In case anybody is curious, this is my current list for the Azorious Combo Deck. I fully consider it to be the strongest deck in the game. The only potential modifications to this list would be altering the type/number of 2 mana instants, or perhaps dropping the inspiration. The only way it ever really loses is if it stumbles against a strong mono red deck, or if it doesn't draw a counterspell before the opponent resolves something extremely powerful.



P.S. if anyone is interested in trying out the deck for the first time, be careful not to tap out when it would be better to just wait. Try to understand what the opponent's gameplan is and when it might be dangerous to tap out. If the enemy looks like a controllish deck with shocks it might be better to wait on Mentor until turn 4-5 to protect it. If the enemy cultivates into 6-7 mana, you probably want to keep up a dissolve or traumatic visions every turn. That said, sometimes you should just jam Talrand on turn 4 and win if the opponent has no answer.

Strongest deck in the game? That's a BOLD statement. (Which I don't agree with)

This is my draw planar cleansing at all costs deck. not gonna lie this deck has a very real win condition of the opponent runs outta cards.

It may not do the most powerful things in the game the fastest, but when I say strongest I mean something like this:

1. It has an extremely high and consistent win rate against nearly every common deck.

2. It has several ways to neuter the nut draw heroic decks and prevent their free wins.

3. It has a favorable match-up against Mono-Red on the play (though unfavorable on the draw).

4. It isn't fragile in that most hands are keepable and it easily recovers from mulligans (it's the only deck I win with consistently after mulliganing to 4 cards).

5. It has the tools to make a game of it's few unfavorable match-ups, so it has an extremely low win rate against no decks.

I took it for a spin to see what the win rate was in general, and won 9 out of 10 games. I'll post the results in the "ten games with" thread if you're interested.

Hey Spencer,

I was taking a look at your decklist, and I am wondering why you are using so many taplands. You dont have any turn 2 double white or blue cards, and besides Brimaz, it seems as though you are slowing yourself down quite a bit and I am trying to figure out why. I see your radiant fountains as well, which i normally dont see outside of lifegain or mono decks. I suppose having the taplands is the reason you can reliably run fountains, but i wonder if it is worth the small lifegain?

Do you find them necessary with the 5 draw spells plus mentor to cast planar?

When you stabilize I know the lands are not a problem, but it seems from the list that you may be setting yourself up to miss a turn statistically. I do enjoy the early chump blocking combo and pseudo-cloudshift archeo + peel synergy, so really i am just focusing on your lands right now.

ok Spence, you convinced me. I'll try out your deck.

When I'm considering my manabase I usually refer to this article:

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles ... ur-spells/

Double and triple colour spells are significantly harder to cast reliably than multicolour spells, and I want to be able to cast both Brimaz and Dissolve fairly reliably by turn 3. I don't want to have to mulligan because my starting lands are radiant fountains plus basics of a single colour. The Radiant Fountains + taplands do indeed make me take a turn off that I otherwise wouldn't have had to in a good portion of games, but the lifegain is necessary in several matchups.

1. The deck doesn't have sweepers until turn 6, so against decks that go wide early all we can do is block a number of their tokens and eat the rest of their damage. The fountains can buy us another turn, which is generally more important than casting another think twice early on. I just played a game against a deck that went t2 Young Pyro into t3 Mentor and t4 Krenko's Command, and I won the game with 4 life remaining after playing 3 Fountains.

2. More importantly they are there to win against decks that try to burn you out. The deck almost never wins quickly, so Banefires and Resounding Thunders can win the game by themselves. Playing 3 Radiant Fountains can counter the damage of an entire cycled Resounding Thunder. Control decks often draw something like 2 Resounding Thunders and a Banefire in their top 20-30 cards, and if they just save it all for our face we lose if we don't have the Fountains, but win if we have them. Against Izzet style Guttersnipe/Kiln Fiend + burn we usually end up taking a bit of early damage, and can end up just getting burned out in a longer game if we fail to pressure them hard. If all we're doing is punching with 2 Archaeomancer's every turn for a while then such a deck can draw a few burn spells and win.

Thinking about the cost of Fountains another way, I replace 2 basics with a tapland and a Fountain. This means I pay 1 mana on a turn of my choice to gain 2 life, an effect I find extremely powerful for this deck in particular. We don't have one drops, so we want to drop a tapland on turn 1 every single game. I also don't want to be playing a 4 drop on 4. Archaeomancer is a terrible card by itself, so I don't really want to play it until I can combo it with other cards, and I want to save Talrand until I can protect him. This means our curve is generally something like Pass-->2 drop-->3 drop-->3 drop. The only card that might make us want 4 mana on turn 4 is Mentor, but if we have mentor active and protected then we're already winning the game, so I don't really care if I have to take a turn off of using his ability.


