First off: I want to apologize to a couple of readers who wrote in asking for today’s article to be a primer on the Five-Color Control deck I talked about for Standard a couple of weeks ago. I fully planned to write on that topic, but I won a Grand Prix Trial for Singapore this past weekend with another Patrick Chapin concoction, and it brought to light a bunch of issues about how a person should actually go about playing control decks that I thought it would be more useful to cover that instead.
I’m actually going to address a few different topics today, but first let’s get the list I ran out of the way:
4 Spell Snare
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Mana Leak
4 Thirst for Knowledge
3 Gifts Ungiven
3 Engineered Explosives
3 Glen Elendra Archmage
1 Trinket Mage
1 Triskelion
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Threads of Disloyalty
1 Firespout
1 Life from the Loam
1 Vedalken Shackles
3 Chrome Mox
4 Mutavault
1 Riptide Laboratory
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Academy Ruins
2 Snow-covered Island
3 Island
3 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
2 Breeding Pool
1 Steam Vents
1 Seat of the Synod
1 Lonely Sandbar
1 Tolaria West
Sideboard:
3 Firespout
2 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Krosan Grip
1 Sower of Temptation
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Annul
1 Izzet Boilerworks
1 Fungal Reaches
1 Echoing Truth
1 Aether Spellbomb
In truth, I shy away from writing primers largely because they are not really that useful for the types of decks I like to play – largely not for “Draw 2” Five-Color Control, and certainly not for such an option-intensive deck as this one. Primers are excellent when you’re playing a deck like Elves or Affinity, or when you debut something new (like Gifts Tron or the first Quick n’ Toast or Feldman Merfolk), or when your plan against a particular matchup is kind of complicated and/or requires very specific execution. The problem is that as formats expand to accommodate larger and larger pools of legal cards, the less mileage you can get from talking about decks in terms of archetypes. In many cases, a failure to approach a given decklist as an individual set of seventy-five cards, choosing instead to confine it to an easily-identifiable archetype, encourages you to make game-losing decisions because you’re not really understanding what you’re trying to interact with. To take just one example, your sideboarding plan in the current metagame – whatever you’re playing – should not attack “Mono-Red Burn;” it should deal with Sulfuric Vortex first and then try to gain some life later. The presence of the card Sulfuric Vortex changes how you’re going to succeed at interacting with the archetype Mono-Red Burn. I played against a version of burn at the GPT that played Pyrostatic Pillar over Vortex, though, and were I approaching that matchup from the perspective of someone who had just read a primer I would have been barking up the completely wrong tree.
There are versions of All-In Red against which I bring in a single Tormod’s Crypt, and versions against which I don’t, and it tends to be dependent on the number of Blood Moon effects they choose to run, and in what quantities, and even then my plan can change depending on whether they choose to sideboard out their Magi of the Moon in response to my bringing in Firespout. But I never read a primer on how to sideboard against AIR; I gained that knowledge from thinking about my specific objectives, and the specific cards that were going to get in the way of my achieving those objectives.
See, this deck falls into one of three main categories of decks I’ve used historically to win PTQs or to win money at Pro Tours. First, there are the good ol’ plainly broken decks, decks like Heartbeat Desire or Elves or Faeries or the Heartbeat-into-Time-Stop-Into-Myojin deck in Kamigawa Block that are just doing much better things than the opponent, and which you kind of can’t afford not to play because you’re sacrificing so much value. Second, there are decks that contain copies of individual cards which most of the field can’t beat, and which maximize their ability to exploit these individual cards. Some examples of this kind of strategy are 2007’s G/R Hate (referenced recently by Richard Feldman), Rock and Nail, Trinity Green, Glass Cannon, and Serenity/Abeyance White Weenie during the Tinker era. But my favorite decks are the decks, like this one and 9x-Draw-2 and Tenacious Tron and Kowal-ash, that render themselves unbeatable in Phase 3 (position themselves around the rightmost pole of the metagame) and simply do everything within their power to get there.
Designing this type of deck is interesting because you really have to solve two different problems. The first is “how do I avoid dying” and the second is “if I take it as a given that the game is going to go on for N turns*, how do I ensure that the likelihood of my winning the game keeps increasing the longer the game progresses?” I tend to work on the first aspect of the deck first because if you can’t do that then there is no real point in trying to do the second part. It’s also much easier to do this since games are quick and usually it’s readily-apparent what the fastest decks in a given format are – and it doesn’t generally matter as much what specific list you’re up against except in terms of percentage points. This is important because as I mentioned above the strategy for winning with this kind of deck involves a certain image of the long game you have to create, and as the game goes long you can be more and more certain that the opponent is going to be able to find singleton copies of specific cards that get in the way of your gameplan. Therefore, your long game has to be extremely adaptable – that is, you have to be able to access specific cards or specific strategies to react to the different avenues your opponent is pursuing – while your early-game defense has to be extremely versatile, or capable of combating the myriad combinations of cards your opponents may draw in their opening sevens. I accept, for example, that I’m going to lose a certain number of games to the card Choke, but you don’t always have the Mana Leak or the Explosives or the Mox or the critical number of non-Island lands. But my deck is capable of dealing with generic three-mana threats, and it doesn’t really matter so much what the three-mana threat is because as a deck whose goal it is to get to the long game you have to basically deal with all of them anyway.
