The Real Reason I Don’t Play Blue Green in Commander

Blue Green decks – otherwise known as UG, or Simic – are some of the strongest and craziest decks in Commander. They’re able to pull off massive mana generation and draw the most cards. So why don’t I play them? The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think.

THE POWER OF SIMIC

Blue Green is one of the most dominant color pairs in Commander. It stands strong because it’s arguably the best at two of the most important parts of Commander: drawing cards, and ramping mana. It doesn’t do so bad with win conditions either, and only in removal does it tend to lag behind the decks featuring the other colors. 

When you’re in UG, you get all of the best ramp: you get the noncreature ramp like Three Visits and Harrow, and you get to play manadorks like Birds of Paradise and Llanowar Elves.

You get access to all of the best card draw, from Rhystic Study to spells based on the creatures you have in play, like Return of the Wildspeaker or Guardian Project.

When you put the colors together, you get the best of both worlds, with spells and creatures that draw you cards and help you to make extra land drops.

The synergy of green and blue allows each color to build off of the other; your Exploration and Burgeoning extra land drops are fueled by blue’s easy ways to keep your hand topped up. 

What’s not to love?

MY REAL ISSUES WITH UG DECKS

Well, for me, it turns out there are a few reasons not to love UG. There are multiple angles at play here, though, so let me tackle them one at a time.

Firstly, Simic decks feel quite solved to me. Each deck is more or less about ramping and drawing cards, and it’s just what you do with said cards that tends to be the differing point. I realize that every deck in Commander is more or less about those two elements of gameplay, but they at least all differ in how they generate those resources. In UG, you get those cards and that mana from just taking the game actions you would take anyway, and in the least risky way possible.

That lack of risk is truly what turns me off about playing in these colors. At least with RW decks, for example, there’s an element of tension and decision making to your gameplay. You have to evaluate who to poke for chip damage that won’t retaliate with prejudice; you have to decide which order to eliminate opponents; you have to generate most of your resources from attacking or narrow strategies like equipment, which means your deckbuilding has to be intentional. In UG, you kinda get to sit and play solitaire until you draw a win condition. 

Did you draw Craterhoof or Scute Swarm yet? No? Well, just sit behind your arbitrarily large creatures with a bounce spell or countermagic up until you do. Nevermind the fact you could be winning without those wincons by just swinging more in the midgame. 

This is compounded by the fact that so many UG cards are either just variations on the same thing (how many Hardened Scales adjacent cards do you need?), or they’re tried and true irreplaceable staples (which is mostly the case when you look at the removal spells they have access to). Sure, you get to go for Raise the Palisade as well as Cyclonic Rift if you’re in a typal deck, but you are still mostly playing Rapid Hybridization, Pongify, and Reality Shift, and maybe a Beast Within. It’s hardly customizable. 

I love Magic because of interactivity and the tension that kind of gameplay can provide, and I’m good enough at the game that if I was to play a UG or adjacent deck (like Temur, which features red), I’d quickly end up overwhelming my regular playgroups, as I don’t need the training wheels that these colors provide. More than that, I don’t actually want them – snowballing games gets old, quickly. I’d much rather lose a close game than win one where I dominated a table. 

MAGIC: THE ADMINISTRATING

All of the pales in comparison to the real reason I loathe playing UG/x decks, though: dealing with the administration. 

There are some Simic Commanders I adore… in concept. Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca? Great design, enduringly popular, and just… a lot of work to operate. Adrix and Nev? Wow, so cool! I advocate playing this one all the time. But making and maintaining all of those tokens? A nightmare.

My worst nightmare is essentially having to manage multiple of the same token while managing differing amounts of +1/+1 counters on them, and nowhere am I more certain to experience this mind numbingly boring task than in UG decks. 

Am I guilty here of having “Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain”? No, I don’t think I am. There’s a difference between the kind of parallel play focused low interactivity that the Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain loves to pop off with (due to a lack of friction), and the very dull task of managing a bag of dice and a box of ancillary tokens and emblems and dungeons et al. The first is a desire to hit the dopamine without barriers; the second is not wanting to recreate the tedium of modern life in a card game. 

It’s just unfortunate for me that the color combinations that have the most… upkeep… tend to be the ones that feature blue and green together. One of my first decks was Prime Speaker Zegana, and as I like to say: I’ve been there, ramped a lot, and drawn my library. What now?

END STEP

I don’t avoid playing UG decks because I have a narrow dislike of the colors – hell, my Lorehold prerelease kit ended up offering my a Quandrix based pool where I got Mathemagics an opponent multiple times, and I had a lot of fun – it’s more that in Commander, the colors tend to perpetuate the kind of gameplay I just don’t have the energy for. I don’t want to be faffing around in a format which increasingly has turn length extending before you even hit Turn 6.

An unfortunate casualty of this is that some of the more interesting explorations of how to do “cool stuff” within the bounds of Magic have been in Simic colors. The scry stuff from Tales of Middle-earth is actually really cool – I just wish it didn’t force me and the rest of the table into suffering long non-deterministic turns.