General Blue creatures

[Lucre]

I had a jeskai elder doing awesome things with fire Ice and opt etc

When you can make it a 2/3 before combat and then have an instant you find useful in the tank things get really interesting. It has a lot of once bitten twice shy appeal when you have a full mitten of cards.

 

[adm326]

? Too weak? Un-fun? Fundamentally a control card? It certainly encourages blue decks to run some sorcery speed cards with spell-like abilities (I have not tested this)

 

[CML]

constructed card. no way to draft around in cube afaik

 

[Chris Taylor]

I feel like people trying to cram in extra blue creatures for the sake of having more dorks in every colour are missing blues point and the point of having great fixing. We don't need to have a dumb attacking creatures deck in every colour, if you really want to have one, do it intentionally with say a really well thought out delver/tokens strategy, graveyard/madness deck, tradewind/ devotion deck. Blue has tonnes of great spells that require support to be strong and other colours have amazing creatures and permanents that would love the support of blue's enablers and disruption.

Making everything even isn't being thoughtful about how different archetypes rely on some colours more than others.

I just want blue to have more than one deck in it. I love the variety that comes from white having control and aggro pieces, and different but overlapping aggro pieces therin. I love that black has pod and sacrifice guys and control guys, and that those all weave into eachother because skinrender is 1) a zombie 2) with an ETB trigger 3) that kills something, and so is a home run for all 3.

Blue doesn't do shit. Every god damn blue deck in your average cube has been the same boring combination of counters/draw/card selection/remand/finishers, or it's been god damn storm or show and tell!
I think it's really really boring when every single card in a given color is aligned to the same goals. There's no draft tension there when that much redundancy exists, you just get the same boring deck each and every time. Same reason my red section has control and midrange elements, and isn't the same pile of 50% burn spells that makes mono red successful in every cube ever that doesn't actively try and break that.

I don't want a "Dumb Attacking Deck" in every color. I blue drafters to be doing something other than draw go.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I don't know, blue is great in tempo (man-o'-war, evasion, bounce), great in control (counterspells, card draw), and great in reanimator (card filtering). All three of those archetypes play differently.

 

[Chris Taylor]

The thing with blue aggro, is thats its not aggro, its aggro disruption. You pretty much never want to be curving out with dudes, but instead relying on bounce and counters to disrupt the opponents game plan, while cracking in for damage. The mono U delver decks in pauper have really no hard permenent removal, but it just dosen't matter when you are beating in with threats while keeping the opponents threats off the board. The old RUG delver decks in legacy were similar, but relied on stifle and wasteland to disrupt the opponent while mongooses and delvers beat them to death. Same with infect, it lacks hard board removal, and just relies on FOW and daze to disrupt enough to kill you.

One of the core problems with the deck in cube, as a blue base strategy, is a lack of sufficent supporting cards. Merfolk themselves are very narrow, faeries as a disruptive strategy is inheriently limited by lack of access to spellstutter sprite and the lack of good faerie density, cloudfin raptor goes against the basic strategy, while delver requires a host of TOL manipulators to be consistent.

That leaves you with phantasmal bear, which is a bad card compared to what every other aggro color can do, and isn't evasive. You need cheap evasive plays or flash creatures so you can keep your counters up while clocking in. Thats why delver, spellstutter sprite, and cursecatcher are good in their respective decks.

The other problem it has is that the more you raise the power level, you start to have an effect where removal has to be ramped up to match the threats, which in turn means that creatures have to have good ETBs to be impactful. At that point, not only does bounce become much worse, but the ETB creatures from other colors begin to compete with blue for meaningful tempo plays.

And the last problem is that people just build the decks wrong, or the designers poorly implement tempo into the cube (I have been guilty of this on both fronts). They want to draft, build, and play the deck like its sligh (disaster, blue can't compete in the direct aggro department); or they focus on spells at the expense of threat density; or the designer starts running cards that have a historical reputation as "tempo cards" but with no real appreciation for how a tempo strategy should be executed within the context of their respective format.

There's a lot of problems with this approach though. Blue has a lack of good 1-2 drops, so if you're trying to wasteland/stifle/bounce to keep the game in the early stages, you start out behind, not ahead. You don't wasteland your opponent when their board is stromkirk noble and plateau and yours is island. A full grip of 7 actual copies of counterspell does jack if you have a vaporkin and they have goblin piker: They have more threats then you have counters, and if a single creature, removal spell, manland, or pump spell gets through suddenly you're losing that race. God forbid they have something like ash zealot or tarmogoyf or daring skyjek and you're losing the race already.
The only ways I've found this to work is either if the 1 drop is sometimes better than their next creature anyways (Delver, sometimes), or if everyone's curve is shit, but nobody wants to be playing cube decks that don't do anything worth caring about until turn 3: Nobody gets to play any magic that way.

