Hi guys, Luthervamplord here and I've got a question for you:

If I were to say 'Control'; how many of you would immediately think of cards like Counterspell and Rewind? Quite a few of you I'm sure. I can almost hear some of you guys yelling out 'Dashed Hopes' and again you'd still be falling into a trap that I myself believed for some time.

When I started playing MTG back in Seventh edition I played Mono-U control exclusively because at the time my flavor was control and had always believed that control was purely the domain of Blue - but I now know this is not the case.

You see, there are ways and means to control a game without resorting to counterspells; that is only one of many routes you can take to ruin your opponents day.

Don't know what I mean? Well then this would be the perfect time to hand you over to two of the greatest minds in the Writers Guild - My good friend Tynion and the young-blood they call Amadeus.

Sliding into the Driver Seat

Ask almost anyone the question: How would you build a control deck? They will most likely start off with Blue or counter spells. Some wise guy may start off with creature removal, but they will immediately jump back into the point to be made: most control decks feature Blue. I will be taking a few moments of your time to tell you that this is not entirely true; and I will prove it to you in my Casual Control deck.

Control decks usually inspire the sinking fear that most players experience when the first Island hits the board. It is the feeling that comes to you when you are about to stop the charge and begin digging in the trenches as you prepare for a long game. A Control deck is not truly strong because it can counter your spells. It is strong because it dominates the board, which is ironic, as Blue cannot do that alone. Blue is fear inspiring because it needs White, Red, or Black to be that strong, yet it is the common denominator of each of these deck builds, and so people assume that it is the Island that scares you, when in truth it is the pair of Plains sitting next to the Island that you should fear.

That is unless you are playing a Control deck as well, but that is a story for a different time.

Today we are concentrating on building a Control style deck that does not utilize Blue at all, and if you know me at all, you know that I will be struggling with not being able to touch an Island.

If you were paying attention to my lead in, you know that I don’t really need Blue to be a Control deck, I need Red, Black, or White to be a Control deck. Ever heard of a Mono-Green Control deck, and were scared of it? Given the choices, I will be choosing White for my Control color, as White gives me one of my favorite cards, Wrath of God. I need to be able to really pound the board and do it consistently if I am not going to have counter back up. What it also gives me access too is perhaps my favorite deck style of all time, and that is Astral Slide.

What is better than playing on Magic the Gathering: Online (MTGO) and cycling an Eternal Dragon? You then get to watch your three Astral Slides and two Lightning Rifts all tripping over each other, trying to trigger at one time and get sorted out in order of importance. Then as you progress through the turn, the End Phase comes about and all those creature triggers attempt to spam your screen with order of resolution. Nothing I tell you. Astral Slide is the easiest way to bog down your computer outside of installing a Virus and letting it run rampant just to see what it will do.

The best thing about Astral Slide is that by itself, it is garbage, but accompanied with a handful of cycling cards, you can not only buy yourself numerous turns, but you can dig through your library and save your creatures from an untimely demise all at the same time. For example, I have a morphed creature in play, and you decide to attack with your 2/2 creature, hoping to kill my morphed guy before I can flip him over. I decide to block your guy, much to your pleasure. You ask if I have any thing I would like to do before damage is added to the stack, and I say no, passing priority and moving us along to the damage step. Both of our creatures get two points set above their heads like Acme anvils being held in the air by sheer luck. At this point, you ask if I have any responses, and I in this case I do. I decide that I would like to cycle the Secluded Steppe (cycles for W) in my hand. This adds a card draw and an Astral Slide trigger to the stack (in that order). I target my morphed creature with the Astral Slide, and it slips into the oblivion… face up… and it draws a sigh from my opponent, as it is an Exalted Angel. I then draw my card. With no more triggers on the stack, damage resolves, killing your creature. When you declare that you are done with your turn, Astral Slide triggers again, pulling the Exalted Angel back into play. Now I start my turn and attack with my Angel, gaining four life.

