Hey Matt...i hope you manage to read this before you see the original copy of this deck that i sent in a little while back. My Mono-blue has undergone some serious overhaul after my first post and after i got some newer Future Sight/ Planar Chaos cards and i after making one successful revision i have stumbled across a far more effective stratagem. This deck was originally focused around being able to tap and counter everything my opponent could play with cards such as Gigadrowse and Mana Leak while keeping the draw power high. However i have found a nasty combo in Brine Elemental and Frozen Aether, which with enough mana allow me to essentially lockdown my opponents side of field by causing all Enchantments, Creatures and Artifacts to enter play tapped and then with ab 10 mana morphing Brine Elemental to skip my opponents untap phase (or so i thought, if correction on this is needed feel free to inform me). The deck still retains enough other countering cards to halt instants and sorceries but as is obvious i need lost of mana to play me super-late game combo. Key problems with the deck are really just speed....i have Aeon Chronicler in the deck to speed up drawing etc. but any other helpful hints on speed/efficiency would be most appreciated.

 Creatures 20

1x Brine Elemental

1x Aeon Chronicler

1x Temporal Adept

1x Magus of the Future

1x Serendib Sorcerer

1x Ovinomancer

2x Primal Plasma

2x Coral Trickster

4x Teardrop Kami

3x Silver Myr

3x Fathom Seer

Other Cards 20

4x Serum Visions

2x Gigadrowse

4x Consuming Vortex

2x Vensers Diffusion

4x Inspiration

1x Frozen Aether

2x Counter Spell

1x Shape Shifting Marrow

Lands 20

20x Island

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Well, today's contributor (we'll call him Bob since he didn't give me his name) sent in a deck a couple weeks ago that I was just about to start working on when I got another e-mail in my inbox that he had already revised his deck! This is his revised version that we will be looking at today.

So, Bob, let's get down to business. I have heard of people using the Brine Elemental/Frozen Aether combo before, and, as you have discovered, it can be quite potent. There's just one problem here (and I imagine regular readers of BMoor's deck garage know exactly what's coming because he says this a lot): if you're going to build a deck around a card or cards, you need to have 4 of each. Well, Frozen Aether doesn't help in multiples, and you've already got some other tap effects, so I'm going to break that rule and suggest 3 should be enough there. In a combo deck, 1 each of your combo pieces is almost never enough.

+3 Brine Elemental

+2 Frozen Aether

Now that that's out of the way, let's take a look at what else is going on in this deck. Mainly, there are a lot of ways to bounce and tap creatures as well as card draw. For bounce, you have Temporal Adept, Consuming Vortex, and Venser's Diffusion. I like the Adept because he's reusable, so let's add a couple more of him, but Consuming Vortex and Venser's Diffusion, while they will work, should be replaced with Boomerang because it can return any permanent.

Returning suspended cards isn't usually useful - unless it's a sorcery, you can just bounce it once it comes into play.

+2 Temporal Adept

+4 Boomerang

-4 Consuming Vortex

-2 Venser's Diffusion

Next, we have your cards that tap things: Coral Trickster, Teardrop Kami and Gigadrowse. Gigadrowse is a good choice, so let's put in a couple more. The Trickster, in my opinion, is just too expensive for what he does. By the time you play him and turn him up, you've spent 4 mana to tap something and have a 1/1 creature. That's not really worth it. In it's place, let's put a card that can do twice as much tapping for 1 less mana: Toils of Night and Day. In a pinch, Toils can also untap something of yours (does double use of Serendib Sorcerer sound good?). Teardrop Kami doesn't excite me much as a one use delayed bounce spell, so he gets the shaft as well.

+2 Gigadrowse

+4 Toils of Night and Day

-2 Coral Trickster

-4 Teardrop Kami

What else do we have? Card draw? Aeon Chronicler, Magus of the Future, Fathom Seer, Serum Visions and Inspiration are you choices here. The Magus and the Chronicler are fine, and we'll leave them at one a piece for now since they are rares, but if you can get more, do so! Fathom Seer isn't a bad card, but in this deck you're trying to ramp up to 7 mana, so the Seer is going to slow that process down. My suggestion to replace the Seer would be Foresee. I've been recommending that a lot recently, but it's for a good reason. Serum Visions and Inspiration are okay, so those can stay.

+3 Foresee

-3 Fathom Seer

I've added more cards than I've taken out so far, so we need to get rid of 5 more cards. Primal Plasma can go - he's versatile, but too expensive for what he does. Ovinomancer can go too, because, like the Fathom Seer, he slows your land drops down too much. Shapeshifting Morrow is a cool card, but it doesn't really fit here, so it can go, too. One more card…maybe let's go down to three Inspiration since it's kinda expensive for what it does.

-2 Primal Plasma

-1 Ovinomancer

-1 Shapeshifting Morrow

-1 Inspiration

I know we've made quite a few changes here, so I'd recommend working with this for a while. See if these ideas don't help you with your deck's consistency a little. If, after these changes you are still having some problems, we can probably tweak a little more. But for now, you might try something like this:

Creatures 13

4x Brine Elemental

1x Aeon Chronicler

3x Temporal Adept

1x Magus of the Future

1x Serendib Sorcerer

3x Silver Myr

Other Cards 27

4x Serum Visions          

4x Toils of Night and Day

4x Gigadrowse

4x Boomerang

3x Inspiration

3x Frozen Aether

3x Foresee

2x Counterspell

Lands 20

20x Island

The biggest potential problem I see here is not having enough creatures. If that ends up being the case, I would drop some of your tapping abilities to get in some good blockers. Let me know how things work out!

mattedesa