Magic: The Gathering’s Innistrad has a formidable common blue assortment to draw from in Limited play, ranging from larger than life graveyard gobblers to recurring removal options that will stop your opponent from developing a board. Let’s take a look at blue’s five best common slot creations:
5. Think Twice. It may be more expensive than a Divination, but it comes with plenty of tradeoff advantages such as instant speed, digging for that third land on 2, and multiple casts for those hungry werewolves. Not only will it help you find your good stuff and ensure you’ll be hitting your land drops, but it functions just fine as another resource in the graveyard or even some bonus damage/removal in the right deck.
4. Forbidden Alchemy. Dig 4 at the end of your opponents turn, find your best card, fill the graveyard with food for your various zombies and flashback cards, and possibly do it all again to cap off the game with your Swamp or Shimmering Grotto? Yes, this is quality.
3. Stitched Drake. A 3/4 flyer for 3 in the common slot with a drawback that is easily taken care of by blue’s Innistrad capabilities? Grab as many of these as you’re going to be able to fuel, but ensure that you’ve got the cards and blue mana to play them early when they’ll really tower over the table.
2. Claustrophobia. Has your opponent just flipped over that Cloistered Youth? Played a giant Skaab? Sacrificed casting to flip over a werewolf? Played a threat or something in your way? Claustrophobia presents an excellent solution to all of these, although it’s not “quite” as good as pure removal with things like Altar’s Reap and The Fantastic Mr. Fox available to negate the blue coffin.
1. Silent Departure. The range of things this card can do make it so immensely versatile and powerful that it simply cannot be ignored. If your opponent doesn’t have things on the board fast and you can field one or two creatures, a single Silent Departure can make their life a nightmare as they try to develop a board presence. Anything laid down can be picked up and then shot back again, the possibly of two “free” turns of unmolested attacks getting through.
Silent Departure can also be used to remove Claustrophobia, Bonds of Faith, replay something with morbid or a Geistcatcher’s Rig, remove two blockers or threats in a single salvo, or just negate transformations. Silent Departure is vastly underrated for its insane array of abilities, but you can count on it to always be useful as a sorcery speed uncommon that comes with the very real threat of coming back again, and again. Multiple copies can destroy any chance your opponent ever had of getting a squad together while you dig in turn after turn.
Blue may not be the titanic drafting force that it was in M11 here in Innistrad, and it comes with more than a few subtleties, but its common slot has plenty of strong options and make it a very viable color to investigate.
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