beat Izzet Cauldron with PuPu UFO? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Mono-Blue Towns
The Deck
The most important part of our deck today is actually the mana base, which is overflowing with Towns! By themselves, lands like Capital City, Eden, Seat of the Sanctum, Adventurer's Inn, and The Gold Saucer are pretty lackluster. (Although we do occasionally get to make a Treasure with The Gold Saucer, and gaining live from Adventurer's Inn is always nice.) So, why are we playing them? Because they power up our Towns payoffs, of course!
We have three cards in our deck that reward us for playing a bunch of Towns in our mana base. The first and in some ways best is Travel the Overworld. The seven-mana sorcery draws four cards, but thanks to affinity for Towns, we often can cast it for just two blue mana in the mid- and late game, which is incredibly far above the curve for card draw.
Our second Towns payoff is PuPu UFO, which might not look like much but is actually super strong in our deck for two reasons. First, thanks to the ability to gain base power equal to the number of Towns we control for just three mana, PuPu UFO actually becomes a very fast, evasive clock in the late game. One of the most common ways for our deck to win is to bounce and counter a bunch of our opponent's stuff, and then, once they run low on action, stick a PuPu or two and win in just a couple of big attacks. The second reason PuPu UFO is really strong in our deck is that it lets us put lands into play from our hand. As a 0/4, it doesn't look especially threatening, so it often sticks on the battlefield for a few turns early in the game. And assuming we have some extra lands in hand, it turns into a steady source of ramp, which adds more Towns to the battlefield to power up our finishers.
Last, we have Balamb Garden, SeeD Academy, which eventually flips into a 5/4 flying vehicle that draws a card when it attacks. Normally, this ability costs seven mana, but this is reduced by the number of Towns we control, so we often can flip it for just two mana in the late game! Together, these cards offer an ample reward for playing our unique Town mana base and are actually oddly powerful in a deck overloaded with Towns.
The rest of our deck is mostly trying to keep us alive long enough to build up some Towns on the battlefield and find our payoffs. But we don't really have hard removal since we're mono-blue (although I did add some Unable to Screams to the sideboard), so we're mostly doing this by bouncing our opponent's threats. We have Desculpting Blast and Jill, Shiva's Dominant, both of which can bounce any nonland permanent, and Summon: Leviathan, which bounces everything but sea creatures and leaves behind a big ward 2 body (at least for a couple of turns). While cards like Jill and Blast look a bit strange compared to Into the Flood Maw, they have a huge upside, which is that they can bounce our stuff as well as our opponent's stuff. This is especially relevant with Summon: Leviathan, where we can play it, bounce everything, hopefully attack for six and draw a card the next turn, and then bounce it back to our hand to reset our opponent's board again!
Finally, we have some interesting counterspells that also help power up our bounce. While we might be unable to just straight-up kill a permanent with our deck, our counterspells can answer anything. And if our opponent manages to sneak a powerful permanent through our defenses, we can always bounce it with Jill, Shiva's Dominant or Desculpting Blast, and then counter it when our opponent goes to replay it. While counters make a lot of sense in the deck, the exact counters we are playing are unique, in Syncopate and Swallowed by Leviathan, which don't typically show up in other decks. Syncopate is strong, potentially countering anything for just two mana, although it can be slow if we are on the draw, and it loses a lot of its value if our opponent gets a bunch of mana on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Swallowed by Leviathan generally can counter anything and even surveil 2 along the way. But there are situations where we won't have enough cards in our graveyard to power it up, and three mana is steep. Still, they get the job done and don't add much to the budget compared to other options like Three Steps Ahead. Finally, Dreams of Laguna gives us a bit more card draw and filtering to help find our important pieces.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, $20 Mono-Blue Towns wasn't great. We ended up going 4-10 with the deck for a 29% win rate, which obviously isn't super competitive. So all in all, it seems like Mono-Blue Towns is way more of a meme than a dream. The deck's biggest issue is that it just isn't especially powerful. We don't really have any free-win draws, so every game is a massive grind, and the deck really struggles if it gets behind since we don't really have a hard reset. Yes, our bounce can help, but our opponent will just redeploy those cards eventually. But aggro decks are super tough to beat. On the other hand, the deck actually feels pretty powerful if we can get out on the front foot, stick a threat or two, and then start countering and bouncing our opponent's stuff.
The good news is that we got some pretty sweet wins with the deck, including beating Izzet Cauldron with PuPu UFO, of all things, which has to be worth like 10 wins all by itself! The deck is interesting to play, as a weird bounce-heavy tempo-control deck. PuPu UFO specifically felt oddly powerful, and Travel the Overworld can be absurdly powerful! I've mentioned before that, whether a deck wins or loses, I always try to learn something from it. In this case, I came away feeling like some of the Towns payoffs were really good and might be worth trying to build around, but mono-blue might not be the right way to do it. Something similar but in Azorius or Bant (so we get hard removal and ramp) might be better, although it would add a lot to the budget to make the mana work.
So, should you play $20 Mono-Blue Towns? I think it depends on your goal. If you are looking for a fun, cheap kitchen table deck, I think Mono-Blue Towns is perfect. If you are looking to win a tournament or rank up to mythic on Arena, though, I'm not sure that it's really strong enough to get the job done.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