To put it another way: a good control deck should not care very much if Wizards printed a two-mana 10/10 creature, because you’re probably going to lose to any unopposed two-drop anyway. Certainly the presence of such a card isn’t good for you, but it shouldn’t ever be the operative difference.
The reason I like occupying the nut Phase 3 position is that a) it’s usually possible to find a way to beat whatever the fastest deck in the format is an acceptable amount of the time, and b) the less likely it is for you to die in the first four terms of the game, the more and more your chances of winning the match approach 100%. This is because longer games have lower variance; they approach theoretical purity, and so it matters less and less what your opening seven are, whether you are mana screwed or mana flooded, what the quality of your opponent’s hand is, etc. The practical benefit of this is that over the course of a given tournament, you play fewer games that are subject to randomness and chance, and so over the long term your success rate should more closely correlate with your skill level. This principle is also why I don’t understand why people would ever play a deck like regular Gifts-Rock last season or Martyr-Proclamation in this one. Both of you are trying to make the game go long, but they are always going to fold to a deck like this one because of a) counterspells and b) recursion. I beat a Martyr deck at the GPT because even though he was gaining 18 a turn, I had Life/Ghost Quarter set up, and two Archmages in play, and four Mutavaults, and Spellstutter/Riptide, and Academy Ruins, and Jitte, and Shackles, and Explosives for Decree of Justice should that ever happen. I was attacking for twenty-five a turn, and that eventually got there. Point being when you run a deck like that, when you invite people to beat you if they want to, you open yourself up even more to getting a bad beat due to matchups.
Getting the edge over decks that try to beat you early generally requires playtesting; you can guess that like 3 Firespout 4 Wrath 4 Repeal (or whatever) is going to beat Zoo Deck X, but you don’t really know that until you play a lot of games. Figuring out how to win the late game can be nice in that you can do most of it via conversation and theorizing. Just look at what the best possible thing the opponent can do is, figure out how that relates to the best possible thing you can do, and look for problems. This is how I realized counter-intuitively that I needed a Tormod’s Crypt against Blood Moon-intensive builds of AIR; I could usually stop an early fatty before it killed me, and frequently stopping it would buy me somewhere around five or six turns before I had to do anything else important. Unfortunately, when a nonbasic-land-nullifier is in play, it’s really hard for me to do damage or to Gifts for a way to cement the late game, because I can’t recur anything and so have to more or less Gifts for value. This means that the AIR player very regularly would get to the point where he could start casting multiple Demigods of Revenge, and without a way to remove the graveyard I had no real answers to that – especially in the face of Shattering Spree, which could get rid of a Shackles.
Notice again that if I approached this matchup as “how do I deal with a 5/5 or a 6/6 or a bunch of Goblins on turn 1 or 2,” as opposed to specifically “what can I do about a Demigod of Revenge being recurred on turn 16,” I’d have failed to arrive at the correct conclusion, and I would have lost.
So far we’ve talked about how you arrive at the correct Nut-Phase-Three-Control decklist; you figure out what the minimum number of cards you need to survive the early game regularly against an aggro deck is, then you figure out how to do deal with the format’s relevant long-game inevitability-producing threats with your remaining space. All of this happens before you sit down to play a game, but the most relevant decisions you make happen when you’re at the table. In truth, this is an incredibly obvious idea that gets next to no attention, relatively speaking, in most mainstream Magic writing. Most of the time, you see a list, a sideboarding plan, a general description of a matchup, and a thanks-kids-see-you-next-week**. This is one of the reasons why articles like One Game or articles that detail intensive playtesting sessions are so useful. But as much attention as we pay to the decklist we bring to a tournament, we (at the PTQ level, anyway) still lose most of our games because we mishandle in-game situations.
I mention this because one of the good things about decks like this is that your in-game decision-making is extremely easy once you realize what it is you’re trying to do. This is not to say that it will seem easy from the outside. I had a lot of spectators at Sunday’s event and people kept asking me why I did this, this, and this, but most avenues of play are clear once you understand your decklist. If you’ve prepared well, you can trust your deck to handle the long game if you get it there. Just keep trying to ensure that nothing happens. This subject has been covered plenty of times before, but it seems like for every person who nods their head in understanding when they hear it, it just goes in one ear and out the other for twenty or so more. So I’ll repeat it again: you don’t have to try to win the game. If you know that casting Thirst for Knowledge is going to result in your taking X amount of damage, and you care about taking X amount of damage, don’t cast Thirst for Knowledge. I drew a Firespout off one of my opponent’s Vendilion Cliques and still took fifteen because I had to make sure I wasn’t walking into Mistbind and I had to make sure I had access more land than my opponent.
