Standard: UW heroic

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Hey there! CheeseMeistro here with a quick write up about my Blue/White Heroic Standard deck. Some of you may know me from Cockatrice but if you don’t, feel free to chat to me on Cockatrice. Sometimes I won’t be at the keyboard but most of the time I will. Time for a little bit about myself.

I am currently 20 years old and have actually only been playing Magic: The Gathering for around 3.5-4 months. Since I started I mostly focused on EDH and got really, really into the deck building side of it. When I started Standard a month ago the same thing happened and I got really into the deck building aspect of it. When I first started the decks were awful but when I got a hang of what cards were good in standard and what were bad I decided I started getting a bit better at it. After drafting Theros for a while I decided I wanted to build something based around Theros cards and thus this deck was born.

Why did I make this deck?

My very first physical Magic: The Gathering event was about 3.5 weeks ago. I drafted Blue/White heroic. It was my first time drafting and I went 3-0 and got first place. The next week I decided to test it again if it was luck and went 3-1 and got second, just losing to a red/blue burn deck. After that I decided I HAD to make this deck Standard legal as we had a Standard event coming up!

Why U/W Heroic and not U/W/X, Y or Z?

I decided to make it a heroic deck after some successful trials and deciding that I wanted a deck in these colours that played the way I wanted and was effective. Many people have told me I should ditch the heroic creatures and some other creatures and put X Y Z in to basically turn it into U/W control. But heroic is an incredible mechanic, and blue/white is probably the best colours for it, maybe tied with red/white (Which I plan on making and maybe an article about soon!).

Why play this deck over any other deck? Well, from my testing so far it has proved quite effective against a wide variety of decks. The only major deck I haven’t had a chance of playing against often so far has been RDW but I have a feeling I could still pull a win out. Basically it’s a fairly cheap deck to build if you take out the Hallowed Fountains (Fiendslayer Paladins are required) being only approximately 50 dollars without them and is very, very effective for the price.

The List:

Creature:                                                            

4 Fabled Hero                                                  

4 Favored Hoplite                                        

4 Phalanx Leader                                           

2 Cavalry Pegasus                                          

3 Banisher Priest                                            

4 Fiendslayer Paladin                                    

Instant:                                                              
3 Gods Willing                                                 

2 Syncopate                                                                                                           

Sorcery:

4 Hidden Strings

Enchantment:      

3 Aqueous Form 

3 Ordeal of Thassa         

2 Ordeal of Heliod                                                                

Land:

4 Azorius Guildgate

4 Hallowed Fountain

3 Island

11 Plains

Sideboard:

2 Gainsay

2 Aetherize

2 Render Silent

2 Voyage’s End

3 Brave the Elements

2 Dispel

2 Glare of Heresy

Budget options:

If you’re on a tight budget you can trade out 4 Hallowed Fountains for 2 Island and 2 Plains, dropping the price of the deck by 50 dollars. That leaves the only big expense being Fiendslayer Paladin. Unfortunately these can’t be removed or the deck just falls apart against the huge amount of red burn and black removal. If they must be removed (Due to major budget concerns) there isn’t really a good replacement so I would put another Banisher Priest and either (Meta call here) 3 Wavecrash Triton or 3 Brave the Elements. If your meta has a lot more targeted removal take Brave the Elements but if they just like to play lots of big fatties (Or RDW with Boros Reckoners) then Wavecrash Triton or something else that controls creatures goes in this slot. Wavecrash is a meta call of mine as there is a lot of people who play RDW or big fatties at my local game store while not having the 4 damage burn spells to remove Wavecrash.

Mana Distribution and Converted Mana Cost:

Using deckstats.net we can see that our Mana Distribution is 77% white and 23% blue while our Mana Source Distribution is 63% white and 37% blue. This was done on purpose to ensure that we have blue early game for Aqueous Form, Hidden Strings and counterspells. We will be relying a lot on our dual lands and if you have to pay 2 for Hallowed Fountain it is ALWAYS the right call, we have a lot of life gain. 

The average CMC of our deck, without sideboarding, puts us at a 1.97. This is a very, very low mana curve and means that in the worst case scenario where we only hit 3 lands for a number of turns, we can still play all of our deck as the highest cost card (Before sideboarding) is three. That means that we are less likely to be hit with mana screw as we don’t need all that many lands to begin with.

Strenghts & Weaknesses:

·          

      Strenghts:

      Speed

This deck is fast. I frequently get a turn 4 or 5 win and end up with over 35 life at the time. Even if the deck doesn’t win that fast (It should about 40-50% of the time with the right hand) we have a lot of stuff to deal with longer games such as the Fiendslayer Paladin, Fabled Hero, etc. Mostly you want to get your stuff down and swing fast with it though, win before the opponent has a chance to react to it.

·          Unblockable 

One of the major things about this deck is making our creatures not able to be blocked. The obvious provider of this is the Aqueous Form but we also have two of the Cavalry Pegasus for a reason. Every creature in the deck except for the Cavalry Pegasus is a Human. That means that the Cavalry Pegasus gives all of our creatures flying. Most of the time people won’t use a Shock/Lightning Strike/Doom Blade on the Pegasus so we don’t even have to waste a Gods Willing keeping it alive to get our flying attacks the next turn.

·       

      Strong Early Game:

The best thing about this deck is its ability to keep a strong field early game even if the opponent has removal. We have a lot of very low cost spells and the ability to get 4 things down/cast by turn 2. We can then protect our creatures with Gods Willing to keep our early game board state and cause the opponent to not set their board state up because they are too busy focusing on removing our creatures.

