Playtesting UW Delver August 2012

Being able to play control for several months now and while I reflect on the outcomes of my first Grand Prix experience last June 2012 in Manila, I realized I want to playtest a delver deck. Going over my cards, only 2 cards have stopped me from building this deck before, and these cards are expensive : Seachrome Coast and Geist of Saint Traft. But since I can substitute Blade Splicer for Geist and Blade splicer somehow works better with Restoration Angel, I thought I would give this deck a try in the last FNM - also substituted Plains for Seachrome Coast just to test the deck and know the current meta of my store a little bit. My final list looked like this:

UW Delver August 2012

Lands: 4 Glacial Fortress 4 Plains 2 Moorland Haunt 9 Island Creatures: 4 Delver of Secrets 4 Snapcaster Mage 4 Blade Splicer 4 Restoration Angel Artifacts: 1 Sword of War and Peace 2 Runechanter's Pike Sorceries: 4 Ponder 3 Gitaxian Probe Instants: 4 Mana Leak 4 Thought Scour 2 Gut Shot 4 Vapor Snag 1 Surgical Extraction

Sideboard: 1 Dissipate 2 Negate 1 Divine Offering 2 Nihil Spellbomb 2 Phantasmal Image 2 Mental Misstep 3 Celestial Purge 2 Timely Reinforcements

I finished 3-2 after the tournament and was ranked 5th - indeed not bad and I liked the deck very much. Playing this decklist made me realize many many things. #1 - I should have played this deck way way back in the past. I don't mean that I did not find Esper Control (Solar Flare) good but Flare usually takes time to win and you thrive in the long game - delver thrives in early and mid game and can not be discounted when the game comes late. If I had brought this deck in the Grand Prix (of course with some improvement in the card list), I could have saved myself from headaches and from reaching the last 5 turns of the Grand Prix events - which happened many times.

#2 - Blade Splicer might be lesser in value and potential than Geist of St. Traft but sometimes, it is better! Especially in my local store's meta and with the release of M13, mono-green is seeing more play. The 3/3 first striking golem can be more useful in these cases. 

#3 - This may be my last realization but since the land count for this deck is just 19 and that all 1 drops are blue cards, Plains cannot substitute for Seachrome Coasts if you want to use ALL your turns efficiently, eventhough its life in standard may only be 8 weeks. And so, I actively searched for seachrome coasts and I did find them. With their help I performed better in the M13 Game day, but I will save that for another post. That is all for now! Thanks for reading.