At the same time, the solution isn’t to sit around doing nothing when you could conceivably be gaining advantage; I mean, the reason you possess inevitability is because your deck is packed with inevitability-producing cards. But you have to deploy them, obviously, for them to do something. You have to be keenly aware of what specifically your opponent can do to you once you drop your guard. If you don’t care, then tap out! When you’re playing ‘investment’ cards in your deck, the same principles apply as in life: it’s all about timing. If you can cast a turn 3 Glen-Elendra Archmage and the best your opponent can do is resolve Sulfuric Vortex, then you probably ought to just cast Archmage if it means you’re clocking them for four a turn and you’re countering at least their next three spells. I also beat a Swans player after keeping a comparatively marginal hand because I had turn 2 Shackles and an Ancient Grudge, and I knew his only way to remove Shackles was an Engineered Explosives on three that wouldn’t come online until I had bought enough time to probably win the match. Sure enough, I killed the Explosives in response to his cracking a sac-land to blow it up, it bought me at least four more turns, and I won game 1 in short order. Sometimes, you get a lot of mileage out of just running your investment cards out there because they’re better than whatever parity your opponent would produce for that turn. You don’t get any bonus points for keeping your mana untapped; you just have to think specifically about all of the threats they could conceivably produce. If your tapping out is going to get you Choked, and you care, then don’t give them that opportunity.
Of course, an issue that needs to be addressed is how to possess inevitability in the first place. In a format like Standard, it can simply mean playing the highest-caliber threats in the format and ensuring that you can both look at them and cast them better than anyone else. Again, as a format’s relevant threats diversify, you’re probably going to have to possess recursion, ways to disrupt recursion, ways to gain mana advantage, and ways to handle non-creature threats. Sometimes you want access to cards like Chalice of the Void, Scepter/Chant, Forbid, Capsize, or Lab/Sprite/Archmage that give you some kind of lock, and these types of cards or combinations become more important when other decks can present threats that are only answerable by locking them down. It’s also important, to me, to have a rock-solid manabase, which is why I think this deck actually has a better Phase Three than even something like Tron. The problem with Tron is that it frequently lacks enough colored mana to have a counter-war if its Moxen and Signets are under attack, and there’s basically nothing more tempting to Spell Snare or Spellstutter Sprite than a Mox or a Signet. The Loam engine in this deck is therefore superior to that of the Tron deck because it’s both easier to resolve a Gifts and easier to get the engine going once you’re there. It is also going to be difficult for them to Spell Burst with buyback both a Life from the Loam and a Glen-Elendra Archmage in the same turn, which is what they are going to have to do to set up Spell Burst inevitability.
An excellent exercise to try and help yourself understand these principles also has the side effect of being a whole lot of fun. It might be ironic that the most striking way to radically improve your understanding of Constructed theory is to play a Limited format, but I have found that Cube Drafting has done more to help me recognize the components of good aggro decks, good combo decks, good control decks, good midrange decks, and good ‘good stuff’ decks than any other Magic format I’ve played. The reason is that everyone starts out drafting what they think will be an excellent Limited deck, and inevitably they get obliterated. A certain Mohd Ikmal has recently handed me my eighth ever Cube loss, and his decks got radically better after his second draft; you can see the understanding and improvement happening practically in real time. Good Cube drafters quickly evolve what tends to become quite a healthy Constructed-ish metagame, with a fast-mana Blue deck being an early favorite, a fast Ankh-intensive Red Deck emerging as a foil to that, some Green-Black midrange concoction taking over once people start to favor the artifact-and-land-kill aggro decks, etc. etc. But having to draft the deck helps you quickly realize how the presence of a certain strategy-enabling card catapults a certain archetype to the next level. For example, an overwhelming majority of my Cube control builds need something like Winter Orb (yes, in control) or Sundering Titan or Wildfire, and my having access to one of those cards correlates with a 3-0 more closely than anything outside of Time Walk, Ancestral, Lotus, Shelldock Isle, Capsize, or Sol Ring. Those cards are frequently the Cruel Ultimatums of Cube in that they drastically constrain what your opponent can do after they resolve so much so that they really are not in the game at all, and in a format without much recursion (or with a lot of negative value in attempting to draft recursion; e.g. seeing a third-pack Life from the Loam without a lot to do with it) such Ultimatum-type threats pick up a lot of mileage.
I guess the ultimate point I’m trying to make is that there isn’t necessarily a giant gulf between “Pure Control” and “Tap-Out Control” insofar as it’s possible to build both with completely bulletproof endgames. The reason is that the best possible Phase Three deck in a given format is also the ‘purest’ possible control deck, even if its means may differ slightly.
Until next week!
Zac
* An actually-relevant footnote: This doesn’t mean you can’t present early-and-mid-game threats, it just means that you aren’t relying upon them to win the game. And any time an opponent has a trump-threat – that is, any time an opponent is more favored over the long-term than you are – you are relying on your threats to end the game within a given time frame.
** This is not meant to insult anyone, either; it’s simply the nature of the medium. When you have to cover a bunch of different matchups and provide some general idea of how the deck works, you can’t really engage that many specific situations.