Definitely agree with the one hundred and twenty-third white wolf. It isn't necessary to dilute the cube to support blue tempo decks. The cards are all very sweet, cubeable cards that have uses outside of blue tempo.
But if you want to support blue tempo, you can only do it by including a critical density of these specific good cards, at the expense of other good cards.
We have no problem paring down the number of totally sweet 5+ drops in other colors to support non-control applications of those colors, so supporting blue tempo is mostly just a matter of applying that same thinking to your blue section. Blue tempo doesn't have enough redundancy to reliably start the show with a 1-drop every game, but it isn't that far off from the other colors despite that.
Good catch on Phantasmal Bear, Phantizle. Going to need to give him another look and see if blue wants the 1-drop badly enough. He's not totally synergistic with the rest of the color, but might be undercosted enough to get in there anyway.
It is a very sweet deck that can keep many other archetypes on their back feet long enough to win. The main thing that is needed if you want to support monoblue tempo is the same thing needed to support any kind of aggro in any other color: you actually have to have creatures in your cube.
Your blue section should look like your other color sections, where the meaningful creature curve starts at 1 and 2, and 50%+ of the cards in that color are creatures. Doing this means raising the bar for epic blue spells and killing some darlings as far as blue control finishers. The secret here is that way more than half of the cards that are needed for blue tempo are also perfectly acceptable plays for blue control.
Ninjutsu is awesome in blue tempo. Ninja of the Deep Hours and Mistblade Shinobi are both quite good. Apart from that and the theme of bodies with bounce attached, building for blue tempo isn't actually that different from building for aggro in other colors -- you need to make sure that you have sweet playable bodies up and down the curve, in enough density that one person could realistically get 4-5 of them each at 2 and 3 mana.
From there, the same mana-efficient counters that are awesome in the early game in control are blue tempo's bread and butter. You want all of your counterspell, mana leak, memory lapse, arcane denial, remand, condescend, daze, FoW, misdirection-type of cards that are cubeable anyway -- you just don't trim a bunch of them in order to run a bunch of draining-whelk style 4+ mana counters.
Just like you don't trim a bunch of lightning bolts in order to run more wildfires -- there is one guy at the table who wants wildfires and is going to very easily table all of them. Meanwhile there are potentially lots of people fighting over bolts.
Below is something very close to the blue section from my non-powered cube. It is admittedly pretty far along the spectrum toward supporting aggro and tempo decks, but I assure you that if you don't make the curve of your blue section an exception to everything that makes sense in cube for all the other colors, then you'll wind up with sweet blue tempo decks. And yes, the control decks will be just fine at using these cards to stall, take opponents to valuetown, and resolve absurd finishers.
But if you want to support blue tempo, you can only do it by including a critical density of these specific good cards, at the expense of other good cards.
We have no problem paring down the number of totally sweet 5+ drops in other colors to support non-control applications of those colors, so supporting blue tempo is mostly just a matter of applying that same thinking to your blue section. Blue tempo doesn't have enough redundancy to reliably start the show with a 1-drop every game, but it isn't that far off from the other colors despite that.
Good catch on Phantasmal Bear, Phantizle. Going to need to give him another look and see if blue wants the 1-drop badly enough. He's not totally synergistic with the rest of the color, but might be undercosted enough to get in there anyway.
It is a very sweet deck that can keep many other archetypes on their back feet long enough to win. The main thing that is needed if you want to support monoblue tempo is the same thing needed to support any kind of aggro in any other color: you actually have to have creatures in your cube.
Your blue section should look like your other color sections, where the meaningful creature curve starts at 1 and 2, and 50%+ of the cards in that color are creatures. Doing this means raising the bar for epic blue spells and killing some darlings as far as blue control finishers. The secret here is that way more than half of the cards that are needed for blue tempo are also perfectly acceptable plays for blue control.
Ninjutsu is awesome in blue tempo. Ninja of the Deep Hours and Mistblade Shinobi are both quite good. Apart from that and the theme of bodies with bounce attached, building for blue tempo isn't actually that different from building for aggro in other colors -- you need to make sure that you have sweet playable bodies up and down the curve, in enough density that one person could realistically get 4-5 of them each at 2 and 3 mana.
From there, the same mana-efficient counters that are awesome in the early game in control are blue tempo's bread and butter. You want all of your counterspell, mana leak, memory lapse, arcane denial, remand, condescend, daze, FoW, misdirection-type of cards that are cubeable anyway -- you just don't trim a bunch of them in order to run a bunch of draining-whelk style 4+ mana counters.
Just like you don't trim a bunch of lightning bolts in order to run more wildfires -- there is one guy at the table who wants wildfires and is going to very easily table all of them. Meanwhile there are potentially lots of people fighting over bolts.
Below is something very close to the blue section from my non-powered cube. It is admittedly pretty far along the spectrum toward supporting aggro and tempo decks, but I assure you that if you don't make the curve of your blue section an exception to everything that makes sense in cube for all the other colors, then you'll wind up with sweet blue tempo decks. And yes, the control decks will be just fine at using these cards to stall, take opponents to valuetown, and resolve absurd finishers.