Several months ago, I wrote that Mono-Blue Spirits was one of the most underrated decks in both Pioneer and Explorer. It remained underrated, and despite many signs that it was a great deck and should be respected, it managed to take the World Championship by storm last weekend.
Mono-Blue has the highest win rate on the MTG Arena Explorer ladder by a massive margin. According to Untapped.GG, at the time of writing, Mono-Blue has a 63.3 percent win rate from Bronze to Mythic in Explorer, while the next-best archetype is Rakdos Sacrifice with 59.5 percent. That’s a difference of almost four full percentage points! These stats aren’t everything, but in all my time studying Untapped.GG, I’ve rarely seen such a large outlier in terms of win rate.
I wish I could tell you that now people will finally wise up to the truth that Mono-Blue is one of the best decks out there. I wish I could tell you that. However, this seems to be a strategy that chronically goes underplayed and unnoticed. Perhaps it gets brushed off as a gimmick, where people think it’s mostly “stealing games” when a quick Curious Obsession goes unanswered. It’s frustrating to lose to Mono-Blue, and opponents often leave the match grumbling, “if they just didn’t have that last counterspell, I would’ve won easily!” Well, I’ve been on both sides of the table enough to assure you that this deck is not a gimmick, and its high win rate is not a fluke.
If others want to persist in this delusion, then it just gives Mono-Blue yet another advantage! I can write about how great this deck is here on ChannelFireball.com until I’m quite literally blue in the face. But perhaps my best course of action is simply to keep playing the deck and teach people firsthand that it’s the real deal. Would you like to join me?
Here’s the deck list I played to a 4-2 record in the Explorer portion of Worlds.
Thanks for the update. Would you mind giving your take on Jace? I haven’t seen him being played much.