I tested a sweet Mono Blue Beatdown deck for the last couple of days, that I want to take into todays 100 card Singleton Challenge.
Due to a nice little Poker win I was also able to buy some staple cards for other decks (like a complete set of dual lands, so yeah, the win was quite nice 😉 ).
Anyways, here’s the deck list of the Mono U deck (hope the screenshot is good enough to actually see what cards are in there… just click the pic to get a full screen view of the deck with a zoom-in function):
The deck plays several sub-par cards, but that is intended. Rather than using expensive quality spells, the deck uses cheap, evasive beatdwon creatures like Zephyr Sprites and Flying Men. Those cards look terrible at first, but when you actually see them in play, they really shine. Most opponents will take a lot of damage from those pesky 1 and 2 drops and will very early be forced to have answers for those at hand. Most Singleton Decks don’t have enough Spot Removal to actually handle those 30 creatures and wasting a Wrath of God on two 1/1 fliers is something only few players are willing to do.
The deck can punish mediocre or bad draws pretty well, sometimes the right plays involve getting the opponent from the necessary Mana (bouncing lands can be quite nasty from time to time, especially if you get lucky enough to hit Ravnica double mana lands with this).
The overall mana curve is quite low, so having only29 lands in the deck seems to be low, but it actually is okay. Hands that have 2 lands are playable all the time, one land hands can often be playable if they include some cheap spells that let you dig deeper to find a second land.
The main disadvantage of the deck, however, is that you really need to be in the driver seat very early on, otherwise it will lose pretty quickly. There are not many cards in there that can win a game on their own and making a comeback with this deck can be pretty hard.
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