It’s time for another budget deck tech! This week we move onto Azorius, probably the strangest guild in Ravnica Allegiance draft. Trying to draft this guild means you’ll be drafting control, flyers, defenders, mill, and tempo. Weirdly enough it works well enough in draft, but that’s a discussion for another day. Today I wanted to create a budget deck for the Azorius and finding a theme to focus on took a little bit of time.
Eventually, I settled on flyers being the archetype I wanted to work on. Favorable Winds is a card that has been in Standard for a while and hasn’t really had a chance to prove itself yet. The card is an efficient lord for flyers, and provided there are enough good flyers, Favorable Winds should do great work. Fortunately for us, Ravnica Allegiance gave us a lot of great tools to use in this flyers deck.
Sphinx of New Prahv is an excellent bomb in this kind of deck, due to being a huge vigilant flyer that is very difficult to kill. Trading your mana efficiently with this card is really difficult, as all the best removal spells in Standard such as Lightning Strike and Cast Down, cost the same as the Sphinx when they target it. Another awesome tool to have is Depose // Deploy. The versatility is excellent and being able to create 2 flying bodies when there is a Favorable Winds out really pushes the card in our deck.
This Standard has a lot of great flyers that aren’t exclusive to Ravnica Allegiance either. Healer’s Hawk is a powerful main deck option against the horde of Mono-Red and becomes a real threat with a single Favorable Winds. Siren Stormtamer has already shown a lot of success in the Mono-Blue Tempo archetype, and cards like Storm Fleet Aerialist give this deck a really great evasive clock. Sky Tether almost becomes a Path to Exile in this deck, as for 1 mana you can completely shut down a creature in combat.
There are a lot of things to like about this deck, but 2 of my favorite things are its customizability and how budget friendly it is. The main deck contains zero rares or mythics which is great for platforms like Arena. However, if you do happen to have cards like Dovin Baan or Sphinx of Foresight there is nothing stopping you from playing them and seeing if they make the deck any better. As long as it has the word flying printed on it, it is something you can test and see if you like. Thank you all for reading, I hope you have a great week and an amazing Tuesday!
Link to Decklist: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/1659067#paper
This deck is terrible. It gets destroyed by red spells, it gets destroyed by large creatures from green, White has even bigger flyers and creature removal, Black is the same and Blue just won’t let you play. You literally can’t win one game in standard with this deck! 🙁
Creature based decks barely work in this removal/control meta, that’s why cards like Ghalta, Carnage Tyrant and Lyra had to be made to keep them a bit relevant if the opponent lets it stick for one turn maybe you have a chance to win.
BTW why don’t you even have Resplendent Angel and Lyra in your deck? they’re literally the best fliers in the format and could win on their own.
This deck is meant to be really budget and costs $25. If you want to upgrade the deck, Lyra and Resplendent Angel are amazing cards and will make the deck much better but those cards are far beyond the budget I gave the deck. If you feel like control is too popular you can also run more negates and dive downs to counter those strategies.