Edit: The meta I'm facing has shifted away from Seance/Spider spawning style decks and become almost entirely early aggression. I'm testing 4 squadron hawks so I can get a creature on the board turn 2 more often. It's not the fastest play, but it's pretty good value and almost always useful. They're obviously great with Mentor. One hawk plus one Guard Gomazoa is enough to prevent an enemy Rabblemaster from attacking. They can chump four times in a row while we build up mana or drake tokens or try to eek the most value possible out of Planar Cleansing. Heck, they can even attack the other guy if you really want to! Here is the current list which focuses on more proactive early play so we never fall too far behind on board against early aggression:



The deck really should still have the 25th land, but I don't really want to cut any cards.

Hello nogoblinsallowed community,

This is my first post here. It might not be the best place to put it but considering i joined to talk about duels 2015 decklists, especifically to share the version of U/W that i've been winning the most with.

Utilizing Stoneforge Mystic

You always hear tales of how broken Stoneforge Mystic was back in her day in standard/modern. It still consistently sees Legacy play whenever the format is friendly to the fair decks around. When at first i saw it in Duels 2015, i was discouraged that it couldn't get anything particularly good.

But it can. Recently i decided to give it another try and use the only equipment card that costs more than 2 to cast (so you can get a tempo advantage by putting it into play with stoneforge) and didn't cost a million mana to equip. Of course, the card i speak of is Avarice Amulet.

Protecting the queen is a matter of risk and reward

Of course, Avarice Amulet is a very tricky card to play with. You can set yourself up to lose very fast if you let your equipped creature die. However, you'd be surprised how hard it is to kill a creature in this format, especially one that has 4 toughness and can't attack - Wall of Omens.

Basically, the only >2 mana removal decks in duels 2015 will play is either reprisal or shock. If your opponent has to spend their turn tapping out for a removal spell on your wall, you can tempo them out with a Negate or similar and be ahead on your next draw step. You're also going to find a singleton Gods Willing that allows you to answer a kill spell at the cost of only one mana.

Getting your opponent dead

Once you're drawing multiple cards per turn, it'd be a pity to lose to some of the more broken things people can do when given a bunch of mana in this format. Kozilek, Craterhoof Behemoth, Sphinx-Bone Wand, Griselbrand, to name a few, are finishers that are hard to catch up against when they resolve.

But those are usually non-plays when you're threating to kill them on turn 6-7. So i gave the deck an offensive capability similar to that of Delver decks in modern/legacy.

The four copies of Raise the Alarm are there not only to go wide against removal strategies (and are great against Tribute to Hunger), they also give us much needed percentage points against the mono reds of the world. A matchup that sometimes felt unwinnable with bigger styles of U/W, is almost favourable when you have 2/4 walls of omens alongside 1/1 tokens.

A lower curve

There are no 6+ mana plays in this deck. It's more of a tempo deck than a real control deck and as such wants to benefit from playing multiple spells per turn. So instead of your planar cleansings, kolizeks and obelisks of alara of the world, we've got a package that's more aggressively slanted, like Vapor Snag

Not that the single Roil Elemental is experimental - it is lights out for the opponent in some matchups and abismal in others (but still a 3 power beater in the worst case scenario).



Decklist

I am currently 22 in 4 with the deck, picking up a few losses to mana flood as i kept decreasing the land count (started at 26). I feel like it's the best version of U/W i'd ever be able to come up with and it's been dominant against the field.

EDIT: Made the decklist look prettier.

OK, anyone who says their deck is the strongest in the format usually needs to play better opponents. Not saying your bad, mind you. I don't know. I'd say Mono-White, Mono-Red Goblins, Izzet Spellbomb, Spawning, Selesnya Tokens, and Witch-Maw self-mill are just as strong if not stronger

Your deck is pretty close to the base design, the only thing I would suggest is the Squadron Hawks. If you are worried about early game aggression, I would take Lone Missionary over the Hawk. His lifegain and 2/1 body easily make up for the search ability and against the decks you are concerned about, flight is not an advantage (at least until the drakes make their appearance). Unfortunately, against a good opponent, no matter how much lifegain you eek in here, a dedicated burn deck will win more often than not against this deck.

I dropped Peel from Reality from my deck and replaced them with 4 Voyage's End (also, I don't play Mentor). There have been many times where Peel sat in my hand when my opponent had a fast start but Voyage is always relevant, as is the Scry. But I don't really see a bad play here since you do run more creatures. I like to have the extra bounce for early aggression.

