Slinn Voda, the Rising DeepSlinn Voda, the Rising Deep | Art by Grzegorz Rutkowski

Each color in Magic has its own strengths and weaknesses. This is one of the first things you learn about the game when you start and is what keeps most people playing for years.

A green deck will have more mana than you thought was possible and so many creature tokens that you run out of board space. By turn two they’ll have as many lands on the board as you have in your deck. And every new land will trigger all of their hundreds of +1/+1 counters to double.

Though there are certain decks that throw this away and try new things, such as this series suggests. Such green players will control the board state with a non-combat engine, shaping the flow of play and dictating what everyone is and isn’t able to do.

They’ll probably have far too many artifacts and enchantments, to boot.

What Is Playing “Out Of Type?”

Magic is a game that doesn’t just allow for, but is fundamentally built around, the idea that each color is “special.” But that doesn’t mean you’re forced to play a specific way. While white has creature removal and black has its ways of gaining life, those are exceptions to the traditional ways of playing.

Red might be good at rush-down aggro strategies, but that doesn’t mean it can't play the long-con. It’s just not what the majority of its cards are designed around.

Playing out of type or “off-color” is throwing away those staple cards the color is known for and focusing on oddities that barely fit within the color pie. It’s less a matter of finding secret sleeper hits and more so turning table scraps into a meal.

And depending on what you grab or how good of cook you are, that can lead to something pretty compelling!

A Quick Disclaimer

You probably won’t win doing this, even at non-competitive pods or low brackets. After all, you’re going out of your way to ignore the best cards in your color.

But would you rather play the same rote deck over and over until the meta shifts, or actually have fun trying something new?

To properly play off-color, you have to go into a game with the mindset that you want to have fun. Winning certainly is fun and some of my favorite games of Magic have been desperate struggles to combat an excellent player with a finely-tuned deck.

But there’s more than one way to have fun, and so many people get lost in how competitive this game is. So talk to your gaming group, set up a Bracket 1 or 2 game, and get deckbuilding something no sane person would ever craft.

Because it’s one thing to skip the counters and the card draw and the milling blue is known for. There are plenty of strategies you can employ that will still control the board state without employing any of those. It’s another thing entirely to focus on creature-spam aggro builds where you crash out if you don’t win by turn four.

Oh, yeah, stompy’s coming over to blue.

What Blue Does Well

Ruining Players’ Fun

Blue’s largest strength, at least within the Magic community, is ruining the fun of other players. That’s really all you need to know. But the obligatory bashing aside, blue is fantastic at controlling the board state.

Counterspells are the most obvious example, in literally allowing you to remove the ability for opponents to cast spells. That type of card is called a CounterspellCounterspell for a reason.

But blue has other means of completely disrupting opponents’ plans. Flickers, or cards that remove a permanent only to return it immediately after, destroy the potential of developing strong creatures. Similarly, blue excels at returning cards to their owner’s hand — yours or your opponents’.

Then there’s the many abilities blue has which tap, restrain, or otherwise render inert permanents without removing them from the board. This can be a minor inconvenience or shut down a strategy depending on how it’s played. At its least useful, it can buy the blue player a few more turns. Which, by itself, is quite a good thing to do!

And, of course, blue has the ability to mill your cards out from under you. Which you might be able to respond to… if you can draw a response before it’s removed from your library.

Deck Manipulation

Drawing extra cards is one of the powerful things to do in Magic, and blue just so happens to be the color most suited towards doing that. While its mana production isn’t stellar in comparison to green, the sheer flexibility you’ll have available is astounding.

Not only that, but blue is also home to the scry and surveil keywords. While it lacks the consistency of tutors that black has, being able to alter which cards you’re about to draw is powerful in its own right. Then combine that with the ability to draw more and you have a scary degree of control over your deck.

Copying

Copying spells and/or permanents is almost entirely relegated to the realm of blue. While red can double-up on its spells by copying instants or sorceries, blue has the ability to wholesale recreate permanents. With shapeshifters and copycats abound, even if blue doesn’t have the answer to a problem it can oftentimes just copy that problem and have it solve itself in the most literal sense.

But What If…You Play a Blue Deck Where You Ungabunga to Victory?

Blue requires a certain level of skill to properly utilize, particularly when you’re not able to rely on the other colors. So what if you just… didn’t? Didn’t plan or think or strategize. You just cosplayed a green player and got the biggest numbers you could find without considering the consequences of your actions.

And to my surprise, it’s actually not that hard!

Creatures!

While blue certainly isn’t the most aggressive color, it has access to creatures which are no joke, primarily Serpents, Krakens, and Leviathans. There’s far more heavy hitters than I gave blue credit for before writing this.

Or just getting more creatures when playing other spells.

Then, of course, there’s the synergy this has with other creatures, such the various Merfolk. Or just Merfolk and Faeries having typal synergies in general. And while chain-synergy between different creature types is a little too high-IQ for what we’re going for, it’s certainly not “stereotypically blue.”

So I say it should be fine!

Sustainability

Something I don’t think of when I imagine blue decks is sustainability. They can control the board state and stay flexible in their options, but they have a certain fragility to the decks most of the time.

If you can get a strong board presence and somehow stave off that presence being removed, most blue decks can’t effectively respond.

Thus, we must include cards in off-blue to keep the deck going through the fights we’ll be starting.

Group Hug?

My light-hearted bashing of blue earlier was really just to indicate that there’s a bit of a stigma against blue players. They’re assumed to be control players so they’re associated with ruining the fun of other players. Which isn’t always true!

So to put your best foot forward in off-blue, I propose engaging in group hug. That is to say, offer benefits to other players.

No one will likely trust you due to the aforementioned suspicion. Good. Let them be suspicious.

Play it straight, don’t feel the need to politic or turn it around on them in the end. Just be nice to the other players and see what happens. Very quickly they'll realize you aren't the threat and will devote resources to the other players.

And that's when you strike.

Blue Has Depth

Maybe this was just my own experience with the color, but I hadn’t really considered just how good blue is at all the non-control options available to them.

Certainly, control is quite popular in blue because it’s quite effective. Most decks can’t respond quickly enough to being milled to put up a fight. Voltron gets shut down hard by flickers. Stompy and aggro either win fast or not at all.

So blue doesn’t often have much of an incentive to experiment outside of what works.

However, there’s real potential in off-blue for other, more aggressive playstyles. They don’t see as much play given they’re competing with the top of class, but they really aren’t the self-imposed restriction I assumed they’d be.

If you want to play off-blue, you’re in for a good time. You’ll be purposely holding yourself back from some of the best cards in the game, but that’s the case with playing out of type for any color.

At the very least, your pod will be glad you’re not running any control.