It’s All about Control
Peter Jahn
I have been playing a lot of constructed online, in all the various rooms and formats. I have seen a lot of good decks – and a lot of decks that will never be good. Good or not good starts with deck design - and deck design starts with one simple rule. Too many people don’t know the rule. Do you?
For many people, their deck design rule is “do it to them before they can do it to you.” That’s the wrong rule. That rule leads to blazingly fast aggro decks – and in the end only one deck can be the fastest. Every other deck that tries to follow that rule will be, at best, the second fastest beatdown decks. Being the second fastest deck in a tournament is like being second fastest draw in a gunfight – namely, dead.
More importantly fast beatdown decks have to be tightly focused – and this can mean that other decks can use countermeasures effectively. For example, Extended Affinity was clearly the fastest deck coming into Pro Tour LA, but over half the opposing decks found ways to play Kataki, War’s Wage, or comparable cards, and Affinity tanked.
Other peoples’ rule seems to be “concentrate on doing your thing effectively, and the winning will take care of itself.” These are generally combo players, and while combo has been good at times, that is generally when Wizards has made a mistake – or people have found cards from widely different sets that have amazing synergy. Wizards tries very hard not to make that mistake – and if your combo deck is not amazingly fast, it is not going to win.
People with this rule are easy to spot. They are the ones asking for games with “no land destruction, no counters, no burn, no attacking me until turn 7.”
Here’s the real rule: “Make sure they can’t do it to you, then do it to them.” Yes – control. You build a winning deck by incorporating enough control to make sure that the opponent cannot execute their plans – and only after that do you execute yours. This does not mean that decks need to be pure control – but they need critical mass of control elements to be successful.
Control decks can be built to control everything. Years ago, I played – and played against – the classic mono-blue control decks. These decks had 25+ lands, a lot of counters (plus the reusable Forbid), card drawing and Capsize, to get rid of anything they could not counter. These decks really did lock the opponent out of the game, then win with an animated Stalking Stones – one of the lands which had powered all the counters and card drawing earlier. (Note: if you want the text of any of the cards not yet available online, like Forbid, check out Wizard’s official source, the Gatherer.)
On the other end of the spectrum, a couple of the best combo decks of all time had a critical control element. Trix, for example, used Donate to give opponents Illusions of Grandeur. That particular combination was annoying, but strictly a casual deck until Michelle Bush added Necropotence, Force of Will and – most importantly – Duress to the mix. Because of the way the stack works, a well timed Disenchant effect could kill not only the Illusions but the Trix player. Duress allowed the Trix player to check for Disenchants – and to pull crucial cards from the opponent’s hand on turn one. Having two control cards – Force of Will and Duress – in a deck may not seem like much, but in a deck that often drew ten cards on turn one, and won on turn two, it was often enough.
Okay, enough about old, dead formats. Let’s look at the current online Standard. The format is fairly varied, but a few archetypes are strong.
Ghazi-Glare is a deck built around Glare of Subdual and a lot of token generators. It is primarily aggro, but Glare is a powerful tool to control enemy creatures. More importantly, it sideboards into a Greater Good / Yosei, the Morning Star control deck. Yosei can beat for five through the air, but that is not her most important ability. More importantly, when Yosei dies, the opponent, in effect, loses a turn. Greater Good means that Yosei can die on command – and score some cards at the same time. On a good day, sacrificing one Yosei will draw you into another Yosei – providing enough of a lock that all the other creatures will be able to finish the job.
Frank Karsten’s Gifts Ungiven deck at Worlds went a step further, using spliced reanimation spells with Greater Good to create a perpetual Yosei lock. His deck also used more traditional Gifts deck control elements, like Kagemaro, First to Suffer, and recursive Cranial Extraction and so forth.
Another seminal archetype is based on Adrian Sullivan’s Eminent Domain deck. That deck uses Dream Leash and Annex to steal opponent’s lands, then Wildfire (sacrificing stolen lands first, of course) to set them back further. It also runs Remand and Icy Manipulator to lock down whatever an opponent can play – then kills them with dragons. Once again, the key is that Eminent Domain prevents the opponent form executing on his or her plan long enough to allow Eminent Domain to accomplish its own kill.
A few mono-blue and base-blue Urzatron continue to float around, proving that no matter how hard WotC tries to step on counters, blue control will always find a way.
