Running walkerless cubes has been a good experience, because it forces one to think more critically about how midrange decks generate card advantage versus control decks. How do you want to differentiate the two deck types?
To me I think one of the key differences is that where control wants to navigate to a state where the control players has inevitability (by having more mana, cards, access to permission and some way to finish that doesn't just get picked off easily like aetherling or a manland), and the midrange deck tries to have as much power and quality in each individual card. My experience with the tournament decks was primarily isd-rtr and rtr-ths standard, so I'm going to use Jund and RG monsters as references.
The isd-rtr Jund deck played a deck that was very concentrated with cards that was as insanely packed with value (a term I'm here going to use to mean how much a card interacts with the game in terms of giving you resources like cards, life and board presence) that tried to win by one-for-one'ing down the opponent's resources to a point where one or both of the players were in top-deck mode where the Jund player would have the superior card quality and just win with suff like flipping a bonfire of the damned.
Topdecks
A Control deck doesn't have same ability to get out of a top deck war I think, because a control deck is by its nature filled by more niche cards. The Jund player of course could end up drawing a dork or dead removal card, but for the most part those draws were very live. Control wins top decks by having access to card draw, so that they can get back into a position where they have a bunch of options. If the Jund player wants to drop some game dominating 4-5 drop creature or planeswalker, the control player can counter it, given that the control player is (well) in control of the game.
Control vs Midrange
My distinction between control and midrange, based on my experience with these kind of decks in standard, is that midrange has much better raw card quality, and control has more niche answers. Midrange is a pretty proactive plan, that wants to eschew the speed that the aggressive decks get at a cost of weaker late-game cards, with some more resilience and higher quality cards.
I think this is also the reason control can have an upper hand against midrange in the roshambo model, because the slower speed gives more breathing room for control, that can use a lower number of permission spells to answer the few but powerful threats the midrange deck presents.
This also I think is why control really needs that card draw, because you can draw the deck in the wrong order (something that can happen to other decks too, but I don't think they're sensitive in the same way since they're more proactive). I've played games with a low to the ground aggresive decks where the control player just has to scoop because they didn't have any answers or selection in their hand, where the midrange deck would probably just slam down some big dork and dominate the board.
How to get make control a thing in cube
In cube this might be harder to make as a distinction, but I still like the differentiation of either going for an answer-plan or a card-quality plan. Midrange decks wants as much out of each card as possible, dominating the game as soon as they play the card (Polukranos, Thragtusk, Olivia Voldaren). Control decks wants to answer whatever the opposing player is doing to get to a point where they can comfortably start winning (this is format depending too, since the winning card can just as easily be young pyromancer or monastery mentor as well as some big six drop hexproof flier) and they do that by having access to card selection so that they always have a grip of options.
The very nature of the midrange decks I'm describing though is good stuff value, so what do I do about that in a limited environment where I want other things to thrive as well? Like, is there a way to introduce very dominating cards that come at some cost so that you don't just jam the cards in every deck with no regards for the precious ideas we as cube designers introduce to our environments? It's the same questions that I've been asking for a couple of weeks here now but it creeps back. Now it's here in the form of how to make control feel truly different from the other 'slower' decks.
Edit: I fixed the grammar a little bit, and I'd like to add that I think control is very meta-dependent as well. I defined it's tactics here based around answers, but those in turn needs to based on what you're
answering which then is a response to what the proactive plans are doing. I've heard this on this forum and I'm sticking to it, that you should design your proactive aggreisve plans first, then move to the plans that answer.
I also added some title-things because apparently I wrote a whole wall about this!
It's like when Grillo talked about laying down the guild-pair themes and defining the strategies and breathing room for those strategies, but in the roshambo-axis. You start with defining some aggro decks (like human weenies and double-strikers or the crowd favorite sac-aggro), and then when those look like fun decks to play and have a late-game plan, you start moving onto how control decks and how those win the game and how they get to that game winning position.
