Alongside the Pro Tour, #SCGRegionals was last weekend, and due to the extreme time difference between Australia and North America, competitors were able to get a longer view of the Emrakul-infested metagame before their Regionals started, so the results of these tournaments should carry much more weight than they would otherwise.
Hidden among the sea of Emrakul, the Promised End and Collected Company were a few hidden gems, one of which I wanted to highlight today: U/G Control.
Suffice it to say that Simic is not a color combination that is heralded for its control prowess, and this list doesn’t even have any hard removal to play a long game against opposing creatures and planeswalkers. Instead, this deck uses green to access key ramp spells and blue to add some much-needed interaction as well as fuel its win condition: Rise from the Tides.
So instead of running your opponent out of resources, you’re simply trying to buy enough time to fire off Rise from the Tides or Part the Waterveil to end the game in a single flurry. In that sense, this deck is more of a ramp/control/combo hybrid than a pure control deck.
Rather than Languish, Grasp of Darkness, and Ruinous Path, you have Displacement Wave, Send to Sleep, and Disperse. You don’t need to answer their creatures forever, just long enough to set up your combo finish, so you can get away with playing the two most removal-light colors in Magic.
Staying two colors is important, since you need to play a ton of basics for your ramp spells. Aaron even eschewed Yavimaya Coast and Lumbering Falls to ensure his Nissa’s Pilgrimages and Nissa’s Renewals would stay live well into the late-game.
Fortune’s Favor and Pieces of the Puzzle ensure that you find the cards you need while also fueling Rise from the Tides, making them ideal card advantage spells for the deck.
This deck feels very much like the spiritual successor to Mono-Blue Prison, but with a proactive gameplan. Such a philosophical shift makes sense in a format filled with decks that are trying to go big with Emrakul, the Promised End, as they will give you the necessary time to develop your manabase and set up a kill. As powerful as the Eldrazi are, the current incarnations are not particularly fast, and nothing is going to beat a horde of ten or more Zombies backed up by a couple of extra turns.
In a format that is soon to see players looking for the biggest haymaker, Aaron Mays seems to have found it.
Spells (37)
