Post-SorceryCon Updates

This list has now been rigorously tested through a gauntlet of 26 constructed games across SorceryCon. Between Side Events, the Main event, and testing games with other attendees, I learned a lot, and came away with one conclusion:

This list is nuts. In those 26 games, I lost only 8, putting me at a 69% win rate (nice). In the main event, I was 5-1 day 1, ending the day in 8th place. While I lost my two rounds on Day 2 to incredible players and mediocre draws, I made both games incredibly close, and take pride in knowing that I was one draw away from taking control of both of those games. Plus, both of those players made it to top 8.

However, no list is perfect, and my testing led to some changes I knew I had to make. Check out the end of the primer for a summary of the updates!

Drown in the Deep

Because Fun is Only For You

Drown in the Deep is a hard control deck focused on stalling out the early game through the repeated submerge effect of [[Mariner's Curse]] and [[Thin Ice]] alongside multiple forced movement effects to prevent your opponent's units from gaining a foothold in your territory. Once we've achieved complete control of the board, we shift our game plan to deploying our late-game threats and ending the game in one or two massive attacks.

This is a deck for people who enjoy controlling the chess match of Sorcery, using positioning and clever movement to send their opponent's forces below the waves, all while overwhelming them with the inevitability of enormous threats like [[Diluvian Kraken]] and [[Great Old One]].

A Note Before We Begin...

The current list of this deck is built with the assumption you will be taking it into a blind meta where you expect to see other meta decks. At the moment, it is prepared for the post-Gothic early meta, where mono-water Necromancer seems to be the strongest contender in terms of power-level. While our deck operates on a significantly different axis than that list, we must still prepare to face it, and the meta it likely brings along with it.

Thankfully, this meta is more favorable to our strategy than the previous, pre-Gothic meta. As a result, the only real concession we're making to the meta is running only two copies of [[Anui Undine]]. While she is an incredible threat, the prevalence of [[Pied Piper of Hameln]] makes her dangerous to play, because the Piper can steal her from our control regardless of how many sites are in her body of water. If you don't expect to see the Piper in your local scene, I strongly recommend finding room for the 3rd Anui Undine.

Deck Philosophy

Drown in the Deep is structured in pillars. These pillars represent the core elements of the deck's game plan, and cards must fit into at least one aspect of these pillars to be considered for the list. The pillars of the deck's strategy are:

Card Advantage: a nebulous concept in Sorcery. With card draw effects limited in scope, or paired with significant downsides, it's difficult to find consistent draw engines. As a result, we operate on pseudo-card advantage. Our goal is to turn each of our cards into X for 1's - meaning each card we play trades for more than 1 card our opponent plays. In this way, we will slowly rip away their resources without significantly reducing ours.
Board Control: in Sorcery, we need to fight on two axes: removal and positioning. With our removal centralized in submerge effects, we rely on robust forced-movement tools to trigger our removal effects like Mariner's Curses, or cluster enemies for mass removal spells like [[Stormy Seas]] and [[Call of the Sea]].
Threats: as a control deck, Drown has very few threats compared to mid-range or aggro decks. Most of our units are role players, existing within one of the other axes. Therefore, we rely on the following primary threats to end the game: [[Anui Undine]], [[Lord of Lies]], [[Mester Stoor Worm]], [[Vatn Draconis]], [[Diluvian Kraken]], and [[Great Old One]]. Protecting these units should be top of mind when they hit table, as they are our route to victory.
Death's Door Solutions: without access to the direct damage many other elements provide in Sorcery, mono-water can sometimes struggle to kill our opponents while on Death's Door. As a result, this pillar is incredibly small, but incredibly important. Our primary Death's Door solutions lie in the activated abilities of units like [[Mester Stoor Worm]] and [[Diluvian Kraken]], but we keep additional methods of ending the game in our collection, to be played at the perfect moment by a [[Silver Bullet]] or [[Toolbox]]. These solutions will be discussed in the section on the Collection.

Strategy

With these pillars in mind, the deck's game plan simplifies into a three-phase process:

Gain Control
Maintain Control
Kill Them

Navigating this process is anything but simple, however, so let's break down each step.

