A long, long time ago, in a state far far away from my home of Maryland, I put together a deck in the format known at the time as Type 1.5, that simply wanted to do this every single game:

Because the dumbest use I could think of for a playset of Mana Drain was windmill slamming Big Daddy Momo on turn three by stealing the mana from my opponent’s 3-drop. It was one of my longest-surviving decks; I played it from 2000 until 2003 (when I sold my Mana Drains along with all the other expensive cards I owned). Mahamoti quickly became one of my favorite cards and was one of the few cards I’ve ever collected: I picked up dozens of them in trades since they were (and still are) worth very little, and had binder pages full of them from every printing.

The rest of the deck was a motley crew of (at the time) forgotten blue cards, most of which are very familiar to the old school community, along colorless lands that weren’t Wasteland:

A full set of Faerie Conclave and Mishra’s Factory made it into the mana base and Counterspells and miscellaneous support cards rounded out the control suite.

That deck was mostly old school cards anyway, so I wanted to revisit it for the battlebox. However, I opted to slow things down a bit to make it more of a control deck. For the moment it has replaced the Merfolk deck in the battlebox, to give a little more variety, and it’s proved a total blast to play without being miserable and overbearing.

Fair warning: There’s a Ghost Ship and a Conch Horn in this deck. You still have time to turn back …

A Budget Starting Point

2 Sindbad

3 Serendib Efreet

1 Time Elemental

1 Ghost Ship

1 Air Elemental

3 Mahamoti Djinn

4 Counterspell

1 Mana Drain*

2 Psionic Blast

2 Power Sink

1 Recall

1 Braingeyser

1 Sol Ring

1 Conch Horn

1 Aeolipile

1 Jayemdae Tome

3 Nevinyrral’s Disk

1 The Hive

3 Control Magic

15 Island

4 Desert

4 Mishra’s Factory

2 Sveyunite Temple

1 Strip Mine

1 Maze of Ith

There are few four-ofs in the deck; some of this is my desire to just play enough different cards to make matches more fun, and some of it is curve consideration, but I promise that this deck is more well-thought-out than it initially appears.

*Budget note: The mana drain is my one budget concession for this deck, given the history I mentioned earlier. Even Italian or modern-bordered ones are very expensive. However, Power Sink is a perfectly fine replacement, and the rest of the deck is generally affordable, especially if you’re using 4th edition, Chronicles, and Timeshifted. (Also, the only reserve list cards here are the Fallen Empires rares, which are practically buyout-proof.)

My Card Choices

Let’s look at the creatures first, starting with Sindbad. I’ve talked about him a little bit before, in the context of the Tax-Edge deck I posted a bit back (which did not survive as a member of the battlebox — it wasn’t unbalanced or anything but simply used up too many cards and was difficult to pilot). Here you can think of Sindbad as your early mana creature. If he doesn’t draw you a land, he ditches the top card of your library so you’re closer to drawing one. Since so many of the lands are also spells, I activate him very aggressively in nearly all stages of the game, unless there is a specific spell that I need to draw to get out of a sticky situation.

Sometimes the stars align and you get a Conch Horn with Sindbad so you can actually draw “three” cards by putting a land back on top. Conch Horn fills a little gap in the budget card drawing suite; in a powered deck, that slot would (somewhat obviously) be Ancestral Recall. It has an interesting side effect in that you can hide a card from discard, if you have something very important in your hand, like a Disk to clear the board. (Plus the art is beautiful, so it’s well worth a single slot.)

The 3-slot has perhaps the most obvious creature, Serendib Efreet, and one of the least-obvious creatures, Time Elemental.

Time Elemental found a place because I needed some sort of repeatable, general answer to problem permanents like Winter Orb or Underworld Dreams that can easily sneak in under counter magic. It’s proven quite good and demands a removal spell if the opponent is planning to win with one or two threats. The card has some weird cache, too, having appeared in the deck that first won worlds, and so the Legends copies can be fairly expensive. Luckily, it’s also in 4th edition.

The Efreets aren’t exactly a control creature, but without them I was twiddling my thumbs too often. You have to win the game somehow and the Efreet was good enough.

The remaining finishers are Ghost Ship, Air Elemental, The Hive, and Mahamoti Djinn.

I couldn’t quite justify four Djinn, as he’s quite hard to cast when I can’t cheat him into play.

Ghost Ship has been a Champ. The regeneration lets it survive Disk (mine and my opponent’s), the four toughness is solid on defense, and the four casting cost fills a nice spot in the curve.

And Air Elemental … well. It’s acceptable. It doesn’t have the upsides of the other 5-drop fliers in the format, but attacking for 4 in the air is occasionally just good enough. This could be a second Ghost Ship, but the main problem is being certain you have a good enough power-to-mana cost ratio to close out the game reasonably.

The Hive was mainly for fun, but it does some decent work in slower matchups.

Moving on to the spells, enchantments, and artifacts:

Counterspells and Power Sinks are one of the main reasons to play blue. It’s not a draw-go deck (usually), though, so you do have to be a bit choosy about what you counter.

For removal, you have a powerful sweeper in Nevinyrral’s Disk filling the space between your counterspells and your big creatures, Psionic Blast and Aeolipile to pick off creatures early (or occasionally finish off an opponent a turn early), and Control Magic, which are particularly strong against other blue decks and against black decks, which often can’t remove it, and green decks that usually can’t remove it maindeck. Red decks usually don’t have anything much worth taking, but nabbing and orc or goblin still keeps it from hitting you. White Weenie decks fare best against them, since they have disenchants (and Swords in a pinch) and can punish you for tapping out with Armageddon.

