As we all know, building a Magic deck in the either the real world or the virtual one can set you back a little bit in the way of money. Collecting the cards you need via trading, crafting or whatever other methods you use takes time and resources, as we are all too aware. That isn’t in itself a bad thing, as anyone who has enjoyed any hobby will attest. After all you are creating something that will give you months, if not years of joy. But when you are just getting started it can seem like a bit of a mountain to climb.

This is especially true for all of us stuck at home during the current pandemic. Many players that will have been used to going to their local LGS for a night of Magic hijinks will know find themselves getting their fix of the best card game on Magic Arena or Magic Online. In fact, one of the side effects of the current situation is the rise in popularity of the Historic format, which mashes up the previous Arena sets with a handful of older cards from Magics history.

You yourself might be interested in trying out this relatively new Magic format during your own spell of isolation. But what do you play? Do you craft a top tier deck and use up all your precious wild cards, or try to upgrade one of your Standard decks to compete in this new battlefield? Well what if I told you that you could build a competitive deck right now, and it would only set you back the maximum of eight wildcards! What’s more, you wouldn’t need any Mythics, and you would only need one Rare!

Well my dear reader, let me introduce you to One Rare Blue.

One Rare Blue is a combo deck that aims to win through the alternative win condition of Thassa’s Oracle. When Thassa’s Oracle enters the battlefield it checks your Devotion to Blue (which will always be a minimum of two thanks to the Oracle itself) and then allows you to dig that deep into your Library and put one card on top, with the rest going to the bottom. Then, if your Devotion to Blue is equal to or greater than the number of cards in your Library, you win the game.

So, we have a way of winning the game, but I can here you say, “This seems like a cool, but how do we maximise our chances of winner of the Thassa’s Oracle trigger?”. The answer is easy. We go on a Treasure Hunt.

Treasure Hunt is a Sorcery that allows us to reveal cards from our Library until we hit a non-land card. We then put all those cards into our hand. Now, those of you who have played Zombie Hunt in Modern will know where we are heading with this. If we set up our deck in such a way as to maximise the effectiveness of Treasure Hunt, we could in effect turn it into a pseudo tutor for our combo pieces. And how do we do this? Fifty-Six lands, that’s how.

That’s right, most of our deck is made up of Basic Islands. This means that when we cast a Treasure Hunt, we will be digging right through our deck until we hit a either another copy of Treasure Hunt or our one copy of Thassa’s Oracle. Then, since well will have basically no cards in our Library, we cast the Oracle and effectively win the game on the spot.

The only difficult part of this deck is making sure you have a Treasure Hunt in your starting hand. luckily for us, the current mulligan rule is perfectly placed to help us in this regard. Each time we pitch a hand, we still get to look seven cards deep for one of our Sorceries. And since we are running such a large number of Lands, we can even go all the way down to a one card had and be reasonably sure of drawing the Lands we need.

Now you might be wondering if this is really that good of a combo. I mean, if someone hand attacks you or counters your Treasure Hunt then it’s just game over, right? Well that’s were Mystic Sanctuary comes in. This Common land from Throne of Eldraine gives us a way of getting back our Hunts from the graveyard and reusing them to make the deck more efficient. And since they are lands, we don’t have to worry about them interrupting our Treasure Hunts when we are digging for our combo pieces or hitting our Thassa’s Oracle too early.

And that’s One Rare Blue, probably the quickest deck tech I have ever written. The deck works very well as is and will win you more than a few games should you decide to run it for your new Historic event. But if you were looking to upgrade the deck, there are a few things you can add.

A second Thassa’s Oracle or a single copy of Jace, Wielder of Mysteries will give you some addition win conditions if you are coming up against a lot of counter magic or hand attack. Just be aware that any tweaks to the deck will dilute the combo in some way, so caution is advised.

But what do you think of the deck? Is it the kind of brew you would want to play? What changes would you make to the deck if you were to run it? Why not let us know about it in the comments below. While you’re there you could like and subscribe to keep up to date with all we do here at Master of Magics.

We also have a Patreon so if you want to support future content for the site consider becoming one of our Patrons. Just a $1 a month would do so much to help us create more of the content you enjoy. If you have any ideas for new and exciting decks you want me to look at you can contact me directly @MTGTengu over on Twitter. But until next time remember no matter the game you play or where you play it, Good Luck and Have Fun.

Liked it? Take a second to support Master of Magics on Patreon!