I do want to say: Phantasmal Bear is literally blue Isamaru unless your opponent has cards like Giant Growth, Cunning Sparkmage, or Harm's Way. Trust me: Anything else would have killed him anyways, or worse.

The two exceptions to this are bounce spells (which you should be the one drafting) and threaten effects, where the downside is also half upside.

 

[Lucre]

I just want blue to have more than one deck in it. I love the variety that comes from white having control and aggro pieces, and different but overlapping aggro pieces therin. I love that black has pod and sacrifice guys and control guys, and that those all weave into eachother because skinrender is 1) a zombie 2) with an ETB trigger 3) that kills something, and so is a home run for all 3.

Blue doesn't do shit. Every god damn blue deck in your average cube has been the same boring combination of counters/draw/card selection/remand/finishers, or it's been god damn storm or show and tell!
I think it's really really boring when every single card in a given color is aligned to the same goals. There's no draft tension there when that much redundancy exists, you just get the same boring deck each and every time. Same reason my red section has control and midrange elements, and isn't the same pile of 50% burn spells that makes mono red successful in every cube ever that doesn't actively try and break that.

I don't want a "Dumb Attacking Deck" in every color. I blue drafters to be doing something other than draw go.

Umm blue more or less has to have more than one deck in it because it's essential for most synergy archetypes and almost essential for tempo and control decks. It does things most colours want but cannot do for themselves.
Cramming idiot creatures without really thematically pairing them with other archetypes or a colour wide theme just dillutes those decks and makes it really hard to have more than one at the table.

Deuces.

 

[Chris Taylor]

I don't know, blue is great in tempo (man-o'-war, evasion, bounce), great in control (counterspells, card draw), and great in reanimator (card filtering). All three of those archetypes play differently.

Tempo is what I'm defending adding here, control is what I'm calling boring, and reanimator (when it does work) has the problem where your cards are shit individually and backbreaking in combination. Merfolk Looter is mediocre on it's own, as is Animate Dead, and whatever creature you're pooping out is probably fine when cast, but do all that early enough and the game is just over.

You need to walk a fine line between fast enough to be worth doing over just ramping the thing out (Yay, turn 4 frost titan? Woo?), and slow enough that the game isn't just over (Turn 2 Griselbrand, kill you), as well as resiliant enough that you aren't a joke blanked by a single removal spell (Getting your fattie pathed and then getting run over sucks), but not so resilient the only way to interact is graveyard hate and counterspells (A la legacy reanimator)

That's a lot of knobs to turn and adjust when the result is quite often drawing the wrong half of your deck and needing to fall back to being a bad version of control.

 

[Eric Chan]

I don't know, blue is great in tempo (man-o'-war, evasion, bounce), great in control (counterspells, card draw), and great in reanimator (card filtering). All three of those archetypes play differently.

This has been my experience as well. You have your:

• control decks
• control decks
• delver + burn decks
• tempo decks
• value decks
• ramp decks
• reanimator decks

And then any combination of the above, like Bant tempo, Esper control, and BUG ramp + reanimator. I'd venture a guess that blue is actually the most multifaceted colour, at least over here.

If we're talking boring, I'd nominate red or white, long before blue.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Umm blue more or less has to have more than one deck in it because it's essential for most synergy archetypes and almost essential for tempo and control decks. It does things most colours want but cannot do for themselves.
Cramming idiot creatures without really thematically pairing them with other archetypes or a colour wide theme just dillutes those decks and makes it really hard to have more than one at the table.

Deuces.

We might be talking past eachother here: cramming in anything without pairing it with other archetypes is just going to dilute whatever your adding it to at all, be that creatures or otherwise

I'm not talking about a blue section without mana leak. I'm talking about a blue section that isn't 70% mana leak.

 

[Eric Chan]

That's a lot of knobs to turn and adjust when the result is quite often drawing the wrong half of your deck and needing to fall back to being a bad version of control.