My online collection is improving, and I have a dozen decks that are almost good enough to take to a tournament. Those decks, however, only go about 45% against the control decks listed above. On the other hand, they eat the random beatdown and marginal combo decks for breakfast, because I know rule number one. I make sure my opponent cannot do what they are trying to do – generally. However, I do not have the cards to make a deck that can reliably prevent the opponent from getting a Greater Good / Yosei lock – and once they have that, I often lose.
I could write about Ghazi-Glare or other tier one decks, but I’d rather write about something I’ve built. I call this next deck Searing Silliness.
When Ravnica first appeared online, I opened a Searing Meditation (enchantment, whenever you gain life, you can Shock something for 2 mana) in each of my first two leagues, and got another in an early draft. I knew I had to build a deck around the card. To my surprise, the deck was pretty powerful.
Searing Meditation decks clearly call for lifegain. Lifegain is generally not a strong strategy. Take Stream of Life for example: if you tap out to cast this, you generally end up spending a card, a turn and all your mana to do something that basically negates an opponent’s attacks for a turn or so. You haven’t affected the board at all – all the attackers and threats the opponent played are still there. At best, you have delayed losing. At worst, you have wasted a turn while your opponent has continued developing. That sort of behavior is just a mistake – but adding a card like Searing Meditation, which can affect both the board and the opponent’s life total, can make life gain much more useful – because Searing Meditation can affect the board and/or kill the opponent.
In the long run, a combination of reusable life gain and Searing Meditation will win the game (provided your opponent doesn’t kill you first – more on that later.) The current standard format provides several possibilities for reusable life gain. Ghost-Lit Redeemer is a cheap 1/1 that gives you two life a turn for W. Tanglebloom is an artifact that gives just one life, but can use any color of mana. Honden of Cleansing Fire is an enchantment that costs more, but provides life during upkeep automatically. Finally, Firemane Angel provides life gain whether it is in play or in your graveyard.
The combination of life gain and Searing Meditation is not enough – you also have to disrupt your opponent’s attacks. For example, let’s assume you play Ghost-Lit Redeemer on turn one, start using it on turn two and every turn thereafter, play Searing Mediation on turn four and start using it turn five. Your opponent is playing the Grizzly Bear deck – the most basic of all beatdown decks, which has 20 lands and 40 2/2 creatures (bears) costing two mana each. The Grizzly Bear deck will be drawing and playing a bear starting on turn two, and drawing two bears every three turns (and lands on the other turns.) Let’s look at the numbers as a game develops.
|
Turn |
Your Life |
Bears in play |
Opponent’s Life |
|
1 |
20 |
0 |
20 |
|
2 |
22 |
1 |
20 |
|
3 |
22 |
2 |
20 |
|
4 |
20 |
3 |
20 |
|
5 |
16 |
3 |
18 |
|
6 |
12 |
4 |
16 |
|
7 |
6 |
5 |
14 |
|
8 |
dead |
5 |
12 |
In short – your opponent is getting an ever increasing number of attackers in play. You are gaining life – but not enough to offset that. You could start shooting bears with the Searing Meditation – but you still wind up one step behind, and if your opponent is playing Watchwolves or Moldervine Cloaks – anything that makes the bears bigger – that plan does not work.
Searing Meditation and reusable life gain is going to win a long game. It is reusable and survivable. However, the opponent playing beatdown is going for a short game – running you over quickly. That makes Searing Mediation the control deck – and it has to be played that way. Playing the control deck means you have to stop you opponent’s threats, not try to outrace them.
Fortunately, red and white have some excellent answers to beatdown decks. First of all, against decks that drop lots of small, fast beaters, or against mana accelerators like Elves and Birds of Paradise, Pyroclasm is great. It is also very powerful against all the Selesnya decks floating around out there. However, Pyroclasm means that you can’t play Ghost-Lit Redeemer, which dies to Pyroclasm. That makes Tanglebloom better – and even more so if you can avoid playing creatures all together. Having no creatures makes all the Last Gasps or Devouring Lights your opponent may be playing dead cards.
The second answer is Ghostly Prison. Ghostly Prison slows down your opponents’ attacks, or saps their development. If they attack early, they are spending their mana on attacking instead of playing more threats. If they play threats, then they are not attacking. Searing Meditation decks need time to set up – and Ghostly Prison buys time.
Now stopping the short game is fine against aggro decks – but getting to the long game may be what other decks are also trying to accomplish. For example, the Greater Good decks are trying to set up a situation where they can reanimate Yosei, the Morning Star, every turn, then sacrifice it to Greater Good. That requires a lot of mana – meaning that those decks are also looking for a long game.
