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Brewing With EMN- Azorius Tempo

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Azorius decks have been a rather fringe contingent in Standard as of late, though now and again a mishmash of blue and white cards cracks the Top 8 of a large tournament. Personally my builds of such decks have all contained Reflector Mage and Eldrazi Displacer with the focus being on disrupting the opponent. I believe that Eldritch Moon adds a lot of tools for such a strategy without the need to get too carried away with the new themes. I'm currently looking at trying a build that looks something like this:

This deck looks confused, and parts of it are, though some of the parts that look off are intentional. Rattlechains and Stratus Dancer both bring the curve down and trade with humans early while being able to interact with removal later against other decks, and the fact that there are only two types of spirits isn't a significant concern. What I'm trying to do is find the best ways to out-tempo and disrupt opponents without getting married to cookie-cutter strategies that look similar but have less play.

The places where I'm actually not sure how to build the deck are with regard to how much "colorless matters" I want, and whether this sort of build needs to go so deep on Sanctum of Ugin. As things stand, there are enough colorless sources to hurt the mana but not enough to happily maindeck a bunch of Spatial Contortions and Matter Reshapers. Access to Sanctum allows you to chain Deep-Fiends which is absurdly powerful, though the fact that they can't generate colored mana means that they're sometimes worse than painlands.

While there are some kinks to work out, this strategy was already something that I was reasonably happy with prior to Eldritch Moon, and with two of the best cards in the set in Spell Queller and Elder Deep-Fiend fitting right in I'm convinced that there is a way to make these elements work together. Spirits is a more straightforward deck that has plenty of merit, but this style of deck has much higher raw power, and I'm determined to make it work.

One thought on “Brewing With EMN- Azorius Tempo

  1. I really like using Skyspawner to curve into Deep-Fiend, and I like using Sanctum of Ugin with Emerge is an awesome way to cheat stuff into play.

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