Yeah, I will agree that tuning reanimator to be fun and powerful but not too consistent in cube has been challenging. Exhume an Iona or Griselbrand into Reanimate is nobody's idea of a good time, but Merfolk Looter to dig for your Dread Return on a Sheoldred only to see it eat a Swords to Plowshares isn't great either. Especially since the deck requires so many moving parts, many of which could be considered poison principle-y.

I've considered ditching the archetype altogether, but every time someone puts it together and goes 1-2 they're having the most fun at the whole table. At its power level here, it's a real Timmy + Johnny archetype, without an ounce of Spike in it.

 

[Diakonov]

Here's how I see the basic breakdown of my cube colors in unbearably unscientific terms:

White is present in the whole spectrum from aggro to control. It contributes to some specific archetypes but has the least amount of durdling (Lucre's point of cutting white).

Blue is mainly for control, and on occasion for tempo-aggro. It's pretty durdly in supporting specific archetypes like spells matter, reanimator, etc.

Black is present in the whole spectrum from aggro to control, though its aggro game is a little wimpy. It also has a relatively high durdling factor with creatures dying/graveyard.

Red is aggro and midrange, and very occasionally contributes to control. I've been pushing hard to increase its durdliness to let it become more accessible as an archetype enabler with reasonable results so far.

Green can do the aggro thing, but prefers midrange and control. Green does all sorts of things. It's doing great.


In order for each color to be as interesting as possible, they should each be able to contribute in a reasonable way to the whole aggro-control spectrum. In addition to that, I want each color to have its own specific identities which contribute to certain archetypes and synergies.

Coming from mtgsalvation, red was the biggest problem initially. It was filled with super-aggressive creatures and burn. I swear, by 2025 the entire red section in mtgsalvation cubes will be comprised only of variously titled Incinerates. After hacking away at it for over a year, it now stretches comfortably into midrange and has a lot more synergistic interactions with certain archetypes.

I've come to the same conclusion as Chris that blue is next. It does do some interesting things to contribute to other archetypes, but on the axis of deck-speed, it largely only helps the slow decks. I love seeing the tempo-style aggro decks come together, but I want to see that happen more often. Blue already has the spells (Daze, Distortion Strike, etc.), but it could use a FEW more decent aggro creatures to support whatever other color it becomes paired with. If I decide to go UW aggro, I don't want ALL of my creatures to have to be white.

If blue was a dish served in a food competition, the judges would say "seasoned well; could use more meat."

 

[Chris Taylor]

... I swear, by 2025 the entire red section in mtgsalvation cubes will be comprised only of variously titled Incinerates. After hacking away at it for over a year, it now stretches comfortably into midrange and has a lot more synergistic interactions with certain archetypes.

Top Kek XD

I feel you on the all white creatures blue aggro deck, but unfortunatly I've basically had to make up every creature that cost 1-2.

You know what makes green really great though? Birthing pod. It's midrangey, but it's midrangey in it's own unique way that plays differently and has lots of interesting sequencing and drafting decisions (As long as the right answer isn't just "go find kiki-jiki and kill you" I guess).
Blue has no such weird deck that that deviates like that (We've been over reanimator), it's kinda just more control, or tempo with no early game curve.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

There's a lot of problems with this approach though. Blue has a lack of good 1-2 drops, so if you're trying to wasteland/stifle/bounce to keep the game in the early stages, you start out behind, not ahead. You don't wasteland your opponent when their board is stromkirk noble and plateau and yours is island. A full grip of 7 actual copies of counterspell does jack if you have a vaporkin and they have goblin piker: They have more threats then you have counters, and if a single creature, removal spell, manland, or pump spell gets through suddenly you're losing that race. God forbid they have something like ash zealot or tarmogoyf or daring skyjek and you're losing the race already.
The only ways I've found this to work is either if the 1 drop is sometimes better than their next creature anyways (Delver, sometimes), or if everyone's curve is shit, but nobody wants to be playing cube decks that don't do anything worth caring about until turn 3: Nobody gets to play any magic that way.

I do want to say: Phantasmal Bear is literally blue Isamaru unless your opponent has cards like Giant Growth, Cunning Sparkmage, or Harm's Way. Trust me: Anything else would have killed him anyways, or worse.

The two exceptions to this are bounce spells (which you should be the one drafting) and threaten effects, where the downside is also half upside.

Yeah, I'm not disputing any of those situations would be problems. I'm just saying that these decks thrive on presenting a combination of early pressure and disruption, and to be viable you need to give them disruptive tools and cheap threats porportional to the environment they inhabit.

