MonoU Prison by Frank Karsten - Magic Daily Update 2016.09.09 (Standard)

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First of all, it's creatureless. The only win conditions are Rise from the Tides and Part the Waterveil. That makes the removal that is so prevalent in Standard today utterly pointless. Grasp of Darkness? Grasp of who cares. Fiery Impulse? More like, unusable impulse. Languish? That can languish in your hand all game. Dromoka's Command? Well, um, shoot. That one can actually be problematic.

You see, the deck is, at its core, a Jace's Sanctum/Engulf the Shore deck. Engulf makes the deck possible, but Jace's Sanctum is the reason it works at all. The cost reduction makes your late game able to churn through cards, the scrying makes that churning go even faster, and multiples make cards like Part the Waterveil easy to cast while still doing other things.

There are, admittedly, some odd-looking cards in the deck. Prism Ring is no one's idea of a powerful card, but in a deck that casts a lot of spells of the same color but doesn't really kill creatures, it provides a powerful buffer between you and death.

Not killing creatures in current Standard seems like a significant problem, but it's really not with this deck, which takes a softer touch with any animals coming your direction. Engulf the Shores sends them safely back to your opponent's hand, while Day's Undoing throws them I know not where, but somewhere between the library and hand. Of course, when that happens, you might have drawn yet another Engulf the Shores (since they all get shuffled back in), which costs a whole lot less mana than your opponent's four three drops that were swept away.

After that, Take Inventory, Anticipate, and Nagging Thoughts keep the cards flowing. Hydrolash is especially neat in that it acts as a Fog-like effect and a way to draw more cards. Orbs of Warding makes red burn decks look awfully silly, especially one Thermo-Alchemist.

The list below is Frank Karsten's, which I would consider pretty close to sacrosanct. So sleeve it up and cackle with glee as you overwhelm your opponents with blue spells.