Astral Slide has a lot of synergy with so many cards that I really don’t have the time to touch on them all, but my favorites are the Nightmare creatures and the summoning sickness tricks.

The Nightmare creatures are the guys that come into play and remove something from the game as long as they are in play. The trick comes in when you use Astral Slide to confuse the game of Magic itself.

When Petravark comes into play, you remove target land from the game. When he leaves play, you return that target land to play. Seems simple enough right? Well, when the ‘vark comes into play, its ability triggers and goes to the stack. At this point, you cycle a cheap cycling card and Astral Slide triggers. So now I add the card draw to the stack, followed by the Astral Slide trigger of removing Petravark from the game. So the stack looks like this:

Astral Slide -> Petravark
Draw a card.
Petravark -> Remove a land from the game.

Last in first out remember? So Astral Slide resolves and removes Petravark from the game. Oops! Petravark is leaving play and triggers his second ability. We need to update our stack now.

Petravark -> Return the land to play.
Draw a card.
Petravark -> Remove a land from the game.

Ok, now we can continue, so I resolve the Petravark… except he has not taken a land so there is not one to remove, so it ‘fizzles’. Now I draw a card. Finally, the Petravark removes the land from the game. Note here that the trigger for this land to be returned has already been triggered and resolved. At the end of the turn, Astral Slide triggers again, returning Petravark to play, which triggers his comes into play ability, and at that point, you cycle again, and continue this until your opponent has zero lands in play and they never return.

The other stack fun that I really love is the summoning sickness trick. Say that you cast a Visara the Dreadful. Summing Sickness says that:

I can exploit this rule by waiting until I am in the End Phase of my turn, and then cycling a card which allows Astral Slide to slip Visara out of play until the beginning of the next End Phase. This means that your Visara is not under your control at the beginning of your turn. So she returns with Summoning Sickness still intact. This results in a 5/5 flying Black creature with defender until I run out of cycling cards. Stack tricks are fun when used correctly.

Now, to exploit the Astral Slide to the fullest, we need to look no further than the best card created for Astral Slide: Eternal Witness. The Witness allows me to always have a card to cycle, as when the Witness returns, I grab a card from my grave and put it back into my hand. This is great if all I want to do is draw a card and block, but I need to exploit it, not just utilize it.

Keeping in mind that this is a Control deck and that I need to dominate the board, let me bring out the big guns. I want to make you not want to play against this deck anymore. To do that, I introduce… the grand daddy of all ‘Screw You!’ decks:

The concept here may not be entirely evident at first glance, as it may look to the casual observer to be just another Astral Slide deck, and to some extent, this is true; however, allow me to point out a few cards. First we have Stunted Growth. Stunted Growth, from Ice Age, takes three cards from your opponent’s hand and places them on top of their library. Originally, it was just a stall tactic, and was not used during Ice Age due to Necropotence, but still is a strong card in hind sight. Second, we have Plow Under, which will compliment Stunt Growth by back logging the opponent’s library with their lands. Third we have Loaming Shaman, which stuffs all the cards in the opponent’s graveyard right back into their library, which decreases the quality of their draws. Last we have Creeping Mold, which can kill any permanent that Wrath of God cannot.

So what am I doing? I am designing a deck that will completely restart my opponent. I am not happy until your library is sitting 60 cards tall. That’s right, I want to put all of your lands, creatures, cards in hand, cards in graveyards, all back in to your library. I would normally have a problem if a Wish were cast or something gets removed from the grave via flashback or something like that, but I am still happy that Riftsweeper was printed, as it can grab those removed cards and shuffle them back into the library as well. In fact, Riftsweeper becomes a great compliment to Astral Slide that I originally overlooked. I can cycle a card during my Main Phase, and slip your creature out to the Removed from the Grave zone and it will be scheduled to return at the beginning of the End of Turn Phase. I follow that up with cycling again, and slipping my Riftsweeper out of the game. When the End of Turn Phase rolls in, being the active player and controller of Astral Slide, I choose the order of the triggers being added to the stack. I first place your creatures return, then my Riftsweeper’s trigger. As the Riftsweeper resolves and enters play, I target your creature which is still floating in Astral space, and it resolves, shuffling it back into your library, making the second Astral Slide trigger fail.