You shouldn't be racing with these decks, and having a blue Isamaru isn't something they should really be in the market for. If you find yourself in the position where you are racing than you (by definition) don't have a tempo advantage, which means you are not executing your strategy effectively.

With the goyf example above, these types of decks would be more interested in generating tokens with a young pyromancer to stall the goyf, growing a swiftspear or seeker to kill it, vapor snaging it to waste their next turn while hitting with delver, casting a treasure cruise to shrink it, dropping a dungeon geist to tap it than swinging with your team, or brainstorming to grow a lorescale coatl that eats it in combat.

Counters are not for hitting everything; they are there to disrupt: hitting key spells that setback the opponents game plan while advancing yours.

KTK has provided a number of great cheap prowess threats in red and white that work amazingly with blues cheap counters and cantrips, and its only going to get better in this next set.

 

[James Stevenson]

You know what makes green really great though? Birthing pod.

The most fun I've ever had in cube may have been this one time I Mindslavered my opponent and tried to find a way for him to kill himself with his pod deck. I ended up trying to make as a big as possible a token from voice of resurgence, then decking himself with Garruk, Primal Hunter. It almost worked! I was a couple cards short but I'm convinced there was a way. So many options with that deck!

 

[Chris Taylor]

Yeah, I'm not disputing any of those situations would be problems. I'm just saying that these decks thrive on presenting a combination of early pressure and disruption, and to be viable you need to give them disruptive tools and cheap threats porportional to the environment they inhabit.

You shouldn't be racing with these decks, and having a blue Isamaru isn't something they should really be in the market for. If you find yourself in the position where you are racing than you (by definition) don't have a tempo advantage, which means you are not executing your strategy effectively.

With the goyf example above, these types of decks would be more interested in generating tokens with a young pyromancer to stall the goyf, growing a swiftspear or seeker to kill it, vapor snaging it to waste their next turn while hitting with delver, casting a treasure cruise to shrink it, dropping a dungeon geist to tap it than swinging with your team, or brainstorming to grow a lorescale coatl that eats it in combat.

Counters are not for hitting everything; they are there to disrupt: hitting key spells that setback the opponents game plan while advancing yours.

KTK has provided a number of great cheap prowess threats in red and white that work amazingly with blues cheap counters and cantrips, and its only going to get better in this next set.

The problem then arises when everything your opponent does demands this kind of attention. Dungeon geists is well and good, but those kind of 2-for-1 creatures don't exist at all mana costs, and spending turns 1-3 on the back foot followed by trying to claw your way back in usually ends up not working, since (on average) your creatures are worse than theirs.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

The problem then arises when everything your opponent does demands this kind of attention. Dungeon geists is well and good, but those kind of 2-for-1 creatures don't exist at all mana costs, and spending turns 1-3 on the back foot followed by trying to claw your way back in usually ends up not working, since (on average) your creatures are worse than theirs.

I don't know what to tell you, if you are playing a tempo deck and reacting to your opponent constantly, you are not really playing a tempo deck, at least not well, and you should expect to lose at that point.

Dungeon geists is just one example of a disruptive play that applies pressure, and not even an ideal one due to its mana cost.

 

[Diakonov]

I generally would expect an aggro-tempo deck to struggle a bit against another equal-speed aggro deck. They really shine against midrange where regular aggro would have some trouble.

 

[Chris Taylor]

I don't know what to tell you, if you are playing a tempo deck and reacting to your opponent constantly, you are not really playing a tempo deck, at least not well, and you should expect to lose at that point.

Nobody's going to spend their turn doing something worth ignoring, or not doing anything at all: they're either spending it killing your sparse ammount of creatures or outclassing them

I generally would expect an aggro-tempo deck to struggle a bit against another equal-speed aggro deck. They really shine against midrange where regular aggro would have some trouble.

This might sadly be the heart of it. A lot of what I'm hearing about blue tempo-y things are about capitalizing on your opponent stumbling, and if the curve of the format is low, that doesn't really happen. (FSR's whole 80% of every color but green costs 3 or less idea)

 

[FlowerSunRain]

White/Blue Heroic has been one of the most consistently successful decks in my cube. Your creatures are way more mana efficient and big then your opponent's thanks to auras so you are basically always the aggressor and then your blue disruption keeps you in the lead. Blue is vital to the deck and gives it unique character: this deck plays completely from the white/red version which relies on pure speed or the black/white version which banks on efficiency.

