Mono Blue Delver

Acquiring Mono-Blue Delver

First things first: mono-blue Delver has, as opposed to its multi-color variants, no reserved list cards. At least, not in the mana base (usually none at all, but I can see things like Powder Keg or Null Rod in the side). This means many of the cards that are expensive have a chance of being reprinted. The most expensive cards in this deck are:

• Force of Will
• Force of Negation
• Wasteland
• Blue fetch lands (Flooded Strand/Scalding Tarn/Misty Rainforest/Polluted Delta)

Cards like Brazen Borrower or Murktide Regent aren’t cheap either, but you can usually get a playset for under 100 EUR/USD easily.

The downside of this deck is that there aren’t really any great budget replacements in this deck. In the list above the player chose for Flooded Strand and Polluted Delta as the blue fetches (probably because he has beautiful foil versions of them), but since the enemy color fetches were reprinted in MH2, you can pick whatever blue fetch is cheapest. Even Prismatic Vista will do since you’re running only basics anyway.

Why should you play Mono Blue Delver?

MBD can be bought on a budget (in Legacy terms at least), with the playsets of Wasteland and Force of Will forming the bulk of the costs, together with six to eight fetch lands. These cards are also steppingstones towards other blue-based and/or tempo Legacy decks. If you love interactive plays and the tempo lifestyle, MBD is perfect for you. Do you hate getting Wastelanded? Look no further.
The deck is consistently strong and easily adaptable to most metas. It has game against every deck.
Many players will appreciate your rogue deck choice: food for conversation.

Why should you not play Mono Blue Delver?

Due to only playing a single colour, this is not the strongest Delver deck around. Other Delver decks might have a weaker mana base, but their power ceiling is higher and more versatile. Even just adding red makes you have more reach (Lightning Bolt), gives you one of the greatest 1-drops in Magic (Dragon’s Rage Channeler), and provides you with a couple of very strong sideboard options (like Meltdown and catch-all Pyroblast). Removal is the deck’s weakness, something that other colours can fix. Some players might be negative about you choosing to stay in one colour, luckily this is rare.

How to play Mono Blue Delver

Like most Delver decks, Mono Blue Delver is a tempo deck that aims to disrupt the opponent (mana denial and counterspells) and play efficient threats to close out the game quickly. However, since we don’t have access to Lightning Bolt, we tend to be slightly more midrange-oriented than other Delver decks, but we should still close out the game before our opponents rebuild. Stifle versions of MBD have an even bigger focus on mana denial. Unlike most Delver decks, MBD has an incredibly stable mana base. Apart from fetchlands and Wasteland, all of our lands are basic (Snow-Covered) Islands, making our coloured mana safe from most land-hate. We can capitalize on this by playing cards like Back to Basics and having near-perfect mana almost all the time. One-landers (as long as they’re not Wasteland) are often very safe, though now with Lorien Revealed even that can be good enough!

A general deck-building rule of MBD is to be as efficient as possible. This means that you want your instants and sorceries to either cost a single mana or be free to cast. Even the original two-mana Counterspell doesn’t see a lot of play in MBD, we simply cannot consistently have two mana open. Sideboard cards and creatures are not part of this rule, as there simply aren’t enough strong one-drop creatures in blue and the upsides of our current non-Delver creatures are too big not to play them. We will always be on the look-out for new efficient cards, though.

Generally speaking, MBD is at its best against non-creature combo decks and at its worst against dedicated creature tribal decks, since our stack-fighting strength is so strong and our (creature) removal so weak. We rely a lot on bounce effects and Phyrexian mana to fight resolved creatures. MBD has three main modes, depending on the matchup and the current board state: guns blazing yippee ki yay all-in kill the opponent before they can recover; carefully deploying a threat without over-committing into a sweeper/combo kill; and finally full-scale mana denial (for some the sweetest mode of all). Stifling an opponent’s fetchland is one of the greatest things this game has to offer. You have not fully lived the MTG life until you have done so.

MBD can be seen as a budget-entry deck for Legacy, which can cause players unfamiliar with the deck to dismiss it as a non-competitive one. However, MBD is not played for budget reasons by many players, and it is instead favoured for its hyper-efficiency and ability to play many of blue’s most broken cards. While it’s true that adding a second colour (typically red or black) is fairly trivial from a deck-building/mana base point of view, doing so changes the dynamic of the deck.

Upgrade Paths

This deck hase a massive upside in the fact that it’s blue. Owning Force of Will + Force of Negation opens doors, for example towards Death’s Shadow. Alternatively, if you want to go all-in, you could add colors and move towards one of many different varieties of the Delver shell:

• UR Delver (4 Volcanic Island)
• UB Delver (this is usually Death’s Shadow)
• UW Delver (Stoneblade)
• Grixis/Sultai/Jeskai/Temur Delver, though these are expensive because of dual lands.

Other possible upgrade/side-step paths are Ninjas, Merfolk, Jeskai Control, Cephalid Breakfast or 8-Cast.