I featured a traditional Esper Control deck for Modern in this space last Friday, and at the risk of repeating myself I have another Esper Control deck today.
Okay, there’s no risk of repeating myself with this deck because it is, shall we say, unique.
That’s not to say it’s not powerful or well-designed, far from it. I think this deck taps into the potential of the Eldritch Moon card that is quickly becoming a Modern staple: Collective Brutality. Being able to combine several good effects without needing additional mana can lead to a huge swing in tempo, so long as you can mitigate the corresponding loss of card advantage.
The obvious way to do that is to discard cards that you want in the graveyard, which we have seen with Griselbrand and Golgari Grave-Troll. And in fact this deck follows that plan with Lingering Souls, but Niklas Kronberger found the other way to mitigate the card disadvantage: pair Collective Brutality with a card that actively wants you to have a small hand, Ensnaring Bridge.
Once you have those pieces in place, the rest of the deck fills in fairly easily around it. We have Path to Exile as a versatile removal spell, the great one mana discard spells of Modern, and a healthy number of planeswalkers headlined by Liliana of the Veil which both empties your hand and builds toward a game-ending effect.
Kronberger also uses Spellskite as a defensive measure against early creatures, answers to your Ensnaring Bridge, and the quick kills from decks like Infect and Burn. And he rounds the deck out with a small blue splash for Trinket Mage; Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy; and sideboard cards. The package with Trinket Mage is likely overboard, given he only has a single copy of the creature, but all the targets are great cards in their own right, especially Nihil Spellbomb and Engineered Explosives.
The end result is a deck that looks similar to Lantern Control with the Ensnaring Bridge prison element, but it plays a much more normalized game, so its individual cards are of a much higher power level. And the real draw here is the aforementioned Collective Brutality. This card is game-breaking in so many matchups, from Abzan Company to Infect to Burn. Especially Burn. Seriously, if you really hate Goblin Guide, try out Collective Brutality.
This card could very well be the missing piece for Modern control. They have historically been spread too thin trying to prepare for so many different decks that they can only last for brief periods when the metagame narrows or they are particularly well-positioned against the top decks. If Collective Brutality is good enough to change that paradigm, Modern could be in store for some big changes.
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (24)
Spells (25)