Gain Control

Gaining control relies on establishing two key pieces: a source of card advantage and a source of removal. In an ideal scenario, we'll draw the card that is both of these pieces in one: [[Mariner's Curse]].

Every time the Curse drowns a unit, it represents a card gained. Because it always returns to our hand, we can redeploy it every turn, constantly draining our opponent's draws by running them out of their valuable units. However, Mariner's Curse gets significantly worse if we're only drowning one thing a turn, which is where our forced movement effects come into play.

Pairing the Curse with [[Coy Nixie]], [[Guile Sirens]], [[Abaddon Succubus]], [[River Rapids]], [[Innsmouth Dock]] or [[Maelström]] presents repeatable removal on our turns, allowing us to use our mana to redeploy the Curse to protect our sites on their turns. Keep in mind that they will likely throw away their least valuable unit on their turn, so we need to identify their most valuable unit each turn and plan for ways to submerge them on our turn.

For a card so critical to our strategy, you may be wondering why we only run two copies in our Spellbook. Simply put, it's because the card is so valuable, we actually want to run four copies of Mariner's Curse. As a result, [[Silver Bullet]] represents copies three and four of Mariner's Curse, and will almost always be used to grab the copy that sits in our collection if we have not drawn one of the two copies in our Spellbook.

When the Curse isn't available, we need to identify ways to survive without it. [[Thin Ice]] is the strongest of our alternate Mariner's Curses, as Coy Nixie can drag any minion our opponent plays with three or more power directly to the Thin Ice and drown them at end of turn. In a pinch, [[Troll Bridge]] can do a decent impression, especially if we can deploy forced movement effects to trigger it on our turn. Clustering units together with our forced movement effects can turn [[Stormy Seas]] into a multi-card removal spell, while [[Nelly Longarms]] can act like [[Pudge Butcher]] and deal with any problematic units.

Maintain Control

Once initial control is established, we need to begin identifying the ways our opponent can take that control away from us, and focus on preventing such circumstances from occurring. The primary goals of this phase of the game are to reach six mana and to avoid Death's Door.

Avoiding Death's Door is obvious: while our deck has dozens of tools to stave off units, we have zero tools to prevent direct spell damage. If our opponent is relying on units to kill us, we can stall out the game for a long time on Death's Door, but if they have anything to directly hit us, the game ends immediately. Preventing this scenario is one of our top priorities. [[Font of Life]] can be critical in this stage, usually representing a swing of seven or more life. It's also critical to identify which units you're comfortable losing, and being prepared to sacrifice them to avoid taking damage from strikes. [[Plague of Frogs]] is an all-star here, representing up to seven prevented attacks if the opponent can't find a way to remove our annoying little frogs.

Getting to six mana is a less obvious goal, but quickly becomes apparent as you draw through the deck: much of our curve exists at three mana. Reaching six mana means we can cast two spells a turn, and more importantly it means we can both deploy a unit and redeploy Mariner's Curse. As a result, this phase of the game is a constant dance between taking turns to deploy additional sites in preparation and using our Avatar to prevent multiple units from untapping. [[Riptide]] is great here; you can draw a spell for turn, play Riptide to cluster several units onto the same site, and draw a site off Riptide's effect to deploy the following turn. [[Overflow]] also shines in this phase. Each copy we play represents a turn where we can use our Avatar to tap down our enemies without risk of slowing down our curve progression.

This phase is also where we are looking for means to shut our opponent out of the game, or dig for our important threats. [[Atlantean Fate]] can shut down our opponent's game plan, stifling their threshold and drowning key units and artifacts. [[Mester Stoor Worm]] can use its tap ability to wipe out our opponent's armies every turn, while also holding onto a threat when we reach phase three. [[Stormy Seas]] can not only deal with problematic units, but take away important artifacts from our opponent by sending them below the water, where they are unlikely to have a means to retrieve them. Finally, [[Call of the Sea]], [[The Flood]], and [[Wrath of the Sea]] represent massive board wipes that can reset the board the turn before we're ready to bring down our biggest threats.

To help us dig for these key cards, we can leverage our Rivers to filter through our deck, [[Deep-Sea Mermaids]] to draw cards we mulliganed away early, and [[Kelp Cavern]] to setup a critical draw of an end-game threat when it's time to enter our final phase. Don't overlook the power of [[Return to Sleep]] in this phase either. We can use it to put key cards we've already played back on the bottom of the deck, only to gain immediate access to them through our Deep-Sea Mermaids.

