If you're a Magic: The Gathering player who hangs around in Commander circles, you may have heard the term semi-blue, but if you made it here, chances are you're not 100% sure what it actually means.
Semi-blue is a new cEDH strategy which got started in Japan over the last couple of months, with good results in August's 'God of Commander' tournaments. Since then, it's been generating a lot of buzz and a lot of discussion about what this archetype means for cEDH.
The core of semi-blue, is a deck that plays busted lands like Gaea's Cradle alongside creatures that untap those lands like Cloud of Fairies, to go off with more and more card draw, ramp, and big creatures. This is a Simic archetype that often doesn't run counterspells, and sometimes steers clear of playing any interaction at all.
The logic behind this kind of semi-blue deck is pretty straightforward. In a multiplayer format, wasting card slots on spells that simply stop another players' gameplan is inefficient. You've expended a card to stop one person, leaving the other two players at an advantage over both of you. By avoiding interaction altogether, you can leave it to the other players to stop one another, and just focus on your own engine. It's a selfish but effective strategy.
Whereas most cEDH decks are built around winning the game through a combo, semi-blue isn't necessarily tied to this trick. While most lists will have a few creature-based combos that are hard to interact with (many cEDH counterspells don't hit creatures) it's equally possible to win in this archetype by just building up a massive board and then attacking once you reach 120 power. These decks typically have a ton of different routes to victory, making them very resilient.
The most popular MTG commanders for semi-blue are Rograkh and Thrasios. These partners unlock red, which allows you to play Kikki-Jikki, and cascade spells like Maelstrom Wanderer. These lists go without a single piece of interaction, since counterspells don't play well with cascade, but there are also Bant and Sultai versions of semi-blue which keep the Gaea's Cradle + Untapper core of the deck, but still play counters.
Many find this archetype a breath of fresh air, but hopefully Temur semi-blue decks don't get too popular! If they became meta, it could create a weird situation where everyone effectively plays solitaire.
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