Well, first one not-surprising thing... Roman Fusco won an RCQ.

I had seen the Pro Tour Azorius decks but they didn't do anything for me... Until the padawan texted me last night to tell me that he had won (another) RCQ with "ol' reliable" ...

So, I immediately got cracking on it!

I honestly haven't loved-loved any Standard decks since Aetherdrift or even Foundations, so I thought this might be The One.

If you haven't been following along for the past couple of years, back in November of 2023 Roman came from the City of Angels to visit me in his onetime stomping grounds of New York... Really he wanted a place to crash so he could win something called Store Champs (with Azorius, natch).

Then he followed up by winning a Standard RCQ. Inspired by him, I did the same!

Might history repeat itself?

I've been playing Blue-White variants to the exclusion of other strategies since Roman alerted me of his victory, trying to answer that question. I said at the outset that I wasn't initially interested in the Pro Tour versions of the deck, and playing with Roman's adoption of them gave me specifics where I previously started only with vibes.

I've learned a lot so far. If I come up with something better I'll let y'all know; but for now we're going to work from Roman's seventy-five.

Azorius Control | DFT Standard | Roman Fusco

• Creatures (6)
• 1 Horned-Loch Whale
• 2 Overlord of the Mistmoors
• 3 Beza, the Bounding Spring

• Instants (19)
• 1 Destroy Evil
• 1 Elspeth's Smite
• 1 Change the Equation
• 2 Deduce
• 2 No More Lies
• 3 Get Lost
• 3 Ride's End
• 3 Stock Up
• 3 Three Steps Ahead

• Sorceries (4)
• 1 Sunfall
• 3 Day of Judgment

• Enchantments (2)
• 2 Temporary Lockdown

• Lands (26)
• 3 Island
• 5 Plains
• 1 Blast Zone
• 1 Demolition Field
• 2 Adarkar Wastes
• 2 Fountainport
• 2 Meticulous Archive
• 3 Restless Archive
• 3 Seachrome Coast
• 4 Floodfarm Verge

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Authority of the Consuls
• 2 Rest in Peace
• 1 Devout Decree
• 1 Elspeth's Smite
• 1 Negate
• 1 Loran of the Third Path
• 1 Beza
• 1 Tishana's Tidebinder
• 1 Jace, The Perfected Mind
• 1 Wilt-Leaf Liege
• 2 Obstinate Baloth
• 1 Boon-Bringer Valkyrie

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1. Stock Up is Awesome

Let's get this out of the way: Stock Up is awesome.

It's a little counterintuitive because Stock Up doesn't look like the kind of card drawing that we've come to expect for this archetype in Standard. Farsight Ritual and Spellgyre are both more mana but have significant flexibility attached.

On balance, Stock Up is sorcery speed; and only one of its three-mana price tag specifies a color identity. Stock Up being a three-mana sorcery can be both feature and bug. Well, I guess the sorcery part is a bug, but the three-mana part is a feature.

You can try to be opportunistic and Stock Up turn three if you think your opponent won't punish you... But you're also forced to sometimes. Casting this card turn three against aggressive decks can get you killed... But what about turn four?

Roman added some weird one-ofs, including perennial inclusion Elspeth's Smite. The four-mana combo of "Stock Up, pray for a land, have Smite back" comes up more than you might guess, just because Stock Up is that good at digging. Just make sure you know this play pattern. It might save you against Mice, both because you need to get that land and because the act of digging for it can be so perilous.

2. I Generally Liked Roman's One-ofs, but...

One is a miracle.

Once you get to two, it's half as special; or not special at all.

Three? Half the time it might as well have been four. Four being my favorite number for a card I actually want to draw... But I love one, and this deck has more one-ofs than you'll typically see outside of a Utility Belt-type.

Some of them (like Blast Zone) are pretty interesting. Blast Zone is like an extra Wrath of God that taps for mana and helps you make land drops until which point you need it... Yet it is a convenient tool in the mirror, capable of removing both Jace and Beza (oftentimes both Jace and Beza simultaneously). We already mentioned Elspeth's Smite.

But as much as I liked Roman's one-ofs, what I shied away from at initial glance of the Pro Tour versions was what I thought of as weird numbers. How many No More Lies? How many Three Steps Ahead? (I am pretty sure those numbers were two plus zero!) ... Whatever matchups they were anticipating, I couldn't wrap my head around two plus zero. Do you ever hate No More Lies? With Domain being one of the most successful decks (at least post-Pro Tour Aetherdrift) don't we want a hard counter?

I didn't love the look of a deck with so many Jace (as many as four) but so few interactive control elements. Maybe I just don't understand it? Maybe it was using Counterspells for tempo and trying to burn opponents out by Stocking Up Jaces, making both decks small in different ways?

My experience, at least with Roman's RCQ-winning version, is that having so few familiar Counterspells and a wild array of expensive cards - Whale, Beza, Overlord, and Jace all - made it difficult to evaluate my opening hand and also difficult to evaluate and plan. The lack of hard counters, replaced by relatively narrow answers to "only creatures" or "only red spells" or "only sorceries" makes the deck erratic. You certainly high roll sometimes (I mean check out the title... Because Change the Equation certainly does counter Three Steps Ahead!) but your draws can be all over the place.