Kill Them

With control established and maintained, we can finally take turns off from controlling the board to develop our end-game threats. Of our end-game threats, the best combination we can hope to see is [[Vatn Draconis]] and [[Diluvian Kraken]].

Both of these threats represent units that exist in multiple pillars - Board Control and Threats. Vatn Draconis can submerge everything at its location, often killing multiple units the turn he enters play if we've clustered them correctly. Diluvian Kraken can surface every other turn to wipe out a 3x3 grid of units, while also damaging our opponent's avatar if we've positioned it correctly.

However, when paired together, these units get much more potent. We can surface the Kraken to strike all units nearby, and then surface Vatn Draconis to attack the surface of an opponent's site. Then, at end of turn, we can submerge everything at Vatn Draconis's site, including our own Kraken, allowing us to do it again.

Vatn Draconis is also important because it protects our units from removal effects like [[Disintegrate]], [[Poison Nova]], and [[Infiltrate]]. Unless our opponent has a submerged spell caster, they can't target or affect any of our submerged units.

Similar to Vatn Draconis, [[Putrid Presence]] can let us kill our opponent without risking our threats. Attacking the underside of their flooded sites likely means they can't block us at all, leading to a quick swing as we drop them to Death's Door.

Once we've dropped them to Death's Door, we deploy any of our methods to deal the final blow to their Avatar: [[Mester Stoor Worm]], [[Diluvian Kraken]]'s tap ability, or a [[Silver Bullet]] or [[Toolbox]]. Make sure you're careful with how you deploy these effects before you're ready to kill your opponent - the last thing you want is to be staring down defeat because you prematurely used the only tool you had to end the game.

The Collection

The Collection mechanic is the single biggest improvement Drown in the Deep received from Gothic. The ability to guarantee specific cards, or draw out certain answers when we need them, has fundamentally altered this deck's power level. The two main ways we access the collection are [[Silver Bullet]] and [[Toolbox]], and we diversify the options we have in our Collection to ensure both present useful options whenever we draw them. These cards are so good for us, in fact, that we also run [[The Lady of the Lake]] exclusively to recur Silver Bullet and Toolbox as often as we possibly can.

Drown's collection can be grouped into three categories: Extra Copies, Key Answers, and Death's Door Solutions.

Extra Copies

[[Mariner's Curse]] and [[Font of Life]] are so good for our strategy that we want to see more than the normal number of copies we're allowed to run. As a result, each of these take a Collection slot so that Silver Bullet can represent additional copies of them if we have yet to see our main deck copies.

[[Overflow]] also fits in this category, though not for the same reasons as the previous cards. While Overflow is excellent, it is strongest in the earliest turns of the game, and can be a dead draw later in the game. As a result, running two in the spellbook reduces the likelihood we draw additional copies when we don't want them, but running one in the collection lets us turn an early [[Toolbox]] into well-timed ramp.

Key Answers

Historically, Drown struggled against two things: Site Destruction, Submerge units, and [[Drought]]. Not every deck runs these mechanics, so finding slots for answers to them was always difficult. Thanks to the collection, we can shove these cards out of the main deck so we only draw them when we need them. [[Order of the Sacred Oak]] helps us prevent losing our sites to site destruction, and [[Sleep]] can help us disable a submerge unit so we can immediately drown them. [[Extinguish]] is primarily to answer [[Drought]], but can be used strategically to banish some powerful threats.

While strong in the mainboard, [[Return to Nature]] isn't quite strong enough that we want to draw multiple copies in a single game. However, against specific decks (like Archimago), drawing Return to Nature is absolutely critical. As a result, we can dedicate one slot in the collection to it so that Toolbox can help us find it in these specific scenarios, similar to our approach to Overflow.

Death's Door Solutions

We rarely, if ever, want to draw ways to kill our opponent when they aren't already on Death's Door. Cards like [[Ice Shards]] and [[Abyssal Assault]] are terrible cards if we draw them at the wrong time, but can end games out of nowhere if we draw them exactly when we need them. As a result, they exist in the Collection to help us kill our opponent at exactly the right moment.

