Merfolk

Most recent deck lists: here.

How does Merfolk work?

While I wouldn’t call any Legacy deck easy, Merfolk is pretty straightforward. The devil is in the details, though. First of all, it’s important to mention there are basically two types of Merfolk decks around nowadays. There’s the beatdown version, which – of course – has some card choices to finetune the deck to your preference. Alternatively, there’s a deck with a Thassa’s Oracle win around (Thassa’s Oracle is a Merfolk, too!). I’ll get into both decklists.

Regular (beatdown) Legacy Merfolk

The beatdown Merfolk deck is basically the ‘default’ version. The core of this deck consists of the following cards:

• 4 Aether Vial
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Lord of Atlantis
• 4 Master of the Pearl Trident
• 4 Silvergill Adept
• 3-4 Tide Shaper
• 3-4 True-Name Nemesis
• 4 Vodalian Hexcatcher
• 4 Cavern of Souls
• 4 Wasteland

After this core, there’s some choices to be made. There are many playable Merfolk you can put 1-4 into your deck if you like. If you’re in a blue-heavy meta, I can imagine Hullbreacher being a good card. Harbinger of the Tides is good if you face a lot of creature decks, same goes for Merfolk Trickster. Svyelun of Sea and Sky is amazing if you run many targeted removal spells.

There’s also the choice of whether or not to play Chalice of the Void. This is also a very meta-dependent preference. When it’s good, it’s really good but when it bad it’s just a dead card. It’s also a very decent option to put it in your sideboard.

Combo Legacy Merfolk

As mentioned above, Merfolk also has a combo version. This deck does a lot of the same things as the regular beatdown Merfolk lists, but it can win out of the blue through a combo with Paradigm Shift. This card exiles your deck, usually doesn’t do a whole lot with your graveyard and then wins through the enter-the-battlefield trigger of Thassa’s Oracle because you have no more cards in your library.

Pro tip: if you’re up against a deck that plays countermagic, keep a Cavern of Souls in hand for your combo turn. You could trick your opponent into letting you resolve your Paradigm Shift because they want to counter your Thassa’s Oracle.

Acquiring Merfolk

Regardless which deck list you like best, there are some expensive cards in this deck. I don’t think there’s any way to compete with this deck without the following cards:

• Force of Will
• Cavern of Souls
• Wasteland
• Chalice of the Void (side)
• Force of Negation (side)

Somewhat expensive cards:

• Tishana’s Tidebinder
• Vodalian Hexcatcher
• Aether Vial
• Lord of Atlantis

Most other Merfolk aren’t that expensive (for Legacy standards). The combo variant of the deck requires 4 Thassa’s Oracle and 4 Paradigm Shift. Many other slots are quite flexible and you can use them however you see fit.

Upgrade paths

While there aren’t a lot of decks that play many Merfolk aside from Merfolk, this deck allows you to shift into other (mono) blue strategies. Force of Will and Wasteland is a powerful duo. The most obvious path would be some variant of Thassa-Shift / Tought Lash (coming to this website later). Alternatively, with this deck, the way to Mono-Blue Delver has been paved to some extent.

Additional Resources

• Nikachu is the go to person for anything Merfolk in magic.
• Rich Cali, the Delver King, wrote a primer for Merfolk in the summer of 2023. There’s no Tishana’s Tidebinder yet but that doesn’t entirely diminish the value of this article!
• There is a Discord server where everything Fish is discussed