What Are The Top Decks In Modern – Blue Moon

Blue moon is a UR control deck based around locking the opponent out of the game with the card Blood Moon. Early turns are spent trying to slow the opponent down with cheap answer cards such as Lightning Bolt, Remand and Mana Leak, until the pilot can play a Blood Moon and finish. The deck runs about half of its lands as basic Islands, with the rest being Steam Vents and blue fetchlands (Scalding Tarn first, and then others based on personal preference). This allows the Blue Moon player to find basic Islands in the early-game before they cast Blood Moon, and then have sufficient mana requirements because they can fully utilize the red sources that the moon makes. Most modern decks do use a small amount of basic lands to play around Blood Moon, so some number of Spreading Seas can also be played to disrupt these, whilst also disrupting UrzaTron players from assembling their three required lands as a bonus. Once the opponent has been locked out of the game, the deck usually wins with a single resilient threat. The main win-conditions used are Batterskull and Vedalken Shackles, with occasional or sideboarded usage of Master of Waves, Vendilion Clique or Keranos, God of Storms. Blue Moon was originally played at Pro Tour Born of the Gods, in a metagame just after Wild Nacatl was unbanned. This meant people were expecting a large proportion of the metagame to feature Naya Zoo decks, which often use shocklands along with sometimes Tribal Flames . Blood Moon was therefore expected to be a very impactful card, and this was true in that format, which resulted in Lee Shi-Tian piloting Blue Moon to the top-8. The decks effectiveness is mainly dependant on what decks are being played at the time.

The decks best matchups are those which rely on a very colour intensive mana-base, such as Abzan and other BG/x variants, in particular those which are not red, as Blood Moon will affect these decks much more than others. It also struggles in games 2 and three where people can use their fetchlands to find basic lands in anticipation of it, however forcing a three-color deck to find basics does still hinder its mana-base greatly, considering that these decks can sometimes get mana-screwed even with a very nonbasic mana-base.

This decks worst matchups are those decks which are unfazed by a Blood Moon, and particularly the more aggressive ones, as the deck is not effective at stopping extremely fast decks, relying on a few spells to slow them down enough to lock them out with Blood Moon. The worst two are therefore affinity and burn, as they do not care about a Blood Moon, and are too fast for blue moon to resist.

Sideboarding Against This Deck

In order to beat a control deck it is necessarily to either play cards faster than they can be countered (the control deck runs out of resources) or to play resilient threats that are hard to counter or remove. Cards like Thrun, the Last Troll are perfect because they cannot be countered. Fast, aggressive threats such as Goblin Guide are also good because they can be played at the beginning of the game before the control deck is ready to start countering plays.