With the recursion of Renewed Faith, I get a new card from the top of my library, one from my graveyard (as the Eternal Witness will be returning at the end of my turn – and most likely will give me back the Renewed Faith), and gaining two life; it is very tough to kill me. This will force an opponent to over extend in order to even hurt me. I can then sweep the creatures into the graveyard (but first cycling the Renewed Faith and Sliding away the Witness!) with Wrath of God. Around that point I should begin to draw into my crippling spells.

You may have noted to yourself... but you only have two copies of each of those spells, and I confess… this is a valid point. However, with the amount of cycling, and Plainscycling the deck will undergo – 16 cycling cards, I should still get to those cards fairly frequently.

This concludes my portion of the Controlling the Board Without Blue article, and should prove two things to be true. First, it is not Blue that you should fear, it is White, and secondly, even without Blue, I can still find a way to torture you!

Until we meet again…

-cpn

As Simple as Black and White

When building a deck, I usually have an idea of a strategy that I wish to implement and often one or more cards that I’d like to use. Choice of color usually flows from this. In this exercise we have a strategy that must be implemented, which is to control the board. However, rather than any specific cards, we are simply told that we cannot use Blue cards. Since the restriction is color-based, my analysis will be color-based as well.

It is true that my natural reaction when building a deck that implements a control strategy is to include Blue as a core element. Let’s first take a look at the reasons that this is the case. Controlling the board is about resource advantage: getting it, keeping it, and finding a way to capitalize on it. What is lost when Blue is removed as an option from a control build? The key tools that Blue provides include:

• Instant-speed card draw
• Instant-speed answers
• Quality of targets – “Counter target spell” has very few restrictions other than the fact that the target must be on the stack.
• In conjunction with card draw, the ability to usually hit land drops

For a control build, the primary reason that I rely heavily on Blue is not, in fact, counter magic but rather card advantage provided by card draw, and more specifically instant-speed card draw. A control deck is usually built around card advantage and Blue provides this by allowing me to keep my lands untapped to answer my opponent’s threats and to use up unspent mana on card draw at the end of my opponent’s turn. This type of card advantage is especially powerful due to its versatility – while Wrath of God gains card advantage if your opponent has creatures in play, it is useless against other control decks. Drawing cards is effective against all types of opponents.

However, no color is a complete package. What are the drawbacks of Blue?

• Reactive approach – wait for your opponent to do something and then respond.
• Weak answers to threats once they make it onto the table (bounce doesn’t actually get rid of the threat).
• Little or no mana acceleration
• No answers to problem lands (lands can’t be countered, of course)

In order to make up for these drawbacks the control player is often prompted to incorporate a second color. That color is often White and historically has lead to the popularity of the UW Control archetype. This happens to be my personal favorite deck to play. Black is usually the secondary choice.

Taking this into account, it is important to take a look at what the other colors provide and make a decision on the approach based on that. The analysis will be not of the color as a whole but strictly of the control-oriented aspects of the color.

White

Strengths

• Mass (untargeted) creature removal (e.g. Wrath of God, Austere Command, Rout)
• Limited instant-speed targeted creature removal (e.g. Swords to Plowshares, Condemn)
• Targeted creature removal at Enchantment-speed (e.g. Temporal Isolation, Faith’s Fetter’s, Oblivion Ring)
• Instant-speed artifact and enchantment removal (whether played from hand via Disenchant or invested and played thereafter at instant-speed via Seal of Cleansing)
• Damage prevention (e.g. Circles of Protection, Story Circle)
• Limited counter magic (e.g. Mana Tithe, Rebuff the Wicked, Dawn Charm)

Weaknesses

• Counter magic is weak.
• Land destruction is next to non-existent (Balance is restricted or banned in all formats).
• No discard.

