Blue Mages Suck.  Have you ever felt that way?  After building a masterpiece deck; crafting and honing that puppy for weeks. It's perfect - you have tuned it to kill on turn 5 or 6 consistently... then the tournament comes around and you go to the table for round one. Who shows up, ready to be your first unsuspecting victim? A blue mage! 

He sits down and makes your life miserable.  Chimeric Idol? Foil! River Boa? Absorb!  Blastoderm? Power Sink! Saproling Burst? Counterspell! Armageddon? Thwart it, Daze my Thwart (alternative casting costs for both) Ok, 'Geddon resolves!  ARRGH!! 

It's enough to make a grown man cry... on second thought real men don't cry - they build decks to crush them back next week!  It seems I'm not alone in hating the counter crazy deck, as evidenced by the a deck sent to me by Mark Haimer. Mark's tired of being pushed around by Blue Mages and is aspiring to reach A New Plateau.

Blue's Clueless

According to Mark, this deck is all about ritualing out threats and backing them up with hand and land destruction.  The idea is to get a guy on the board, and pound for twenty points before the blue mage can set up a counterspell defense.  Mark indictated he wanted this deck to be able to crush Blue, and handle Green and White - but Other than that, he's not worried about anything else in his local field...  Well, we can certainly do that.

Creatures....

Well, this looks like this may be part of the problem actually.  Blue likes to bounce things that it can't just counterspell the first time around (ie: First turn , Dark Ritual, Hidden Horror) The "fatty" creatures in this deck all have a Come Into Play effect that is quite a drawback... assuming you're not actually PAYING for Delraich with gobs and gobs of black mana (which we all know - if you can actually pay his casting cost, the blue mage will almost always be able to counter it)  So let's look at what creatures we have to work that don't have these nasty CIP effects.  4 Ravenous Rats, 4 Chimeric Idol, and 4 Sengir Autocrats.  I get a strong feeling the Autocrats are there to only feed an Alternately Cast Delraich, so let's just put them on the back burner for a bit.   A quick glance at the spells Mark is using shows he's not adverse to the dirty tricks of Hand and Land Destruction, so let's maximize this!  

By using 12 creatures that destroy the hand of your opponent, you can be sure the blue mage will have a tough time countering your "finisher" - Thrashing Wumpus. (Wump for 2, Attack, GO, End of Your Turn - Wump for 2 more!  Ahhhhhh...)

Spells....

Yay!  More Hand destruction!  A little land destruction and then some removal.  Sounds okaym but let's focus in on our goal.  Destroy their hand, lay a guy, destroy their hand more, kill their guy, attack with a guy, rinse.. repeat... This can easily be done with the surplus of excellent discard and removal spells available to us.  So let's drop the land destruction in favor of adding to the Hand and Creature destruction spells we already have.

Now let's look at our land count and ratio.   Well we have nothign but black and colorless mana needed, and we'll stick to that in our land count. The Rishadan Ports fit along fine in this deck, allowing you to buy yourself a turn or two you will want to get some spells out of their hand.

The land count may be a bit off, I think in a mono color deck you astill can't let yourself go with less than 22 lands, even if you have the aid of Dark Ritual.

Before:

After:

The sideboard, of course should be fit for your local metagame. 

So - let's look at our finished deck configuration...

Blue's Clueless