Shax wrote:
Your joking, right? So in 1v1 your complaining about a 3CMC General with Flash, that doesn't win you the game from being broken? Look at Dralnu before you look at this general in the wrong light, seriously. Even if it gives MUC good tempo and etc and all the arguments to be made for it. Dralnu is a CA engine and can run black(!) as well.
No, I am not joking at all.
It isn’t a coincidence that the best general is also in the most dominant and most oppressive color in EDH. With a huge amount of counterspells at your disposal, the amount of versatility in answering practically every threat is immense. What counterspells don’t cover, bounce temporarily takes care of. What either of those don’t cover, there is Clique’s ability to preemptively get rid of it before can even be cast. Having your opponent’s hand revealed alone gives a blue player critical information on exactly what to expect and as such prepare the perfect answer. When none of these options are able to suffice, such as in the case of Kor Haven or Maze of Ith walling out a Clique, the Clique player simply turns to all sorts of various utility lands to plug the gaps – such as Strip Mine, Wasteland, Tectonic Edge, and Dust Bowl for dealing with Maze and Maze #2 (Kor Haven).
Because Clique nearly seamlessly covers up its holes in the versatility and threat density punishment counterspells provide combined with a relatively fast clock, you are backed up in the corner while Clique is on the offensive munching away at your life until it hits the magic number of 21. While you might be able to break out of other blue general’s grip of seemingly “endless” countermagic in the long run to force through real threats, the clock of Vendilion Clique drastically covers up this one well-kept secret of the prototypical MUC deck.
Do cards like Darkblast and Punishing Fire provide a magic pill for stopping Clique? Far from it. The immense versatility of countermagic allows the Clique player to answer 99.99% of spells by simply tapping a few islands. Such cards like the above two rely on the graveyard to do their thing. Remember how I previously stated Clique has no problem looking to other solutions to plug up any sign of a weakness? That’s where graveyard hosers such as Tormod’s Crypt come in, as well as Dissipate and Faerie Trickery. Worse still, is Clique’s ability to ship cards to the bottom of the library. This spells disaster for cards that need to be in the graveyard to function, or function much better when recurred. You can try finding a weakness for Clique, but you cannot pinpoint any one card or strategy that brings the deck to its knees, let alone give you a positive matchup. A very small handful of cards that are about as close to satisfactory as you can get to answering Clique are merely speed bumps for Clique.
Khymera (along with some of my help and input) has come very close to making a truly optimized Clique deck that is basically countermagic, card draw, and bounce spells. That’s pretty much it, and that’s all you need to win with Clique. This makes the deck extremely consistent, and able to answer virtually any threat thrown at it. Hell, I don’t even think my decklist for Clique isn’t up to par yet, and I’ve only lost one game out of over 60+ games because of extreme mana screw. The point is, there hasn’t been one general that I have seen at all in testing that is able to beat Vendilion Clique, let alone even for one game. Keep in mind these aren’t just Norin the Wary decks I’m playing against. I’ll bring up an example of a Sharuum deck I played a few nights ago. His deck was designed to be as competitive as possible, with infinite combos, griever cards, “douchebag” strategies, you name it, he had it. In a three game set, I crushed him 2-0 because he was completely powerless at controlling the stack in both games, and he ragequits upon losing the second game. This certainly wasn’t the first Sharuum deck that was blown out by Clique, and it certainly isn’t the last.
Clique almost never loses because it virtually never taps out on its main phase. Unlike other blue generals that aren't named Venser, Teferi, or Wydwen, Clique has flash, meaning it's able to control the stack better than other blue generals can when they have to play their general at sorcery speed. Dralnu cannot control the stack
at all when it has to tap 5 mana during its main phase to cast the general.
To beat Vendilion Clique, your deck needs to be extremely fast, have extreme threat density, and should still function even when the general gets tucked. There are no generals out there that fit currently fit all of these criteria. Almost all top tier generals use their general as their base of operations to do whatever they need to do to win the game.