Kairi clone deck! Kairi loves clone spells, as well as instants and sorceries.

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, AKA spend a turn to kill him, he is a flying 6/6 so he is hard to attack. He also has his second 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.

• Have you played clone decks? Hilarious.

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 boardstate 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 should be efficiently utilized to their greatest degree. Hold up mana for instant speed spells. 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".

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!!

• Solemn Simulacrum: Lands, anyone?

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

• Mana Rocks: More mana for later, especially Powerstone Shard.

• Astral Dragon: Is astral dragon. Bonus points when it can create more propagandas or extravagant replications or something dumb.

Cards With Extra Synergy and Why:

• Resculpt, Curse of the Swine, Ravenform, etc: All "oh no also make a token" removal spells are unnaturally strong. They create 0 cmc tokens! You can bounce them all for literally free with Kairi's ability! These removal spells will have almost no downside

• Theoretical Duplication: Fun for borrowing cool creatures. Very underplayed? If you know someone about to have a good turn, keep it around!

• Mirage Mirror: Behaves pretty bizzarely. 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, very powerful for acquiring cool creatures, and very evasive (it can hide from most targeting by becoming a basic island).

• Mystic Reflection: 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)

• Clear the Mind / Psychic Spiral: You actually don't deck yourself. Bonus points to Psychic Spiral for being instant speed and for milling an opponent for all those graveyard cards. Fun wincon.

• Step Through: Obviously Wizardcycling. You might not have noticed, we have a lot of wizards, and we have Orvar the All-Form (who is secretly a wizard, too).

• Modify Memory: Exchange good creatures. Can also draw cards at a really solid rate while denying decks synergistic pieces (or play politics).

• 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. Good for getting back certain useful pieces or cheating out Caged Sun.

• Battlefield Thaumaturge + Curse of the Swine: I hope your opponents like 2/2 Boar tokens, because for two mana you can convert the entire board into them.

• Transformed Creatures and CMC: The backside of a NONTOKEN mdfc card (such as Final Iteration) is the same CMC as the front of the card. 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.

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.

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

• Stax out your opponents by recurring every counterspell in the multiverse. Can become trivial with Sublime epiphany, which also bounces any permanents that weren't 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 focus on 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.