Also, I find 25 lands to be too much most of the time. The draw algorithm for Duels is wonky at best. 24 usually runs you out pretty well as land numbers, adding some fetch/artifact mana makes up any difference usually for larger mana curves well.

No matter how few or how many lands you have, odds are very high if you start with 5 land hands, your next 2 will be lands as well. Watch Hakeem's and Mobius' and you can see this happen to them a few times. Especially hilarious to watch if you've ever had it happen to you.

I've played most of those decks, and while they're capable of more explosive starts than this deck, I've found this one to be more reliable overall. I think you might be right that if this game had tournaments or better players on average another deck might be stronger, but this deck has the highest win rate in quick play for me personally.

Lone Missionary is something I considered, but it didn't really fit with what I was trying to do. The problem I had against aggressive decks was that some games, if I missed my turn 2 Wall of Omens, I would lose to their turn 1 and turn 2 plays because I was too far behind by turn 3 when I dropped a Brimaz or a Guard Gomazoa. With Squadron Hawks I have seven two mana creatures in my deck, so I'm extremely likely to find one in my opening hand. If I added four Lone Missionaries the deck would definitely be stronger against aggro, but drawing multiple Missionaries would lose you the game against some decks. If I add only one missionary to the deck then I still don't have a good chance at hitting my 2 drop. Squadron Hawk give me the benefit of something to do with all my mana for the entirety of my early turns, means I almost always have a creature in my hand to activate Mentor, and no there's chance of top decking multiple two drops in the late game if it comes down to that. The benefit of having four chances to draw one but an extremely small chance of drawing multiples is just too good to pass up for a deck that relies on building up incremental advantages and trying to out-value the opponent.

The base deck actually used to run four Voyage's Ends before the expansions and it was stronger against early aggression (so I can see why you might not be so keen on the Hawks at a glance), but Peel has so much more potential upside I feel the swap was worth it. Often the opponent is only able to play a single threatening creature each turn and simply chaining Archaeomancer/Peel every turn is enough to lock them out of the game until you find something else to do. I also ran into the problem of Peel not having targets on my side that I wanted to bounce, but Squadron Hawk actually fixed that problem too.

I would never cut Mentor, it wins me so many games. If it trades one for one with a removal spell that's ok too, it means one less removal spell to kill Talrand.

I don't know how much merit there is to questioning the draw algorithm, but this deck generally wants to find 7+ mana before it tries to win. Chaining Archaeomancers and Dissolves at 7 mana is a pretty common play as well, and nearly every game I end up with so many cards drawn from Mentor I have to start discarding due to hand size. 24 lands is a bit too few to run when you want to hit every land drop until turn 5 without missing and you want 7+ mana every game.

Raise the Alarm is basically squadron hawks against aggro, but at instant speed, and triggers sphinx-bone wand and talrand in the lategame.

And triggers Mentor of the Meek. Good suggestion.

Raise is probably better than Lone Missionary, and definitely has more value in the best case scenarios with Talrand, Wand, and Archaeomancer in the deck, but it's only better than hawk in the cases where we're already winning the game. If I resolve Talrand or wand with mana up I don't lose anyway. The point of Hawk is that I want a creature on 2 every game, but I don't want to draw any 2 drops in the late game. Any creature that trades with a Foundry Street Denizen or chumps a 7/7 Ethereal armor dork is fine, but I need something on the board.

At the same time, I can't afford to draw three Raise the Alarms over the course of a long grindy game against decks where the tokens don't matter. There's no such thing as Sphinx's Revelation, so control decks need their cards to have real value.

Can someone tell me how to reply without quoting there whole post?

I am curious how this deck is supposed to run? like what are you supposed to do ideally? Could you give more insight on how to play this thing? I really want to know your idea behind this since it's unique.

I am guessing stone forge turn 2 into cheating amulet in turn 3 and then like wall of Oh and equipe ammy turn 4 and not have protection up? that seems like the fastest you can go and I don't see how you can "win on turn 5 or 6" seems very slow actually. and the non protection seems bad. You use vapor snag offensivly? it seems like more gods willing would fit what your trying to do which it seems like it's keep the amulet on your side. vapor snag doesn't seem very good at that. but I don't know what I am talking about. I am really just asking you how this thing is supposed to run.

Do you think all those tap lands are necessary? I really hate the roil, it seems so bad, such an easy target and so much lands to cast, there must be something better! also, how do you decide to tap out or keep up counters? What do you want to play out before you use counters as protection?

3 angelic and 3 reprisal seems like alot, are you running them to get amulet back? what if they don't use the amulet and let it just sit there?

edict cost so much to cast! and 3 of them?