Mulligans

In the early game, we need to find any source of card advantage we can muster. We almost always mulligan away big threats, with the intent of pulling them from the bottom of the deck at key points with Deep-Sea Mermaids or [[Kelp Cavern]]. For sites, Thin Ice, Troll Bridge, and [[Maelström]] are hyper critical to this deck, so we want to dig hard for them.

Why Waveshaper?

You may be wondering why [[Waveshaper]] is the avatar of choice for this deck. Ultimately, she does double duty. Her first role is to extend our body of water when we don't have a flooding effect handy. Her second role is to lock down units, buying us turns as our opponent's threats are prevented from tapping out. Once we reach our critical threshold of mana, Waveshaper can lock down our opponent's ground forces, potentially indefinitely if we have placed our forced movement effects correctly.

However, there are opportunities to replace Waveshaper with another Avatar, especially depending on your meta. If you're up against a lot of spell-based aggro or control decks, you may find better success with the additional movement opportunities of [[Avatar of Water]]. If your meta runs a lot of water decks, you may not need the flooding to extend your body of water, and might find more success with [[Sorcerer]] or [[Seer]] to fix card advantage. Finally, if you're up against a lot of decks with [[Summoning Sphere]] effects, you may consider [[Dragonlord]] with [[Vatn Draconis]] as your iconic dragon, which allows your avatar to spend 3 mana to drown everything on your site.

Matchup Advice

Pending further testing! All the matchups I used to give advice on are irrelevant now. I'll update this section when I've got sufficient reps against decks I expect you will see at big events.

Change Log and Current Testing

2.1 - Post-SorceryCon 2026

This deck amazed me at SorceryCon. Gone are the days where Waveshaper and mono-water control are the underdog, fighting against the hyper-aggressive meta that pre-Gothic Druid ushered in. With so many decks on slower game plans that rely on playing one or two big threats and protecting them, Mariner's Curse has never been better, and that means this deck has never been better.

However, I didn't quite get the list correct. I was 90% of the way there, but testing proved out a few key things.

While Abyssal Assault is awesome, it's hard to keep the lower end of my monsters alive long enough to take advantage of it int he mainboard. As a result, I've cut back on the monster sub-theme and left the Abyssal Assault only in the collection as a finisher.
Guile Sirens is incredible. Turns out, copies 4-6 of Coy Nixie helps this deck immensely. Plus, they break wards for free every turn, which won me several games.
With how slow the meta is, more board wipes is a good thing. [[Wrath of the Sea]] returns to the list as a result.
[[Font of Life]] is still busted, especially with so much water in the meta. I thought I could cut down to just one in the collection, but there isn't a single game I played where drawing extra copies of Font would have been bad.

This is likely where the list will remain over the coming months, barring any significant shake-ups to the meta or any changes proven out by additional practice games.

2.0 - Post-Gothic Build and Testing Plans

You're reading 2.0 right now! Gothic is a massive shake-up to both this deck and the meta at large. The plethora of new forced movement effects, the powerful new units and monster synergies, and the backup copy of Mariner's Curse that is Thin Ice has fundamentally changed the power-level of this deck in ways I did not expect. Additionally, the meta has slowed down significantly, with less of an emphasis of value-based aggro and more of an emphasis on midrange. These changes are both great news for this deck, allowing us to trim previously necessary cards like [[Amulet of Niniane]] and [[Blasted Oak]] in favor of more cards that synergize with our core strategy.

In terms of testing, I'm still evaluating the exact number of each spell in the deck. Namely, I have my eyes on [[Font of Life]], [[Wave of Eviction]] and [[Overflow]]. I'm very high on Font of Life and Overflow, but I'm unsure how necessary they are in the slower meta. Jumping ahead on curve seems very powerful, hence why I'm on the full playset of Overflow, and gaining back lots of life can really move the game in our favor, but they may not be necessary depending on how well positioned we are in the meta. Similarly, [[Wave of Eviction]] is one of the strongest forced movement effects I've ever seen, but with so many excellent forced movement effects in our minion selection, I'm not sure its necessary.

Likely, I will be altering the count of spells and specific effects as I work to identify exactly which of the pillars of the deck need to be increased or decreased in the current landscape.

Drown in the Deep

@ZenatheShadow