It’s very likely that I couldn’t keep my opening hand in game one in general, but it definitely wasn’t playable against Burn and I got appropriately punished. Game two my opponent’s draw was very good against mine – I had Sun Droplet, which is great against spells but worse against multiple creatures instead of Ensnaring Bridge or Pyroclasm which would be great against a creature-heavy hand and worse against a burn heavy hand. Our draws lined up as badly as possible for me, but I was still remarkably close to turning it around.

That was a much better demonstration of how this deck is trying to work. Spend the early game making as many of their cards irrelevant as possible, and then use Lantern with the other one-mana artifacts to stop them from drawing any of the relevant pieces while building further redundancies to cut out remaining outs.

This seems like a really hard matchup. They don’t give you a lot of time to set up and they’re good against Ensnaring Bridge. The only saving grace is that Spellskite is great against them and you’re playing three copies plus four Ancient Stirrings, but it’s really hard to win without it. I almost managed to get set up in game two, but my limited access to colored mana made it just a little too awkward./p>

The difference between that matchup and the Infect matchup is interesting, but not surprising. I’m an Ensnaring Bridge deck. The opponent who can easily get under the bridge is advantaged, the one who can’t is disadvantaged. Also, I think Spellskite is a little better against G/W Hexproof, but it’s close. The one advantage G/W Hexproof has is access to Stony Silence, but I have five discard spells and five removal spells for it, so it’s not really that big of a problem, which is something I love about how this particular list in configured.

Overall, the deck played about how it looked to me on paper – it involves a lot of moving parts, and you really need to get them all together quickly. Ancient Stirrings is great, but some opponents give you very little time.

I saw someone on Facebook express surprise that this deck doesn’t need some kind of source of card advantage, and I think that intuition is part of the problem with classifying this deck as a control deck. The archetype “Prison” doesn’t get discussed much because it’s very rare that a true prison deck is particularly viable, but that’s exactly what this is. Your “card advantage” is that you get to a point where your opponent never draws another meaningful spell. When you have all these incremental mill cards, it can be really tempting to use them, especially when you have a lot of them in play and choosing not to mill your opponent for five at the end of their turn just feels really wrong. In practice, I sometimes used them there, partially because of the clock on Magic Online. In reality, you need to realize that, because you control your opponent’s draw steps, you reach the point where turns are meaningless, and you really don’t want to mill them any time the top card of their library is blank.

It’s not shocking to me that this deck did well. It has a real plan against anyone – it’s doing something powerful and proactive and using cards that most opponents are bad at disrupting. Also, there wasn’t a reason to expect a large amount of Affinity hate at this event. This deck falls apart very quickly if it ever becomes big, because it really can’t handle dedicated sideboard cards like Shatterstorm, which it can’t hit with Inquisition of Kozilek and which ignores Welding Jar, but it helps that after a certain point your opponent will never actually get to draw their sideboard card. Large numbers of Ancient Grudges would also be a huge problem. Still, this is a great demonstration of how deep you can go and sometimes come out with something viable in Modern.