As many people have realized, Faeries is the best deck in Standard, as clearly shown by the 5k and 2k open results this weekend. Now everyone has rushed off to build the 'anti-faeries' or is trying to come up with mirror tech. Unfortunately for the latter, there really isn't very much 'tech' to be shared. There's only three good ways to approach the Faeries mirror and each involves shutting down a certain type of draw.
1. The Bitterblossom draw
2. The heavy removal / counter / visions draw.
3. The creatures w/ counters (i.e. the Fledgling Mawcor draw)
You'll notice I don't include anything about the god draw with a mix of hand 1 and 2. I don't do this, because you'll pretty much be soundly thrashed barring your own draw being just as awesome or havingsome sekrit tech. Now there are ways to beat each draw with effort.
#1: This can be trumped with cards like Desert, Prodigial Sorcerer or Fledgling Mawcor. Of course with Desert it assumes you can handle Scion, but it gives you an otherwise unkillable and uncounterable way of stopping incremental attacks. In a Faeries mirror, one side getting to the point of a large alpha strike means something went terribly wrong anyway, so the idea of them just sitting on BB the entire game to negate Desert doesn't strike me as a big deal. On the contrary, the lack of damage in the early game usually means they can't incrementally sting you to death.
#2: Good luck with this one. There's no real answer unless you figured outa way to play Oversoul of Dusk in your Faeries. You basically need the turn 2 Bitterblossom or T1 Thoughtseize, T2 visions type of draw to get out of a hole here. Overwhelming with 15 creatures isn't exactly easy.
#3: Very vunerable to Terror or a counter, since by turn 4 you shouldn't ever be tapping out on your own turn. Which means it'll most likely come down T3 as a morph if possible, but again if you run at least 6 removal spells post-board, then this likely won't be a problem.
There's no answer to every threat the opp has, but you can configure your board to negate 2 of the 3 most common hand-types.
Of course, you could run the other plan which is to play an anti-faeries strategy. Easier said than done I'm afraid. There are very few vunerabilites to exploit I'm afraid. The most common and well-known is aggression: A well curved Elf deck or RDW can get two effective drops in before Faeries usually comes online and can immediately back these up with removal or more threats. The second way to defeat Faeries is to strain the resources they access too.An old-fashion Rack deck of the Mono B or B/X variety can crush Faeries with a good draw, because they have no answer to a heavy discad assault early in the game. Other than Manlands and Clique, they still rely on swarming to actually kill an opponent. The ability to cripple the number of weapons they have is incredibly helpful. Moreso when you can back it up with difficult to kill threats like Korlash, Plague Sliver and Demigod of Revenge. Remember that you still get Bitterblossom's of your own, so even Thoughtseize - BB can be backbreaking to Faeries.
Of course that isn't a for sure answer. On the draw sometimes hitting enough discard to be hurtful is difficult, but it remains an otherwise ignored option. Mana denial is another potentially dangerous strategy to the average Faeries deck. Force down a Magus of the Moon and they'll be hard-pressed to recover, the same goes for starts involving turn 3/4 LD spells (or turn 2/3 if you have the elf or bird needed). Faeries runs enough land to function, take out their ability to get the 4th mana source and you've crippled half their bombs and the capacity to play a spell and have counter back-up. You also now have extra ways of dealing with manlands that may prove an annoyance.
Or could you could try some sort of hyrbid abusing removal with large threats that Faeries can't really deal with. You know something like...Skred, Bitterblossom, Demigod of Revenge, reanimation, Magus, Fulminator Mage, Redcap, Shadow Guildmage, etc. then boarding against green decks which is a heck of a lot easier than boarding against Faeries.
Tags: MTG Strategy
Related to:
Magic: the Gathering