Thought of another equipment so the other stoneforge isn't dead? It probably doesn't matter since if you got the amulet going, it probably doesn't matter if you have a dead stone forge.

Thanks for the post and welcome to no goblins. your build is interesting to me. sorry for all the jumbled up stuff above, a bit tired atm

edit: I've messed around with it more and am figuring it out. This deck seems to do it all which is generally a bad thing but it pulls it off. generally it wants to play slow and get off a lot of card advantage but you can punish opponants who don't do anything with a little bit of early agro. I see why you only have 1 gods willing, because you don't have very many creatures. you also protect your creatures with counters which have more utility anyway. vapor snag can be used defensivly but it hasn't really came up much for me. the tap lands may be necessary since all the double costing stuff. it doesn't seem to slow you down much anyway since the curve is all **** up. but it doesn't matter because this deck doesn't need to tap out every turn anyway. There may be something better than roil elemental but so far he has done me well. I casted him twice and it was never killed. it's very late game though, I don't cast him on 6. he must be protected. the removal seems necessary but I hate the mana cost on edict. Part of what makes this deck good is the lack of good removal in the format so I guess that's part of it's downfall too. reprisals have always been good. never has been dead for me. if it was i was winning anyway. edicts I've had trouble with casting and leaving mana open. this deck always needs mana left open. i guess there's not much you can do about that. I keep thinking about adding in another amulet or something for if they kill or take the first one. but it's such a terrible draw so idk. I haven't found the amulet to have any draw backs. the one time someone took it from me, it already did it's work and i had such over whelming card advantage they had no chance. they also opt'd not to use it, which was smart because if they did i would have gotten it back anyway.

thanks for the deck, it's really good. I never would have thought

Selectively quoting you to cut down on length and also address some specific points.

I built this deck and tried it out against the AI piloting some of the stronger decks in the meta, and in my opinion the deck is good but not great. I would not expect it to go 22-4 against a sample of good opponents. I never won a game by turn 6-7. People seem to show up a lot on this forum claiming their deck is a 90%+ winner, but then when you look at which decks they played against, it was human opponents playing garbage decks. I'm not saying yours is garbage im just explaining my skepticism when people claim their deck is the undisputed champion.

I played a few rounds against the following archetypes (again, AI controlling them): seance spider spawning, selesnya token, izzet aggro, azorius combo control (bone wand).

The only clearly favorable matchup was against bone wand, which is really just a mirror match but one that your deck is better suited to win because it can go aggro faster and gets more early card advantage from avarice.

Seance spiders (which i think is the strongest midrange deck) was a split. That's not bad. Won 2 (1 of the games by a turn, though), and lost 1. A major caveat is that my seance spiders deck runs hedron crab, which the AI will never use to self-mill. More answers for Seance than any other deck, in 3x negate and 3x angelic edict. But, with two seance's and ways to recur it, I had to counter or exile seance a combined 4 times in a single game. If you can get a talrand out, and keep seance off the board, then you generally win in a few turns, but spider spawning can slow you down with chump blockers. If seance can persist on the board for a few turns, they will usually find an uncounterable removal to take your avarice, or an uncounterable craterhoof to seal the game. But, in both wins I was able to get out a talrand with an amulet providing plenty of instants and sorceries, and win a token standoff before seance found a craterhoof.

Against the aggro decks, izzet and selesnya, the struggles were real. I played 2 against izzet and lost both games by turn 6, and went 0-1 against selesnya. Selesnya had a great start - elvish visionary x2, raise the alarm, two creatures I countered or reprisaled, a triplicate spirits and a token pumper. Chipped me down in the early turns and attacking with 3 2/2 flyers on turn 7. Triplicate spirits is basically an immediate loss for this deck unless we can set up with a talrand in response, which I didn't happen to have. Izzet was a pretty ugly matchup, though it is for most of the meta. Reprisals and angelic edicts are dead cards, and negate is pretty useless as well. The deck doesn't have enough blockers to deal with a wide goblin token or pyromancer token attack, it can't kill guttersnipe, and it can't stop a kiln fiend. Also, seeing a turn 3 goblin rabblemaster on the draw is pretty much an instant loss unless you have both a vapor snag and dissolve in hand. And stoneforge mystic dies to shock.

The deck deserves some more testing against other archetypes, like other midrange decks and the better control decks, but it seems like it should lose consistently to aggro and unfortunately those are the best decks in the format. The problem against aggro seems to be that you can't get into your own card advantage engine quickly enough while also responding to all the early threats. Talrand is the only hope against a wide token assault, but casting him on turn 4 with no counter protection is a toss up on whether he will get killed before he can generate value, and waiting until turn 6 to cast him with negate support is often too late.