Card/Deck Giving Control that sweet loving

So, in the sort of classic roshambo model the sequences goes aggro<-midrange<-control<-aggro (also combo is somewhere in there if you want I'm skipping it here). We pretty much all agree on the importance of a bunch of early pressure decks (aggro) for a healthy format and some of us are complaining about good stuff midrange. Control is supposedly pretty good at locking midrange out of the game, where aggro is too fast, so is ideal as an archetype we can encourage.

Usually when I talk to people about how to get more control decks at the table they answer "run planeswalkers!", "cram the cube with sweepers!" etc. While this is of course one way to do it, what is a more fundamental rule of thumb in order to get people hyped on the control train?

My bucket list of stuff a good control deck needs is a way to close out the game, and a way to get out of the tight mana squeeze of the early game. This is a pretty broad category, so finding ways for people to be creative in drafting these kinds of decks is something I'd love to enable.

A red based control deck with boros reckoner and blasphemous act sounds like tons of fun, and I want more gimmicky ideas like that along just good control cards that end up in the control decks after the player that tries to move into that strategy wheels stuff.

What cards that encourages control decks are most of us not running today that we should be? Does a combination of strong control and efficient aggro help keep goopy midrange decks in check?
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
One of the things thats struck me so far about modern is how "good stuff" midrangy a lot of the decks feel, even decks that aren't being given proper midrange designations. I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, as there is a certain level of strategic overlap: both decktypes tend to focus on value generation and attrition: and its a turn four format.

I kind of suspect that part of the good stuff problem is that with a lot of powered cubes, there isn't much of a focus on supporting X number of distinct archetypes across color pairings, and you can kind of see that with the advise you've been given in regards to planeswalkers and sweepers. With the ubiquitous power of walkers, everything sort of starts to gravitate around a 4-5cc value generation point, using similar tools, and the decks start to run together in an unhealthy way.

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?
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Wall of Omens I think has a permanent position in almost every cube. I love Augur, especially with my Brainstorm package, but I could see an argument for it getting the cut.
 
Wall of Omens is awesome. I've been less impressed with Augur as I think it misses more often than not in my cube, but it's cute with Riptide Laboratory.
 

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
In every Cube format I've designed, blue 1/3s for 2 are one of control's biggest weapons. People really like Omenspeaker over here, and I like Renowned Weaponsmith despite the awkward "shuffle your library" effect. You can, however, sharpie Weaponsmith to be real frickin' gud if you fancy.

Cool idea. What would you sharpie in? "search for an artifact that costs 1 or less"? Something like that?
edit:But then tapping for 2 doesn't make much sense.... unless you fetch an X!
 

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
What you set it to "XU, T", or "XX, T", and you can search for an artifact with converted mana cost X? That would be swagged out.
 
Cool idea. What would you sharpie in? "search for an artifact that costs 1 or less"? Something like that?

edit:But then tapping for 2 doesn't make much sense.... unless you fetch an X!
My first attempt was Mystical Tutor for artifacts. Nopenopenope too gud
I think if I had to do it again, I'd do something like, "scry 1, then reveal the top, if it's an artifact, draw a card." So we'd probably be passing from Sharpie to sticky-note, but it'd probably be pretty swell.
EDIT: What if he made legendary Flayer Husks? Oh zang! Or legendary Bonesplitter.
 
How long has your avatar had a Santa hat?

It's been there at least since I've been on this forum, so more than a year!

Cool idea. What would you sharpie in? "search for an artifact that costs 1 or less"? Something like that?
edit:But then tapping for 2 doesn't make much sense.... unless you fetch an X!

So we've been complaining about how Stoneforge seems underwhelming without GRBS equipments, and along comes this SFM-costed artifact idea. Here's what I'm thinking:
1W
Renowned Augur of Stoneforge
Human Wizard
When Renowened Augur of Stoneforge enters the battlefield, look at the top 3 cards of your library. You may reveal an artifact from among them and put it into your hand. Put the other cards on the bottom of your library in any order.
T: Add 2 to your mana pool. Spend this only to cast artifact spells or activate abilities of artifacts.
1/3
 

Aoret

Developer
Ludevic's Test Subject is a good one. Great way to make those turns where you don't counter something feel good instead of stupid. You still feel pretty stupid when they doom blade your 12 mana guy, but overall I like the dynamic of the card a whole lot.
 
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.
 
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