I suppose for the Pro Tour, where only a small number of players were running an unfamiliar build, this could make for some exploitative Magic. But for our purposes (grinding Arena Events and maybe spiking a Blue Envelope at the Local Game Store)... It at least does no play to my strengths.

3. Kaito on the Play is Almost Unbeatable

I asked Roman how good the weird sideboard cards were. You know which ones... Obstinate Baloth (which he can't really cast) and Wilt-Leaf Liege (which is an eyebrow-raiser in most circumstances, for this strategy at least). He told me that Pixies was the most popular deck going into his RCQ, so he wanted to be prepared.

"Anyway," Roman said "I won every match against Pixies that I drew them."

In an open deck list tournament just having Obstinate Baloth that you can't cast in your seventy-five might make a statement to someone planning on punishing you with Momentum Breaker. Actually deploying it first turn in a non-open deck list tournament (like an RCQ) would probably be game. Four life and a 4/4 on turn one? Yes please!

What he didn't tell me is that you do kind of need these extreme tools. I only played Pixies once, and I got annihilated. I think of Pixies as a small ball deck and Azorius as a big resources deck. One Temporary Lockdown and you should be good, right? Well, only if you live that long.

My Pixies loss did eventually come down to being "burned out" by Hopeless Nightmare for the last two points... But at that point it was a bouncing Shock, as I didn't even have any cards less. The match had been lost on turn three because I made the mistake of not winning the die roll.

Opponent opens on a Spyglass Siren. I don't know how you feel about a Spyglass Siren, but it's not exactly scary, is it?

Well the problem came on turn three (my turn two) when the Siren attacked for the second time. Bam! Bane of Nightmares!

This is a disaster. How do you stop this? Are you supposed to Ride's End / Whale adventure every creature attacking you starting on turn three? You can't. You also have a finite number of Get Lost to interact with Kaito once he's already on the battle dot field.

Is this insurmountable?

Of course not. You can cast a Beza and pray. You can get some 2/1 bugs out there. But you'll be woefully behind (at best) and the fact that your opponent will have probably drawn four extra cards at that point probably means they can interact with your non-Get Lost answers.

I highly recommend just deploying a turn-one 4/4.

4. Change the Equation counters Three Steps Ahead

Artifact of the casting cost on Three Steps Ahead, that one is.

Learned this one the hard way!

But, meaning that...

5. I've Been Losing the Mirror More Than I've Been Winning

This has been the biggest surprise for me.

A year ago, after I had beaten in my own RCQ run, I tested the mirror relentlessly going into the actual Standard Regional Championship. I got myself to an extremely acceptable level of competence in the Standard Azorius mirror; to the point that I was more comfortable in that mirror than the Modern Burn mirror.

So, I'm going in with this new and innovative, yet already proven, deck... I square up against an opposing Restless Anchorage assuming that I'm going to have the advantage.

But!

I've lost way more mirrors than I've won so far.

"This deck is not optimized for the mirror," Roman followed up. "At the Pro Tour it was totally unexpected, and even when I won it wasn't a known quantity yet. In my first run I sideboarded a Mirrex for the mirror but by the RCQ win I had taken it out and even moved a Jace to the sideboard."

I ultimately chalk this up to three things.

First, the mirror is highly draw dependent. That's because of the wide range of types of cards in the deck (i.e. Overlord of the Mistmoors, Beza, and Jace competing at four mana; versus relatively few consistent Counterspells). If you tap out for a Stock Up on turn three to fix this, you might get immediately punished. If your opponent taps out on turn three for a Jace, you have a few Get Losts and a slow af Blast Zone from preventing them from annihilating you with it. This does come down to skill, preparation, even "reading" the opponent somewhat... But your ability to leverage those is far less strategic than in the builds with fewer non-Jace finishers (and more Counterspells).

Second, play/draw matters much more than it has in most previous Standard Azorius mirrors. If you're going second and especially if your second land enters the battlefield tapped, your opponent can probably just jam Jace if they have it. Even if you have an untapped land it might not make the colored mana for No More Lies... And you don't have four No More Lies. In fact, you're not mathematically favored to have a 2 mana Counterspell to interact with Jace. You're also not favored to have one of your four (or especially three) Get Losts in this spot. You might not lose immediately, but their third-turn resolved killer is going to color how this game goes, with them starting WAY ahead.

Finally, there is only one Demolition Field. One is a miracle. But in a mirror where you will just lose to your opponent's utility land, a few more copies might be welcome (if not technically miraculous). Utility lands were so good when I qualified last year that we ran 2x Sunken Citadel to power them up... And Fountainport hadn't even been printed yet. If the opponent gets ahead with Fountainport you will lose to it if you don't answer it.

A lot of this just goes back to the present mirror being more draw dependent; meaning I probably could have high rolled more than I have. But I haven't thus far! Coming up with L after L on MTGA has been, as the subhead goes, surprising for YT.

Congrats to Roman, though! Azorius being good enough has been like a door opening in Standard for me regardless, so I'm not done with Horned-Loch Whale just yet.

LOVE

MIKE