Weaknesses

·          Spot Removal

Probably the biggest threat to this deck is spot removal in the form of Mizzium Mortars, Magma Jet, Lightning Strike and any number of black removal spells. A good turn two play won’t matter if you play second and they just bolt your Favored Hoplite when you are tapped down or don’t have a Gods Willing in hand.

·       

      Protections

One of the biggest problems I have run into is creatures that have protection from white. Creatures that are protected from white completely stop us from swinging through if we don’t have an Aqueous Form on our creatures or a Cavalry Pegasus on the field (Assuming they don’t have a flying protection from white) to get us over the creatures. Unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot we can do about these except sideboard in Voyage’s End to remove them. 

·          Slow starting hand

A slow starting hand can really mess our deck up. If we don’t get some creatures down and start the train rolling early enough our opponents will be able to set up their board state before we can do anything to them. Also, if we lack a Fiendslayer Paladin or two against black/red decks we won’t be able to keep our board state, buying them time to get mana down for their big bomb spells.

Notable Interactions and Synergies:

This deck is all about synergies and card interactions and here is a list of the main ones that will help you win the game (hopefully).

Fiendslayer Paladin/Fabled Hero + Hidden Strings (Ciphered):

If we can get our Fiendslayer/Fabled hero to stick to the board with a Hidden Strings ciphered onto them AND managed to swing through, we are in a great spot. This is because of how Cipher works with first strike damage. After first strike damage our Cipher triggers occur meaning that we can pump triggers onto Phalanx Leader or any other Heroic creature to buff them up before normal damage occurs.

Heroic Creature + Ordeals:

All of our heroic creatures have the staple that they get a +1/+1 counter when they are cast upon. This means that casting an Ordeal on one of them then swinging nets us an immediate 2 counters. The next turn? That turns to three and it pops. Bonus points if we manage to get another ordeal onto the creature that turn giving us 3 counters, then 5 when we swing triggering both and either refilling the hand or getting us loads of life.

Gods Willing + Heroic Creature:

Super simple here, we get a Heroic trigger giving us a +1/+1 counter, protecting from the colour of whatever we need to protect against and scrying one. All for one W mana and one card. That is huge.

Banisher Priest + Phalanx Leader + Heroic Triggers:

This is quite a minor interaction but basically getting the heroic triggers on our Phalanx Leaders buffs our Banisher Priest up making him more resilient to red burn spells. Ideally you want him at 5/5 to prevent Mizzium Mortar kills. This also has the side effect of making him a good blocker. It must be noted that this will occur very, very rarely and is just noted here as a way you can save a Banisher Priest (exiling a Boros Reckoner, Purphoros etc.) from a Shock or Magma Jet.

Sideboarding:

What we’re using our sideboard for here is certain specific situations. Sometimes we may come up against a deck that has a lot of protection from red creatures that we can’t remove. What about that guy playing big blue bombs and cheap counters on instant spells? Or the other guy with heaps of tokens or counters on creatures, making them too big to remove normally? This is what the sideboard was created for.

Gainsay is probably my favourite counterspell in blue. We can sideboard this card in after one match when we know the opponent is casting lots of spells with blue in them, making it cheaper to remove these spells over the alternative Dissolve or Syncopate. Two of these swapped in over Syncopate against mono U or predominantly blue decks.

Aetherize deals with so much so easily for a measly four mana. This card can remove that huge token army that’s swinging at you for lethal. It can remove that army with 5 +1/+1 counters on it that’s about to kill you. It can do so much. Two of these swapped in over Cavalry Pegasus against these types of decks.

Dispel: Going up against nothing but instant speed removal from black and/or red and can’t deal with it after game one? This card stops them completely for just one mana. Nice. Two of these in over Cavalry Pegasus against instant speed removal decks that don’t use many creatures.

Render Silent is quite a powerful card. It is two cards combined into one. Counterspell (UU) and Silence (W). Basically this card lets you cast two spells spliced together for the same cost. It didn’t make the main deck as sometimes you don’t need the silence effect. Really shuts down RDW from dropping 4 creatures in a turn when you counter that first Burning Tree Emissary or Boros Reckoner. Two of these in over Syncopate against decks that like to cast lots of spells in one turn.

Glare of Heresy is actually a meta call on my part. At my store approximately every person that isn’t me managed to pull an Elspeth or Foil Elspeth (Some people got two foils and a non-foil…) so I sideboard this to deal with that. It has the bonus effect of being able to easily deal with Boros Reckoners or any other painful white creatures. Two of these in over Cavalry Pegasus’s.

Voyage’s End lets us bounce any creature the opponent controls unless they have protection from blue or hexproof. This means that big fatty that cost most of their mana just got removed or we can have it early game to disrupt their big creature play early (If they ramp). We can also target remove creatures with counters on them if they aren’t swinging. A good example of this is Gyre Sages who are being overloaded with tokens and just used for mana. Two of these in over Cavalry Pegasus’s.

It must be noted that if you need multiple of these sideboard cards against a certain deck you will have to judge yourself on what to remove to put both in. Good targets are removing one Hidden Strings and one Phalanx Leader (Or two Phalanx leaders if it is that bad) if you need the Cavalry Pegasus’s to swing into the opponent.

Well, that's all for now. I hope you liked the deck. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

CheeseMeistro