Blue Devotion with Dragons of Tarkir

The last couple of months have been pretty busy for me, so Fate Reforged has come and gone without me posting anything about it. As it happens, one of the most interesting decks that I came up with for Fate Reforged and never talked about now gets multiple significant upgrades from Dragons of Tarkir. I am talking about Blue Devotion, an archetype that had been basically dead since Khans rotated in. My FRF blue devotion deck was as follows:

FRF Blue Devotion
Creature (28)
4x Hypnotic Siren
4x Master of Waves
4x Shaman of the Great Hunt
3x Thassa, God of the Sea
3x Triton Shorestalker
3x Vaporkin
4x Wall of Frost
3x Welkin Tern

Artifact (2)
1x Bident of Thassa
1x Hall of Triumph

Enchantment (7)
3x Cloudform
4x Pin to the Earth

Land (23)
8x Island
3x Mountain
1x Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
4x Shivan Reef
1x Swiftwater Cliffs
1x Temple of Abandon
4x Temple of Epiphany
1x Temple of Mystery

With the loss of devotion-enabling goodies from Return to Ravnica block, building an aggressive Blue Devotion deck became an uphill struggle to find enough playable blue permanents to power Master of Waves and Thassa. This basically forces you to play a bunch of tiny evasive creatures of dubious quality. When I first experimented with this archetype after Khans came out, I came to the conclusion that the deck was hopeless without a Master of Waves in play, and not even that good at supporting devotion for Thassa and the Master.

Fate Reforged changed this with two interesting additions. First we got a somewhat decent devotion enabler in Cloudform which, though not impressive by any means, turns out to be the only playable creature under four mana with two blue in its cost (not counting Wall of Frost, which is more of a removal spell than an actual creature). With a deck full of tiny creatures, you are not terribly likely to get a valuable manifest card with Cloudform, but it does give you the option of flipping the morph for an extra devotion, sometimes. The really exciting innovation, though, came with Shaman of the Great Hunt.

With a deck as linear as blue devotion, an off-color permanent really needs to be amazing to earn slot. I believe the Shaman does that, in spades. It has great synergy with all the small evasive attackers, and provides a strong drawing engine if it ever lives until you untap. Its chances of actually attacking and damaging an opposing player are not great, but still better than in other decks, thanks to Thassa's ability, and the fact that opponents don't have much of a reason to hold back blockers otherwise. In short, the Shaman is a second must-kill threat, to complement Master of Waves.

The deck above is not top tier, but it's pretty cool, and I think it's good enough to bring to a tournament without embarrassing yourself. However, it has some important weaknesses, such as needing to play some mediocre cheap creatures to fill its curve, and often having a relatively low devotion count. Hence, I was pretty excited to find that Dragons of Tarkir fixed all this, by providing solid replacements for the weakest creatures and a strong card costing UUU.

DTK Blue Devotion
Creature (28)
3x Gudul Lurker
4x Hypnotic Siren
4x Master of Waves
4x Shaman of the Great Hunt
4x Shorecrasher Elemental
4x Stratus Dancer
4x Thassa, God of the Sea
1x Vaporkin

Enchantment (6)
2x Cloudform
4x Pin to the Earth

Artifact (2)
1x Bident of Thassa
1x Hall of Triumph

Land (24)
8x Island
1x Mana Confluence
2x Mountain
2x Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
4x Shivan Reef
2x Swiftwater Cliffs
4x Temple of Epiphany
1x Temple of Mystery

Gudul Lurker and Stratus Dancer play out just like the Triton Shorestalker and Vaporkin they replace in the early game, while getting quite a bit better when topdecked in the late game. But the real star is the Shorecrasher Elemental, which doubles as a strong and versatile body, and an outstanding devotion enabler. The deck now has enough devotion to go back to 4 Thassas, and enough mana sinks to make good use of a second Nykthos. Read More......