Fortunately, the two leagues that provided the Searing Meditations also gave me two copies of Razia’s Purification – and I picked up another. They are cheap. Razia’s Purification is a solid answer to almost any deck. Against a dedicated beatdown deck, keeping two Ghostly Prisons means they cannot attack you (unless they keep two double mana lands – like Golgari Rot Farm – and a single creature.) Other options, like a Ghostly Prison and the red and white Hondens, can be even better.
Speaking of the Hondens, they fit nicely into the deck. The red Honden (Honden of Infinite Rage) can deal with a lot of annoying creatures, starting with Birds of Paradise and going up from there. A Honden and Pyroclasm kills Watchwolves, and having two Hondens doubles the damage – and the life gain. More importantly, opponents often have a limited supply of enchantment removal, so if they waste it on a Honden instead of Searing Meditation or Ghostly Prison, so much the better.
When I started building the deck, I had no Sacred Foundries, and only one Battlefield Forge. That meant that mana was a problem – but it also meant that I started playing both Boros Garrison and Boros Signets immediately. These really help with the mana requirements of this deck – and are really good with Razia’s Purification. I have often cast Purification and kept Searing Meditation, Tanglebloom or the white Honden, and a Garrison – and then dropped a second land after casting Purification. That is sufficient to keep going, and to almost completely shuts down most opponents.
When I started playing the deck, I had no Lightning Helixes – which are also a perfect fit for the deck. I played Shocks in thier place. Shock, however, does not do quite as much damage, so sometimes I had trouble dealing with five toughness creatures and the like. I filled in with three Dancing Scimitars – which were, in effect, a flying wall. The deck worked reasonably well, all things considered, in the casual play rooms, but as soon as I got better cards, the Scimitars vanished.
A quick aside: the deck at that point could not hold it’s own against tier one decks (like Greater Good), but could do fairly well against even rare-heavy other decks. For example, I faced a deck with Wood Elves, Farseek and so forth, powering into a full set of foil Ravnica dual lands. Once that deck got its mana going, it dropped Plague Boilers, Wrath of God – and eventually a Myojin of the Cleansing Fire that would wield a Loxodon Warhammer. My opponent got ahead a couple times – but forcing him to blow the divinity counter on the Myojin, then casting Razia’s Purification, set him back often enough to let me win the match. He was pissed. His parting comment: “Your deck is so lame. Some decks are just not fun.” Considering he was playing 12 Wrath of God effects, that comment strikes me as hilarious.
I did take the deck into the tournament practice room, so I needed a sideboard. I played some Bottle Gnomes as a defense against fast decks (e.g. Ninja Rats, etc.) I played Terashi’s Grasp against Jittes and Greater Good (although an instant like Demystify was eventually necessary) and all my Genjus of the Spires to bring in against control decks. I also played some Junktrollers, because a ton of people were playing Glimpse decks at that time, and because they could always double as blockers. Junktrollers also work against dredge cards, and provide some defense against Gifts Ungiven (just return whatever they target with Recollect to the library.)
Over time I have managed to accumulate a playset of Lightning Helixes, plus some of the better duals. Here’s the deck as I am currently playing it.
Searing Silliness
5 Mountain
8 Plains
2 Chastise
4 Tanglebloom
Sideboard
1 Faith's Fetters
4 Terashi's Grasp
The Fireman Angels are nice. Not only are they a nice source of lifegain to trigger Searing Meditation, in long games they are recurrable. The Lightning Helixes provide some additional protection against weenie beatdown, so I don’t need as many Pyroclasms maindeck. Faith’s Fetters also buys time against beatdown, but are solid against a host of decks. Fetters can shut down even cards like Greater Good – if you can get a chance to cast the Fetters.
If I owned the cards, I would make some changes / improvements to this list. The first change, obviously, would be to go up to four Sacred Foundries. After that, the weakest cards in the deck, right now, are probably the Chastises. Chastise does provide an answer to fatties like Keiga or Kokusho – fatties that would be hard to kill with Pyroclasm or Searing Meditation - but Chastise is not a great answer. Even Devouring Light would be better against creatures that regenerate, like Ink-Eyes. Given that, as a four mana answer to problem attackers, I would prefer Wrath of God, which will appear once I open one in draft.
That said, the deck plays pretty well as listed. It has a solid winning record in the Casual Deck room, and is slightly above 50% in the tournament practice room. With better mana (e.g. 4 Sacred Foundries) that would improve.
PRJ
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