I know this isn't the answer you are looking for at all because its "just a variant of white aggro", but it has been a satisfactory solution for me. Red/blue and black/blue aggressive decks opportunistically pop up here and there when the draft pool falls right (and I expect that to increase with more prowess including PROWESS FLYING MAN coming next update) which is more then enough variety for me.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Nobody's going to spend their turn doing something worth ignoring, or not doing anything at all: they're either spending it killing your sparse ammount of creatures or outclassing them....This might sadly be the heart of it. A lot of what I'm hearing about blue tempo-y things are about capitalizing on your opponent stumbling, and if the curve of the format is low, that doesn't really happen. (FSR's whole 80% of every color but green costs 3 or less idea)

hmmm...I feel like we are talking past each other here.

Are we having a productive discussion about implementing blue aggro-disruption strategies in cube, or is this about venting over past difficulties getting those strategies to work?

If this is about justifying a bad experience in cube design, there is nothing really constructive I can see coming out of this. It seems like every suggestion or insight provided is just being shot down. Personally, I feel the crux of the argument (lack of cheap blue beaters) was nixed many posts ago when multiple people pointed out that blue has a rich selection of cheap threats it can take from the other colors to compliment its already deep selection of disruptive counters and bounce.

I'm still not sure you're understanding the archetype either (and please don't take that as an ad hominem). Its not about "capitalizing on your opponent stumbling" (though it can certaintly do that) its about proactively making them stumble and capitalizing on it. That is why I keep on talking about cheap threats and disruption. Think stifle on a fetchland in legacy, spellstutter on a ponder in pauper, or cursecatcher and wasterland crippling an opponent in vintage. It really has nothing to do with how low the curve is. These also aren't threat light decks. Think of the threat density of RUG delver in legacy, merfolk in vintage (or delver for that matter), the old UW delver decks in standard, standard UB faeries, or mono U in pauper.

Now, its possible that a tempo deck might not be viable in your format as is. I don't know how your decks play out or what would constitute effective disruption, but it is certainly an achievable goal. Between being able to break singleton, running multi-picks, or just coming up with custom cards, you should be able to craft a combination of cheap threats--porportional to your formats power level--and effective disruption.

This is just a much more difficult archetype to design for, because its so ingrained with what the format is doing, and effective disruption can take many different forms: thoughtseize, mesmeric fiend, mystic snake, ninja of the deep hours, counterspell, snap, dungeon geists, young pyromancer, man-o'-war, stifle, daze. However, if you run too many ETBs, suddenly bounce is bad; too many mana accelerents, daze is dead; no fetchlands, stifle does nothing; fast curve, mystic snake is terrible, etc.

At any rate I don't want to argue. I've been down this design hole before, and if you want to talk about the archetype in cube, I'm open to that discussion. With your level of open-mindedness towards design I'm sure there are a lot of great creative solutions to be found.

 

[Chris Taylor]

White/Blue Heroic has been one of the most consistently successful decks in my cube. Your creatures are way more mana efficient and big then your opponent's thanks to auras so you are basically always the aggressor and then your blue disruption keeps you in the lead. Blue is vital to the deck and gives it unique character: this deck plays completely from the white/red version which relies on pure speed or the black/white version which banks on efficiency.

I know this isn't the answer you are looking for at all because its "just a variant of white aggro", but it has been a satisfactory solution for me. Red/blue and black/blue aggressive decks opportunistically pop up here and there when the draft pool falls right (and I expect that to increase with more prowess including PROWESS FLYING MAN coming next update) which is more then enough variety for me.

PROWESS FLYING MEN MASTER RACE

 

[Chris Taylor]

hmmm...I feel like we are talking past each other here.

Are we having a productive discussion about implementing blue aggro-disruption strategies in cube, or is this about venting over past difficulties getting those strategies to work?

If this is about justifying a bad experience in cube design, there is nothing really constructive I can see coming out of this. It seems like every suggestion or insight provided is just being shot down. Personally, I feel the crux of the argument (lack of cheap blue beaters) was nixed many posts ago when multiple people pointed out that blue has a rich selection of cheap threats it can take from the other colors to compliment its already deep selection of disruptive counters and bounce.