The colorless lands give you nine ways to put a damper on faster creature strategies and gain time to get your Counterspells and big creatures online. More serious players looking to “improve” the deck will probably want the full playset of Strip Mines in place of some of the Deserts (I wouldn’t get rid of any Factories, and I wouldn’t ditch Desert entirely — you might cut a spell instead), but battlebox decks have a hard limit of 1 (since they lead to frequent blowouts). The Deserts can seem oppressive against some of the battlebox decks (especially the Faeries deck), but the card is underplayed and I’ve mentioned my fondness for it before.

The other land of note is the Sveyunite Temple. Having it makes the deck slightly less soft to cards like Tsunami, or islandwalking fishes, and the tiny bit of acceleration without resorting to mana rocks is important in a deck with several expensive spells.

The deck runs 27 land, which is a lot, but keep in mind that many decks run 27-30 mana sources in this format. You’re at 45% to hit a land blindly off Sindbad, and I’ve gone back and forth on having a 28th land (usually cutting Aeolipile).

General Strategy and Sideboard Ideas

Anyone who’s played a control deck is going to look at the list and feel at home, but it’s sometimes better to think of this as a midrange deck. Deal with your opponent’s threats, stick a large one, and ride it to victory while protecting it. This deck is perfectly capable of piviting to be the aggressor as early as turn 4, and most of my losses come from being too skittish with my threats and trying to hide behind a wall of countermagic, or simply countering things that don’t really matter. While it feels bad to die with countermagic in your hand, it feels worse to die with a large creature in your hand that you could have played several turns ago and ended the game with. Sometimes it pays to simply tap out and keep playing threats until your opponent can’t deal with them anymore.

The decks that have been hardest to deal with outside the battlebox are combo decks, some prison decks, and certain types of black decks like dedicated discard and Underworld Dreams backed up with fast creatures. My current sideboard includes Psychic Purge (which, if you scroll back to the top, used to be maindeck, you’ll notice), which is excellent against most black aggro decks (not just for the 5 damage it deals if they make you discard it — it also kills Orders), Energy Flux (which could be maindeck if you’re so inclined), Hurkyl’s Recall, a few Blue Elemental Blasts, an Amnesia, and some wildcards (sometimes additional creatures like Dandan, sometimes an additional counterspell or bounce spell, etc.).

Other Cards to Consider

Blue has some of the most “obvious” auto-includes if you’re not on a budget. This will be a shorter list than usual in part because there are so many different cards in the deck already. However, there are some worth discussing that I haven’t mentioned already here or in the Merfolk article, including some different types of counterspells.

Fellwar Stone: This deck plays no mana rocks, and that’s possibly a mistake, especially when the Energy Flux aren’t in the maindeck. These are an easy swap for Sindbad and Conch Horn (most likely) and the fourth could probably be squeezed in over a land. I’m more inclined to play these when the deck has access to more card drawing, so I would say that running these would tack the deck more toward pure control.

Flash Counter: Similar to Remove Soul below, this can help with some of the stranger mana situations you might get yourself into with a deck that plays 9 colorless sources. It’s not on the level of Negate in later formats, but it’s good enough against control, combo, and burn for stopping the most important spells from resolving, or it can be used to save your stuff from removal. Since I’ve advocated playing Avoid Fate for similar reasons, a case could be made that one or even two of these maindeck is good enough, especially if you’d prefer to remove some of the creature hate (like the Aeolipile).

Juggernaut: Big Juggs is going in a deck in the Battlebox, but this one wasn’t it. While it would be a classic inclusion

Phantasmal Terrain: The effect is minimal and in EC rules you have access to more Strip Mines to take care of the problem, but there are versions of the format where only a single Strip Mine is legal; so this card is worth considering in Mono Blue to take care of the nemesis that is Library of Alexandria or opposing Factories. If you’re also expecting a lot of decks with very few creatures but not much blue mana, you can also run these in anticipation of bringing in the Dandans after sideboard.

Prodigal Sorcerer: A completely reasonable way to handle the weenie hordes throughout the EC metagame. Between Tim, Desert, Aeolipile, and Psionic Blast, there aren’t too many creatures that are safe. They aren’t in this deck in part because the deserts are already brutal enough against some of the weenie decks in the battlebox. Tim’s another card that got subtlely more powerful after 6th edition rules: under modern rules you can tap him to deal damage after he’s blocked, but this doesn’t work under the classic ruleset.

Remove Soul: If you play against mostly creature decks, you are likely to run out Desert or a Factory as early as possible to get the shields up. However, this means that leaving up two blue for a Counterspell is tougher. Remove Soul is an efficient way to handle the second or third creature cast. This deck has lots of defense against creatures already, so this is more of a sideboard call, but I could see it being maindeck over the Power Sinks sometimes.

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Yotian Soldier, Brass Man, and Giant Turtle: These can be a bit of a gamble and are not as embarrassing as they seem at first. They really do help a lot against fast aggressive decks, as they come down early and can survive in combat against the glut of commonly played 2/2 creatures, but they obviously aren’t reasonable ways to finish the game. They are worth testing but didn’t make the cut for my build even in the sideboard, as I felt the deck had enough power against small creatures as built.

Hopefully you’re feeling inspired to smash face with a big blue creature of your own!