As a matter of happy accidents, or happinstance, or whatever you want to call it, this was not the article that I had expected to write to start off the Kaldheim season. 

See, if you’ve ever watched my stream before (and if you haven’t go mash that follow button or whatever it is that the kids are saying these days), you know that I’ve been playing Angels for quite a while. Historic Angels is what got me out of a huge slump around the end of the Ikoria season…it was an old favorite that I hadn’t visited in quite a while and it was surprisingly good. And yes, you’re going to get an article about it eventually. But when I found out that angels were going to be a theme of Kaldheim, my soul was ready. Wizards wanted the Standard angels deck to be BW, and so BW angels I built and played. It was fun, but…there was something missing. There always seemed to be a problem in most situations that I couldn’t solve. When I needed a bit of card draw, I was short. When I needed to avoid a sweeper, I never seemed to draw protection. It was just average. 

So…why not play the two colors together that generally supply both of those things to flyers? Yes, I know that stating that UW is the flyers combination is not breaking news. But the new set doesn’t encourage that pairing (UW is the “cast two spells in one turn” and Fortell combination), so we’ve got to use a lot of tools outside of the new set to make this work, along with my beloved angels to supply the flyers.   And when I started playing this deck, after settling behind the new strategy I immediately raced to seven match wins in a row in Platinum, which will hopefully result in this list getting reported by Wizards of the Coast as a high-achieving deck. Fingers crossed?

While this looks like your usual UW flyers deck, it doesn’t play the same way. Your classic gameplan is T1 flyer, turn 2 Curious Obsession or Staggering Insight or such, and start smashing and drawing cards. But that doesn’t work really well in the current meta because of the surplus of cheap removal. Whether it’s Frost Bite or Stomp or Shock or whatever, you’re often going to get 2-for-1ed before you get a real payoff from it. So this particular list is more of a midrange/control feel, where your early creatures exist to stay on the board and discourage aggro attacks. Once you’ve got equality, then you can start drawing cards and making your flyers huge. The bottom of the curve are the two big UW flyer signpost cards we’ve gotten recently in Watcher of the Spheres and Youthful Valkyrie. Watcher makes our flyers cheaper and can attack as a 3/3 or a 4/4 in future turns, and Valkyrie has obvious synergy with all of our angels and, maybe more importantly, has a big butt. You’ll notice that a lot of the creatures in the deck have oversized toughness numbers. That’s not only to synergize with the lifegain from Righteous Valkyrie but also to dodge an early Frost Bite or Stomp. And if he can dodge the first cadre of removal long enough to play another angel, then it has 4 toughness and can dodge even more. The third two-drop is Skycat Sovereign. It’s listed separately because of its lower toughness…if you play it on turn 2, it’s almost certainly not going to be around on turn 3. But if you can get a flyer or two down, it’s fantastic in the late game as a bigger body that serves as a mana sink to spit out more flyers. 

The key cards are at the three-drop, where Righteous Valkyrie and Linvala, Shield of Sea Gate rule the (proverbial) roost. Valkyrie is effective the wincon, as she lets you gain life once you get stabilized and Overruns the competition to finish. But Linvala is the real diamond in the rough here. Linvala was a weird angel insofar as she never seemed to find a home. Angels were the wrong color, and the flyers deck didn’t need her until right about now. Her stats are almost irrelevant, because what he really provides is (a) a way to get angel triggers, (b) another flyer, and (c) protection from every targeted removal and board wipe apart from Extinction Event. You get to pick and choose what creatures you’re willing to give up to removal and that usually means they have to start with Linvala herself, which provides more time for your engine to crank up value. 

There are a couple of other creatures we have to mention that might change in the future but seem very good today. I’ve learned through experience that Reidane, God of the Worthy would be a good Magic card even if it didn’t sporadically hose snow decks (and most of the time she doesn’t). The front side is another flyer that slows your opponent’s haymakers for a couple of turns, but the back side is an absolute champ. Preventing one damage doesn’t seem like much, but there are a good number of one-power creatures in the mono-red aggro and deathtouch tribal decks that it absolutely shuts down as well as making your creatures safer from removal. (Note: the card is less good against the deathtouch tribal deck if the opponent is playing Questing Beast, which apparently added another line of rules text when my back was turned). I’m not sure about Mistcaller as it’s probably the weakest card in the deck. But it does have angel/changeling synergy and that four toughness is yet another big butt for the deck. Finally, Legion Angel is, well, Legion Angel. It mostly functions as a way to draw another angel into our deck to make sure we don’t run out of gas. In my experience with angel decks, I’ve found that 2/2 is the best split for them since that supplies enough card draw to be useful and enough draw frequency to make it happen.

I won’t spend a ton of time on the spells in the deck because they’re pretty much the same spells they’ve always been in the UW flyers decks. Lofty Denial is pretty much undercosted Counterspell in 90+% of situations. Staggering Insight is the card draw engine, and for now the rest of the spots are taken by Disdainful Stroke to try to turn off bombs. This might become Miscast if this stupid meme Tibalt’s Trickery deck doesn’t go away any time soon, but c’est la vie. 

The sideboard, as always, is a work in progress. There are additional copies of the creatures that are or aren’t relevant in a lot of situations. I’ve got a couple of copies of Nine Lives for anti-Vorinclex tech (since Nine Lives is a “you add counters” and not your opponents adding them like with poison counters, you don’t add counters as long as Vorinclex is on the board, and it’s got hexproof so it isn’t going anywhere), and because I’m a Timmy at heart I play Iron Verdict because that’s always the card that gets me and it’s really cheap and powerful removal. Finally, I’m running a couple of copies of Saw It Coming for games when I need more countermagic, but Miscast is looking better every day. 

As mentioned above, you want to play as a midrange/control list rather than an aggro list. Start playing big-butt creatures and forcing your opponent to use premium removal on them early. Then you either get the value engines going with Staggering Insight and Righteous Valkyrie, or you play Linvala and dare the opponent to remove something. Meanwhile, you’re holding strong removal to counter the bombs and stabilize the board. 

This deck really feels unique in the current meta, and blue definitely provides some of the stabilization to the holes that BW angels has, and it provides a really fun play pattern with important decisions to make throughout. Give it a try, and let me know what you think about it or if you have any improvements!