Budget Magic: $82 Mono-Blue Flash (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! If you've been playing Magic for a little while, you might remember that the most successful budget deck in recent years was Mono-Blue Curious Obsession. The deck was super cheap to put together but also good enough to win Pro Tour–level events! Thanks to Duskmourn, it's now possible to build a similar deck in Standard, with the goal being to stick a cheap flash threat or two, snowball card advantage from Enduring Curiosity and Flow of Knowledge, counter everything the opponent does, and pick up a tempo win before the opponent can recover! How good is Mono-Blue Flash in Duskmourn Standard on an $80 / 15-rare budget? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Mono-Blue Flash
The Deck
As I mentioned in the intro, the game plan of Mono-Blue Flash is to never, ever tap mana on our turn. Literally every single non-land in our main deck can be played at instant speed—and then we try to stick a threat or two; draw a ton of cards with Enduring Curiosity and Flow of Knowledge; counter anything the opponent plays; and ride our little, evasive flash creatures to victory!
The Engine
One of the dirty secrets of Mono-Blue Flash is that, compared one-to-one with our opponent's cards, our cards sort of suck. As such, we need a lot of them to win the game. Thankfully, we have two absurd card-advantage engines to make this happen. The first is Flow of Knowledge, which just draws a ton of cards for five mana thanks to our all-Island mana base. The second is a new Duskmourn addition in Enduring Curiosity, which is incredibly powerful. With Enduring Curiosity on the battlefield, we draw a card any time we deal combat damage with a creature, which makes all of our underpowered 2/1 fliers into all-stars. Basically, Enduring Curiosity is our Curious Obsession. It's slower to get going but way, way stronger once it gets going. Oh yeah, it also has flash, which plays well with our theme of never tapping mana during our turn. And if our opponent manages to kill it, it comes back as a non-creature enchantment. It's the most important card in our deck, and it's not especially close.
The Creatures
As far as creatures, we kick things off with our fliers, which play super well with Enduring Curiosity since they are great at chipping in for combat damage thanks to evasion. Faerie Mastermind and Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel give us cheap fliers that might also draw us some extra cards, while Stoic Sphinx is our big finisher. Once we flash it in, we can avoid casting spells to keep it hexproof and potentially close out the game in just a few attacks.
We've also got a couple of removal creatures. Fear of Impostors played better than I expected, as a counter on a stick. I was a little worried that the manifest it made would diminish its power since the 2/2 can simply trade with Fear of Impostors. But it turns out that being able to counter anything for three mana was still worth it, especially in our deck, where most of our creatures have flying, making the manifest a poor blocker. Meanwhile, Floodpits Drowner is an upgraded version of Merfolk Trickster, a card that was a staple in flash decks in the past and still sees Modern play. Drowner gives us a flash creature that can temporarily remove a creature by tapping it down for a couple of turns. And if it's a creature with a problematic ability, like Sheoldred, we can use Drowner's second ability to remove it permanently by shuffling it back into the deck, which is something Merfolk Trickster couldn't do.
The Counters
Finally, we have our interaction. Once again, the gameplay of our deck is to stick a couple of early threats and then use counters to make sure our opponent never resolves anything meaningful. For this, we need plenty of counterspells. Phantom Interference and Three Steps Ahead are the best of the bunch since they are counterspells that can also potentially make a creature at instant speed, making them a weird hybrid of interaction and flash creatures.
Meanwhile, Negate and Get Out answer spells along with creatures and enchantments, respectively, with Get Out being especially strong thanks to its ability to counter the powerful enchantments in Standard, ranging from various Talents to new Duskmourn cards.
Last but not least, we have Into the Flood Maw. Ideally, we'll never let our opponent resolve anything meaningful. But if something slips through, this is our get-out-of-jail-free card. We can use Into the Flood Maw to bounce the threat back to our opponent's hand and hopefully counter it on the way back down.
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, Mono-Blue Flash crushed it, going 5-0! If you decide to try the deck, my one big piece of advice is to make sure you have at least one threat in your opening hand. We tried keeping a couple of all-interaction hands with no creatures, and it always went poorly. Just countering everything the opponent does is fairly meaningless if we aren't also pressuring our opponent's life total and refilling our hand, and both of which usually require creatures on the battlefield. Without a threat, we'll run out of cards sooner or later, and our opponent will take over the game.
The good news is that the deck felt super strong, and I'm not sure there are really any expensive upgrades needed to power up the budget build. Mono-Blue Flash is one of those archetypes that just happens to be cheap in its optimal form, and I expect that the best version of the deck will look quite a bit like this build.
So, should you play Mono-Blue Flash in Duskmourn Standard? If you are looking for a competitive budget deck, I think the answer is yes! The deck felt super strong. I'm not sure how well it would hold up in best-of-one, where super-fast aggro is more popular (and super-fast aggro seems like our toughest matchup). But I think the deck might actually be a real option in best-of-three! If you like tempo and countering tons of spells all while drawing oodles of cards, this just might be the budget deck for you!
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.
