Kairi clone deck!

Kairi loves clone spells, as well as instant and sorcery cards.

Why Kairi?

• He is exotic. Very few people have made a Kairi deck despite the fact that he is incredibly fun and versatile.

• His loop is really quite elegant. Clone Kairi, activate his second ability, bring back a clone spell and a spell of your choice. Our winner here is cackling counterpart for instant speed and great rate, though certain other ones can get much more out of hand situationally.

• Onboard removal and protection as well as a nice body. Kairi has ward 3 which makes him borderline unremovable with targeted removal. He is a flying 6/6 so he is hard to attack into (useful as he can sometimes be the only creature on-board). He also has the ability which bounces permanents up to cmc 6. Any amount. Bounce all the non-clone tokens you don't like (clone tokens have their original cmc), and then permanents up to cmc 6. Hits everything, sets people back. No it isn't permanent, but it's often long enough.

• Blue keeps players honest.

The Gameplan:

Your opponents tend to play creatures in their decks. They can't help it. This is seen as a problem by some blue players, but to Kairi it is an opportunity. A Muldrotha, the Gravetide is good. An Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite is good. An Etali, Primal Storm is good. These are all certainly scary cards, and can act as great value engines or finishers in a lot of decks. But, there is the simple reality that hard-casting these big spells is uncomfortable (not to mention they aren't exactly in the blue color pie). Our beautiful clones, however, can quite literally do everything they can and often at a fraction of the mana cost, especially since this deck centers around reducing the cost of our instant and sorcery cards. And what's more, while your opponent's one Elesh Norn is certainly good, it is hardly effective against four.

In essence our goal is to do our opponents' best things better. Our opponents should play value pieces, so we can too. We want our opponents to drop haymakers (if only for a moment) so we can quickly appropriate them for ourselves. Our board-state should be a "best of" compilation of the game.

Gameplay-wise, the deck is a little durdley, especially early. We want to keep a lot of cards in hand while we inspect the board. When the time is right, copy the best thing for hopefully a great rate. Play out Kairi as a 6/6 flying combat deterrent. Recur your clone spells. Remove problematic pieces. Like a blue deck should, our cards are a resource to resolve problems efficiently, a bounce spell might delay or prevent an explosive turn. Hold up mana for instant speed spells to take out threats that might still be in players' hands. Take advantage of mono blue's ability to terrify the heck out of people by playing Baral, Chief of Compliance and saying "it's just for ramp".

Interaction and a constant board presence is an essential part of playing Kairi. This doesn't always have to be malevolent. Spells like Split Decision and Fact or Fiction are cards that engage our opponents when we play them. Wandering Archaic can be a politics piece as much as a value piece, a copied removal spell doesn't have to be directed at the caster, unless of course they're using it on you.

Our Best Duplication Targets:

• Archmage Emeritus: Draw the cards.

• Wandering Archaic: Borrow everyone's spells, even their boardwipes and protections, and many times over.

• Multiple cost reducers are very good. Bonus for Haughty Djinn also being a great flying wincon with a graveyard full of spells!!

• Extravagant Replication: Two of these can copy themselves, this can get very out of hand. Easy ways to do so is by targeting Mirage Mirror on Upkeep and then transforming it in response.

• Docent of Perfection // Final Iteration: Wizards and anthems? Uh, do I win now? (probably yes)

• Caged Sun? Extravagant Replication???

• Astral Dragon: Very powerful ETB. You get bonus points if you can combo off with something.

Cards With Extra Synergy and Why:

• Mirage Mirror behaves pretty bizarrely. This can be cloned as either itself or as it is copying another permanent. If it is copying another permanent, the copy will be that permanent. However! This can be used to do some strange things such as copying a permanent in response to an Orvar the All-Form trigger to instead make a copy of the chosen permanent (even if the target for the original spell is made illegal). Breaks Extravagant Duplication. Breaks a lot of things, frankly, it can easily become a cool creature to copy, and is very evasive (it can hide from most removal by becoming a basic island).

• Mystic Reflection is maybe one of the strongest cards here, secretly. Make anything into something basically worthless, for removal. This isn't temporary, this is until it leaves. Make your opponent's strong commander into a llanowar elves. Or abuse it yourself! You can make any creature into a strictly better one. (still better for removal imho)

• Psychic Spiral are means of resetting our graveyards when we mill ourselves. This deck is not opposed to playing against mill, but it can be good to keep a means of casting this before we could draw a card and lose the game. Psychic Spiral is unique in it's ability to "shuffle" our graveyard by targeting ourselves with the mill effect. This means certain useful creatures can go back into the library without us losing graveyard size and we can find potential silver bullet spells that we didn't have access to before. Obviously we can also use this as a win condition by milling our opponents out.

• Vedalken Shackles are a removal spell, a easy way to clone, and a source of combat tricks. Grab a big blocker suddenly to kill an otherwise unopposed attacker. Gain control of a key combo piece to stop a game-ending turn. Gain control of a creature to use Cackling Counterpart on them, which would normally not work on opponents' creatures. Bonus points for if said creature then dies to the legend rule.

• Modify Memory can exchange our creatures for our opponents'. Can also draw cards at a really solid rate while denying decks synergistic pieces (or play politics). Good commander removal.

• Argivian Restoration: There are a fair few artifacts in this deck! Now we can essentially recur graveyard artifacts from our self mill. It can mean ramping really hard or recurring artifact clones like Phyrexian Metamorph, Imposter Mech, and Machine God's Effigy. Good for getting back certain useful pieces or cheating out Caged Sun. See Encroaching Mycosynth

• Battlefield Thaumaturge is an incredibly powerful creature for their ability to cut down mana costs on cards that target multiple creatures. It will reduce every single target clone spell a little, but it also does so much more. Baral's Expertise can cheat out a 4cmc spell for UU, Curse of the Swine mass exiles opponents' boards for UU. It works with a lot, so consider it!