I'm still not sure you're understanding the archetype either (and please don't take that as an ad hominem). Its not about "capitalizing on your opponent stumbling" (though it can certaintly do that) its about proactively making them stumble and capitalizing on it. That is why I keep on talking about cheap threats and disruption. Think stifle on a fetchland in legacy, spellstutter on a ponder in pauper, or cursecatcher and wasterland crippling an opponent in vintage. It really has nothing to do with how low the curve is. These also aren't threat light decks. Think of the threat density of RUG delver in legacy, merfolk in vintage (or delver for that matter), the old UW delver decks in standard, standard UB faeries, or mono U in pauper.

Now, its possible that a tempo deck might not be viable in your format as is. I don't know how your decks play out or what would constitute effective disruption, but it is certainly an achievable goal. Between being able to break singleton, running multi-picks, or just coming up with custom cards, you should be able to craft a combination of cheap threats--porportional to your formats power level--and effective disruption.

This is just a much more difficult archetype to design for, because its so ingrained with what the format is doing, and effective disruption can take many different forms: thoughtseize, mesmeric fiend, mystic snake, ninja of the deep hours, counterspell, snap, dungeon geists, young pyromancer, man-o'-war, stifle, daze. However, if you run too many ETBs, suddenly bounce is bad; too many mana accelerents, daze is dead; no fetchlands, stifle does nothing; fast curve, mystic snake is terrible, etc.

At any rate I don't want to argue. I've been down this design hole before, and if you want to talk about the archetype in cube, I'm open to that discussion. With your level of open-mindedness towards design I'm sure there are a lot of great creative solutions to be found.

Oh god that's a revealing sentence. Pod means there's lots of ETBs running around, my cube has a low curve so mystic snake has been bad, fetchlands are common but not commonplace enough for stifle to be more than niche,
Daze....I dunno people don't like bouncing their lands? Maybe my friends just don't like daze.
I should add some more dazes. Maybe Snap, Snap seems sweet.

Ima do some research.

Also: this is why I have a problem talking about blue creatures. Here's a comprehensive list of blue creatures at 1-2cmc that are not custom in my cube:




Not exactly a powerhouse crowd is it? I've had to make custom EVERYTHING because I couldn't find anything anywhere that did what I wanted (Which apparently included having 2 power)

How do you guys do it?

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Seriously. First you guys are yapping about how blue has no aggressive 1- and 2-drops, then you complain that you can't make Cloudfin Raptor work because there is nothing to follow it up with. Are you guys looking for a mono blue aggro deck? Because that isn't blue's role in the color wheel. I don't understand how people can be fine with green not being an aggro color, although green has a lot of aggressive drops and could support aggro (at the cost of other interesting options), but hate blue not being able to support aggro, when it can even though it's supposed to be by far the worst color at it. Even a lowly Man-o'-War can make Cloudfin Raptor a 2/3, which is enough to make it an efficient beater! And Man-o'-War is an exemplary inclusion in blue's aggro decks. Your opponent better hope he drafted a decent deck or he's going to have a tough time beating Cloudfin Raptor into Vapor Kin into Man-o'-War into Dungeon Geist. (Oops. That was a mono blue hand. Guess it can only get better with support from other colors.)

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Chris, what really hits your format hard? How do your games develop, and what is an effective way to disrupt the development of your different archetypes. Go wide with the brainstorming. Are your green decks vulnerable to having their mana dorks killed? Do your aggro decks burn out after a certain point if they can't get damage in? Are your midrange decks playing a bunch of higher CC threats?




Just to give an idea of how broad this can become. Tactics disrupts people that want to race or use damage removal on your creatures; aether mutation is a beating on people running big midrange dudes; vines provides damage, board control, and a removal counter; savage punch provides damage and board control; geist flame can disrupt mana dork strategies; and ambush viper can kill a threat before feeding a stitched drake. I know those arn't mostly blue cards, but no one plays mono colored decks, and you have to consider how blue can interact with the other colors.

The playability of cards as disruptive pieces is going to change dramatically based on the format they are in. Daze, for example, is probably bad in your format because you are running double birds, double elvish mystic, joraga treespeaker, noble hierarch, and a bunch of other mana dorks in your green 2 and 3cc spots. Its safe to say, I think, that cursecatcher effects (or forcespike) will not be as effective here as they would be elsewhere.

Once you have an idea of what constitutes effective disruption, then you'll have a better idea of what threats can best take advantage of that disruption.

I'm not sure about your bounce, you don't seem to have much of it, and cheap bounce can be used with ETB creatures to get more value out of them while also acting as a possible removal counter, aka vapor snagging your own evoked shriekmaw is a great feeling.