Flying decks are one of the weakest yellow archetypes. They could really use a buff. I think their biggest problem is that the flying keyword isn’t useful against a lot of the most popular decks.
Rush forces you to stay near your orb and fill out the land spaces around you, which means the flying keyword doesn’t do much at all. It doesn’t even seem to be possible to win against yellow rush with yellow flying, unless I’m missing something. It’s just too slow.
Drakkar Skycaptain’s ability is especially too slow against rush decks. It doesn’t help if creatures in your hand are buffed if your opponent kills you before you have time to attack with them.
Flyers are a bit better against burn, but flying also isn’t too useful against them. Burn can easily stay near their own orb and still win the match. The flying mobility isn’t that much of an advantage if your opponent barely needs to move at all.
A lot of the flying creatures have really health, which makes creatures like Demon Wing and Iona die too easily. Since burn can deal damage from anywhere on the map, it’s really easy for them to just kill the flying creatures as they’re summoned. It’s hard to accomplish anything with them if they die right after being played.
The Golden Aviary is a bit underwhelming. It’s only useful if you already have a few flying creatures on the board when you play it. Otherwise, it tends to be a dead card. It could probably be buffed, to give a bigger incentive to play flying decks. As it is, it’s not even essential to a flying deck.
I would also like it if there were incentives to play flying decks other than mono yellow. I’ve tried other color variants and they’re really bad.
Flying is one of my favorite archetypes, but I very rarely play it since it’s hard to win with it against a lot of popular decks. It’s not popular at all among other players either. I’ve only played against flying decks around four times in the last month.
