This is my list for the taking turns deck. For those who haven't heard of the deck, or have only seen the Blue White variant, This deck centers around playing Dictate of Kruphix or Howling Mine To let each player draw more cards, and then chaining together Time Warp, Part the Waterveil, and Temporal Mastery to take many many turns, with two Snapcaster Mage acting as Time warps 4 and 5 or as an auxiliary win condition if the need arises. The main win condition for this deck is Part the Waterveil using the awakening cost to animate a land and kill the opponent or the 3 copies of Thing in the Ice
in the sideboard. To help achieve this goal, the deck contains a lot of disruption in
Gigadrowse
and
Exhaustion
as well as a myriad of counterspells in
Spell Pierce
, Remand, and Cryptic Command.
My choice for running Mono Blue instead of Blue White is because I wanted better play against control decks, and I wanted to significantly reduce my chances of not being able to cast my mono blue spells on curve because of Celestial Colonnade and Plains being in the deck list. Besides that choice, my meta has a few decks that run main or side board Blood Moon so increasing my chances of casting all my blue spells on curve is very important.
6 Spells that draw us extra cards each turn has been a good amount in all the games I've played with the deck so far. you don't want too many because you want to draw the other spells in your deck for disruption, but if you run too few of the spells then you risk having games where you don't draw one until late in the game. 6 Has ensured that in every game I've played with this deck, I've drawn at least one or two by turn 5. All the spells in the deck are important to ensure that 1) You don't die before you can go off on turn 5/6 , 2) The combo isn't stopped in some way while you're performing it, and 3) You can stop any combos or controlling decks before they can lock you out of the game.
For the aggro decks that try and kick you out of the game early: Burn variants, Soul Sisters, Zoo variants, etc. the main cards that help keep you alive until you can try and combo off are:
Exhaustion
,
Gigadrowse
, Remand, and post board, Sun Droplet and against the aggro variants, sometimes Thing in the Ice
can be useful. These decks are definitely favored against us, and it is an uphill battle to end up comboing off and winning. As an upside though, if we do start comboing off, there's almost nothing msot of these decks can do to stop us.
For the midrange decks that have a lot of disruption that can stop the combo i.e Jund, Death's Shadow, Tron, etc. These decks have good play against us because of the hand disruption or permanent disruption spells they run. The cards helpful against these types of decks are Remand,
Exhaustion
, Cryptic Command, and in the sideboard, Spreading Seas is your best bet. The game plan against these decks is to play the control role for the first 2-8 turns of the game, and wait for them to tap out for a large threat. Once they do, it's usually enough to just untap and try to go off. Our deck should be favored against almost every midrange deck if we can get 1-2 howling mine effects to stay on the field for one or more turns. Our counterspells and disruption should be enough to keep us in the game until we can go off, and at that point, there isn't much they can do to stop us.
For the combo and control decks. We are almost always heavily favored against these decks. They don't contribute many threats to the board early, which lets us just keep making our lands drops until we can force a howling mine effect to hit the field. Once we have at least one howling mine effect, the best way to win against blue decks in particular is to find one of the 4
Gigadrowse
we have in our deck and tap our opponent out at the end of their turn. There isn't much an opponent can do against this particular card, unless they're running a Counterflux effect, which doesn't see a lot of play in modern to begin with. Against every control deck and instant speed combo deck our best spells are
Gigadrowse
, Cryptic Command, and sideboard Dispel, and Swan Song.
I'm sure there are plenty of match-ups I just haven't considered, but this deck has done well so far for me and I plan on continuing to play this deck in the future.
