Illustrated by Sam Burley

Mono Blue

Blue is the color of logic and cognition. Blue has the strongest card draw effects, able to manipulate artifacts, copy other permanents, sling spells and is the master of countering spells.

Mono blue decks offer a great variety of different play styles: from combat focused creature decks to control heavy "play island, end turn" like decks with several interaction possibilities.

Mono Blue themes

Power Artifact: Illustrated by Terese Nielsen

Artifacts

Artifact decks aim to interact and gain advantage with own artifacts by copying them, turning them into creatures and simply create new artifacts as tokens. Artifact decks are very popular and they have multiple infinite loops.

Clone: Illustrated by Kev Walker

Clones

Mono blue has multiple ways to clone own or opponents permanents. The gameplay changes effectively, when you get to play your opponents biggest threats, too and clone decks can lead to some very weird and interesting situations.

Wizard's Retort: Illustrated by Grzegorz Rutkowski

Wizard tribal

Wizard tribals is significantly less a combat focused than other tribals. Wizard tribals are often cantrip heavy decks but have the bodies to fend off the aggressive goblins. Laboratory Maniac is maybe the best known non legendary wizard.

Grindstone: Illustrated by Greg Simanson

Mill

Milling in mono blue can be done in two clear ways: self-mill or regular mill. In self-mill, blue usually tries to find some kind of an infinite loop piece and retrieve it from the graveyard or run the Thassa's Oracle or Laboratory Maniac combo. In the regular mill the goal is to mill opponents whole libraries and win by having an opponent draw from an empty library.

Mono Blue decklists

Minn, Wily Illusionist as a commander in mono blue EDH deck. With lots of permanents!

Mono blue commander: Minn, Wily Illusionist with permanents

Adventures in the Forgotten Realms precons published in 2021 summer have some very interesting commanders! Minn, Wily Illusionist flied under the radar for a long time for me, but finally I've built my own mono blue deck! With lots of permanents.

Mono Blue Commanders

Orvar, the All-Form: Illustrated by Chase Stone

Orvar, the All-Form

Orvar is mono blues second most popular commander, barely after Urza. Orvar's ability opens a multitude of very different and unique kind of decks. With Orvar you can literally build a deck around a single card, and actually make it a viable gameplan.

As Orvar has every creature type, it is also amazing mono blue tribal commander. Great tribals for Orvar are the sea-creature types: Leviathans, Krakens, Octopuses and Serpents. Other popular tribals for Orvar are: Merfolk and Wizards.

Urza, Lord Hidh Artificer: Illustrated by Grzegorz Rutkowski

Urza, Lord High Artificer

Urza, Lord High Artificer is possibly the most powerful unbanned commander in EDH. Due to this EDH Chamber doesn't recommend anyone to build an Urza deck for casual games, as it is very difficult to build a low powered deck with Urza, and still being able to have fun.

Minn, Wily Illusionist: Illustrated by Dmitry Burmak

Minn, Wily Illusionist

Minn, Wily Illusionist's ability provides a unique approach for taking advantage of blues card draw. With Minn the only limitation is permanents in your hand and the power of your illusions.

Minn decks can be build with very different kinds of themes: combat focused Illusion tribals with permanent draw, landfall decks, tax-decks with artifacts. For Minn, the only real restriction for free permanents is high mana cost.

Talrand, Sky Summoner: Illustrated by Svetlin Velinov

Talrand, Sky Summoner

Talrand, Sky Summoner is great mono blue commander, combining two blues primary mechanics: spell slinging and flying creatures. Casting multiple instants with Talrand is great way to create an army of fliers during opponents end step and then retaliate during your own combat phase.