• Wizards of Thay and Clone Legion combo quite well with each other when you cast it while myriad is in effect. Can grow really quickly and finish games.

• Imposter Mech is very novel. It is an artifact most of the game, and so is best served as a clone of a creature that doesn't need to stay a creature. Can have some interesting synergies with Astral Dragon's "Noncreature Permanent" clause. If you want more, you can crew it for 3 to temporarily give it creature status for a Cackling Counterpart spell.

• The recurring, instant speed wheel effect of Jace's Archivist can be used just as much for disruption as it does giving us a fresh hand. Since a larger graveyard is almost always better for us, effects like these definitely work a little more asymmetrically. Obviously, wheeling is not always advantageous. Don't give a fresh hand to someone who just dumped theirs out the previous turn.

• This isn't synergy but I figured it's cool to know that there are three foretell cards: Ravenform, Behold the Multiverse, and Mystic Reflection (so it's actually never clear which card is foretold). Feel free to foretell them early so you can forget you had the ability to play them later.

• Astral Dragon behaves strangely. Because of this, it's good to know its interactions. Any aura that is also a creature is destroyed by state-based actions. This might be obvious, but since it needs a non-creature permanent, you cannot copy astral dragon tokens. Extravagant Replication, Caged Sun, Propaganda, and Imposter Mech are all good in-deck targets, but you may find better targets on the battlefield.

• Liquimetal Torque has really become one of my favorite mana rocks. The secondary ability to turn anything into an artifact temporarily can greatly expand options. Removal spells targeting artifacts now target any permanent, and in the same way clone spells like Saheeli's artistry will be able to have a greatly expanded range of targets. Now you can get someone's cool enchantment, planeswalker, or creature with just a copy artifact effect. Potential political advantage by using it to support other people's removal spells, also!

• Encroaching Mycosynth expands the concept of the graveyard-artifact gameplan by making all of our permanents artifacts. Notably this lets us recur certain particularly useful cards with Emry, Lurker of the Loch and Argivian Restoration. This means we can get out combo pieces or play reanimator, which is fun. It also makes Mirrodin Besieged a pretty straightforward win-condition.

A Little Extra Advice / Rules Interactions to Know

Clones such as Phyrexian Metamorph, Imposter Mech, Mirrorhall Mimic "enter the battlefield as a creature". This means they avoid shroud / protection, and are not ETB triggers (because triggers on the stack are too slow for 0 toughness creatures, and they would die instantly due to state based actions, same as modular creatures). This means they are also not suppressed by ETB hate, and can actually utilize the ETBs of creatures they copy. There also is no way on the stack to prevent a clone from entering as the chosen creature as the clone resolves.

The backside of a NONTOKEN mdfc card (such as Docent of Perfection // Final Iteration) is the same CMC as the front of the card if it has no other associated cmc. This property is totally lost on token copies however, and their cmc is 0. For the cards that care about cmc or mana pips, this is how mdfcs behave mechanically. They may no longer be blue, but they can have blue pips.

I highly recommend waiting to clone MDFC cards that transform until after they have transformed. They are almost always better on the back.

Always have a clone spell in hand. Without a means of recurring instant and sorcery cards this deck can really run out of gas. A clone spell can even mean Argivian Restoration to bring a Phyrexian Metamorph from graveyard into play. It is almost like a permanent on the board in terms of the value and synergy it has.

Nyx Lotus can be really powerful, but keep in mind your boardstate. Permanents that are copies of other permanents will have their cmc, so you might find yourself having more devotion to white or green, or at least just less devotion to blue than it seems.

Ghostly Pilferer is a rare card for giving priority during the untap step (when it becomes untapped). This probably isn't relevant, but it does allow for synergies with Mirage Mirror and permanents with upkeep triggers, if that's your wheelhouse. Without using the stack in this way, it is impossible for mirage mirror to use upkeep triggers.

Blue mana matters a lot. When you recur a bunch of spells, espeically with generic mana cost reduced, you might find that the vast majority of the mana you need must be blue. Keep it in mind and always use colorless as early as possible on a turn.

How Do We Win?

A question you may find yourself asking, especially once you get the Kairi engine going. There are functionally infinite ways to, varying by the cards your opponents play, but we have onboard wincons also:

• Mill your opponents out with psychic spiral.

• Astral Dragon + Machine God's Effigy

• Swing with a lot of Docent of Perfection tokens (ideally with a lot of Final Iterations).

• Grind out your opponents by recurring every counterspell in the multiverse. Can become trivial with Sublime epiphany, which also bounces any permanents not countered, and recurs itself with Kairi.

• Play another deck better. One blood artist is good, five will end the game very quickly.

• Invent an infinite combo. Sometimes people can play enough value pieces where we can get to an infinite combo faster than they can. Otherwise a sufficient amount of onboard mana and/or cost reducers will do the trick.

A lot of loops rely on paying attention to the entire board. A lot of "generic value" pieces are kinda just good anywhere. Ask yourself, "Does Doubling Season work well with Astral Dragon?" (the answer is yes, yes it does). Enough Elesh Norns are functionally unstoppable without a boardwipe, and Avacyn Angel of Hope is a good card.

This deck can be "improved" by giving more focus, but in my opinion a good clone deck should prioritize versatility and interactivity with the board over rapid combo/aggro lines! Our biggest enemies are graveyard hate and death trigger removal (and leyline of singularity, I guess?). I put potentially good cards in sideboard as easy upgrades / focus changes on a bigger budget.