Pauper Deck of the Week: White-Blue Familiars

White-Blue Familiars was always an underrepresented strategy on Magic Online. It was never widely adopted even when it was by far the best deck. It ended up phasing out for a variety of reasons, but it looks like it is coming back to its roots of being a beast but underrepresented.

At its core the deck acts as a white-blue control variant with a combo plan that involves setting up a plus lock to the whole board and/or all spells. It can then wrap up the game by attacking in the air with or the creature side of or just assemble the combo and win with .

The deck takes its name from . It's what holds everything together and what enables the various loops.

• With two each of , , and Island plus one each of and , you can bounce all of the opponent's creatures. It is a mana-neutral loop.

• If you only have one Familiar, you can do the same loop, but it will require one due to Flicker costing two.

• With two Familiars, one Mancer, and a Flicker, you have infinite storm and infinite creatures entering the battlefield, as you can flicker Island plus Archaeomancer.

• If you also have , you can gain any amount of life.
• If you also have , you can mill out your opponent.

There are more complex lines of play that aren't as common. They include using to deck your opponent or gaining any amount of life with only one Familiar and two bounce lands.

At first glance it may seem that the board states for these interactions will be hard to achieve. But the value plays greatly contribute to these board states, and there is a ton of redundancy built into the deck. You can even flicker to retrieve important creatures. Don't scorn the , as the incidental life gain does so much to stabilize the game, plus the "infinite" life is in itself a win condition against a good chunk of the meta, at least when you're playing on tabletop. You can just gain a bazillion and will never run out of cards first, thanks to Mire/Flicker/Archaeomancer.

How about or other graveyard hate? Well, with you can play around those cards. If you really find yourself struggling, there is always too. But it isn't the draw of the graveyard hate that is going to beat Familiars. It is graveyard hate plus pressure. The deck also suffers a great deal against Ponza and struggles a bit against combo decks, although against the latter you can at least try to concoct a plan.

Kampo's list shows itself to be greatly tuned for this meta. It helps that the main-deck plan of Familiars is good enough to beat or at least able to put up a fight against almost all decks. But where it shines is the sideboard, which is mostly devoted to the bogeymen of the format:

Bring in four and four against Affinity. Add four and one against Synthesizer Burn. These blasts also double as anti- technology. With the two remaining slots, you can try to catch other complicated matchups, such as the combo version of Walls. Kampo brought the technology of , which was tried by others in the past but never to much success. Worth noting, however, this instant can be useful in the mirror and great against Flicker Tron because of .

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