Black

Strengths

• Mass (untargeted) creature removal, usually of the form –x/-x, though not always (e.g. Damnation, Mutilate, Decree of Pain).
• Targeted creature removal, often of the form –x/-x, or with limited targets (e.g. Terror, Last Gasp, Sudden Death).
• Some useful cross-color removal options, such as Mortify with White, Putrefy with Green, and Wrecking Ball with Red.
• Discard, both targeted and untargeted (e.g. Hymn to Tourach, Stupor, Duress, Thoughtseize).
• Limited counter magic (e.g. Dash Hopes).
• Land destruction (e.g. Rain of Tears, Rancid Earth, Befoul, Despoil).
• Deck neutering effects (e.g. Cranial Extraction, Extirpate).
• Card draw (e.g. Ambition’s Cost, Dark Confidant, Night’s Whisper).

Weaknesses

• Counter magic is weak.
• Costs sometimes require payment of life, especially in the area of card draw.
• Enchantment and artifact removal is almost non-existent.

Red

Strengths

• Mass (untargeted) creature removal, usually by way of causing damage (e.g. Pyroclasm, Pyrohemia, Steam Blast).
• Targeted creature removal, usually by way of causing damage (e.g. Lightning Bolt, Incinerate, Skred).
• Land destruction (e.g. Stone Rain, Molten Rain, Lay Waste).
• Limited card draw (e.g. Browbeat, Wheel of Fate).
• Artifact removal (e.g. Shatter).

Weaknesses

• Weak card draw.
• No counter magic.
• No discard.
• No enchantment removal.

Green

Strengths

• Enchantment and artifact removal (e.g. Naturalize, Seal of Primordium).
• Limited land destruction (e.g. Mwonvuli Acid-Moss, Reap and Sow, Winter’s Grasp).
• Mana acceleration (e.g. Farseek, Search for Tomorrow, Into the North).
• Extremely limited card draw (e.g. Harmonize).

Weaknesses

• No counter magic.
• No creature removal.
• Weak card draw.
• No discard.

There are some interesting options in the area of control via land destruction. However, what I want to do is build a control deck that behaves in a similar fashion to those with which I am more familiar. After Blue, White is the most common choice for control decks, followed by Black. Of course, this depends upon the particular format but historically this has been the standard approach.

When building a control deck, I look for card advantage using a number of mechanisms. I have already mentioned card draw, and while many colors have some form of limited card draw, Black generally plays second fiddle to Blue in this area, with the other colors trailing well behind. The drawback that Black has is that it usually requires a tradeoff of life points in exchange for cards. Other cards like Wrath of God and Story Circle are effective means of winning the card advantage war as well. The good news is that these are White and are still available to me. Not only that, but Black has an exact copy of Wrath of God in Damnation.

Replacing counter magic is a difficult proposition in the control build. Black brings discard which is a staple of many control builds. Discard can be looked at two ways, depending on the type of card. Cards that force the opponent to discard more than one card are useful for card advantage. These cards generally cost two or more mana, such as the classic Hymn to Tourach at 2cc and Stupor at 3cc. Against aggro-style decks, that can’t counter these spells, this type of discard can be very effective simply because it answers threats in the opponent’s hand prior to being cast. This type of discard is generally untargeted, in that the player controlling the discard spell does not get to choose the cards that the opponent must discard. Untargeted discard either allows the targeted player to choose the cards discarded or the cards are random. This type of discard can claim lands in hand, which may cause a mana shortage eventually but in the near term results in a low-quality trade. Counter magic never targets lands, meaning that it always hits “business” spells. Cards that force random discard, however, tend to result in better overall trades. Targeted discard generally allows you to choose which card your opponent must discard but is generally limited to a one-for-one trade: your discard spell for one card from your opponent’s hand.

It is important to note that a discard strategy has a significant disadvantage as compared with counter magic: it does not cause the opponent to tap down mana. When an opponent plays a spell, they must commit their resources. When counter magic counters this spell, the opponent’s resources remain committed. This means that “counter target spell” generally maintains tempo with your opponent (barring differences in mana cost). When the opponent is forced to discard, they lose the card(s) in hand, but still have their resources available to them on the next turn to play another spell remaining in their hand. Counter magic has the effect of maintaining tempo while discard does not.

Initially I had planned to implement a fairly classic discard strategy in Black while incorporating some of the control-oriented elements of White. Ultimately, however, the tempo loss of the discard strategy caused me to choose a more classic approach to control while including some limited discard for the purpose of gaining card advantage. Here is my Extended-legal Black/White Control build:

The land base is primarily Black but able to produce enough White to play the key cards in that color. Initially the White requirement was even lower but the inclusion of Story Circle means that you’ll need at least a few White sources by the mid-game. With no mana acceleration I find that 25 lands help to ensure that you’re hitting your land drops in all phases of the game.

I tend to prefer a diverse collection of win conditions in a control build – generally at least three. This deck has Kokusho, the Evening Star as a primary win condition. Kokusho has the added advantage that you generally don’t mind casting a necessary Damnation while Kokusho is in play due to his ability. I don’t usually run a four-of (for example, I’d normally only run two Akroma), but you’re rarely upset to see Kokusho and you can even play one when you already have one in play: the Legend Rule causes them both to hit the graveyard but the result is a 20 point life differential (-10 for your opponent and +10 for you). Urza’s Factory is a late game backup win condition. Mutavault is an option because it survives Damnation and also gives the deck some flexibility to take on the beatdown role in the early game against control, if necessary.

The remainder of the deck is about controlling the board. Phyrexian Arena is an interesting card because an extra card per turn can result in solid card advantage, but if you struggle to gain control or take a lot of early damage it can be your own worst enemy. This is where pairing it with White is key. Specifically, the first ability of Ajani Goldmane more than offsets the life loss, turning Phyrexian Arena into a one-sided Howling Mine.

Speaking of Ajani, this card is all about control. The life gain of the first ability does a lot to keep you in the game while you’re establishing control. Let’s face it, sometimes it can get bloody while you’re trying to establish control and the life gain gives you a little extra breathing room. The second ability appears to have been created for weenie hoards but it also turns Kokusho into a 6/6 with vigilance. Very handy. Finally, Ajani’s last ability actually gives the deck a fourth win condition. If your opponent has not dealt with Ajani then the Avatar could put your opponent on a one-turn clock. This is especially true if you’ve happened to sneak in a Beacon of Immortality – just another way to try to keep the life up and pump the Avatar.

Story Circle helps to hold off the opponent while Damnation and Terror keep the board clear. Stupor is about card advantage and general disruption. Extirpate is a tricky one – it can often result in card DISadvantage but depending on the matchup can help to neuter the opposing deck and limit the opponent’s options.

Finally, Vindicate is an all-purpose harbinger of disaster. It has fantastic flexibility and is especially useful for whacking problem lands and Planeswalkers. However, it also means that you have four copies of Disenchant and Mortify in your deck as well without losing any slots. The only real drawback is Sorcery-speed – a price I’m willing to pay for the versatility.

Of all the BW builds that I tested for this article (and there were quite a few), this build has performed the best so far. However, I’m keen to actually build a BW Control deck for casual play and would appreciate any feedback that you have for making it better. The only restrictions are that it must be Black and White only and it must include Damnation and Kokusho.

Until next time,
Amadeus

You can discuss this article in the MDV forums here.
Find other articles by this author(Chris Newton) here.
Find other articles by this author(Amadeus) here.
Find other articles from this series here.

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The Apprentice Magician - Part Six.
Design on a Dime: The Lunch Meat Edition!
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The Games People Play - Market & EDH.
More Evil Than Evil.
Pauper Chronicles: Top O' the Morningtide to You!
Sarpadian Empires, Vol VII: Foreword.
Words from the Streetz: Uncommon and Common Magical Treasures.
The Writers Guild: The Inside Scoop.