General Making control decks more interesting

[Onderzeeboot]

This one works pretty well in control on control mirrors.

 

[James Stevenson]

This was my most memorable control deck I drafted from my cube:

Spoiler: Kirblinx (2-0-1): UB Tinker Mill

UB Slaver Control

Sure it has decent PW density, but the fact it had a small combo (Tinker to Mindslaver) made it pretty memorable. Although the biggest factor is this card:

This card is a great control finisher. All you need to do is drop it at the right time and use removal that is cheaper than their threats and you win 'the downward spiral'. It always makes memorable games and I am sad that it still doesn't see as much love as it should (except RavebornMuse, who loves it as much as I).


A tad too underpowered (jank), I like this guy (janky jewel), too much green (jank), other finishers are better (junk), he costs how much? (janky junk)
Ultimately I think having just 1-2 flash creatures should be enough for teachings as having a decent amount of instants should make a 4 mana tutor worth it (Teachings for Gifts Ungiven for the durdle express)

This is cool. Looks like a deck where mindslaver and tinker worked out. They're such cool cards, but I thought both were usually pretty useless.

 

[Aston]

?

 

[sigh]

+ ?

+ ?

EDIT: grove, what happened to you?? You used to be only moderately overpriced, but now....

 

[safra]

+ ?

+ ?

EDIT: grove, what happened to you?? You used to be only moderately overpriced, but now....

It might go down eventually as legacy Lands cuts PFire for Abrupt Decays but I wouldn't hold your breath.

 

[anotak]

so like did something change in terms of the cards people are playing? i know i havent played magic in like 2 years but gifts ungiven was always pretty good for me even without any kind of serious combo element. i guess all my cubes were heavy on some kind of graveyard interaction or another, but even just a regular value gifts always felt pretty good without any particular combo in mind.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

To summarize what I've seen in this thread so far, the idea seems to be for control to win with;

• mill (mesmeric orb, sphinx's tutelage, nephalia drownyard, increasing confusion)
• reanimator (gifts ungiven + unburial rites, or any kind of loot effect and reanimator spells. Possibly dread return?).
• some big creature or burn spell

maybe it's enough to add some really subtle combos like molten vortex + loam (possibly bad) or gifts + rites to give more spice to control decks?

 

[sigh]

I do run Molten Vortex and Life from the Loam, and had it come together once. It's a really cool little engine, and plays well in RG/RUG/jund control

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

To summarize what I've seen in this thread so far, the idea seems to be for control to win with;

• mill (mesmeric orb, sphinx's tutelage, nephalia drownyard, increasing confusion)
• reanimator (gifts ungiven + unburial rites, or any kind of loot effect and reanimator spells. Possibly dread return?).
• some big creature or burn spell

maybe it's enough to add some really subtle combos like molten vortex + loam (possibly bad) or gifts + rites to give more spice to control decks?

Ideally, a control deck is going to warp itself around a mass of board control and draw tools to win via attrition, and bottle neck the game to a point where the opponent is top decking, while the control player has lots of options.

The best win cons are going to be part of control's natural gameplan, which can than transition into winning the game. Manlands and PWs are some of the easiest to support in the current era. Part of it too is thinking about how you want your control decks to operate, as wincon can mean very different things (and that might not become apparent until you play some games and see how the cards are used). Cards like stroke of genius or sphinx's revelation can be win cons if they put you so much ahead in the attrition war that the actual kill condition is trivial. Mana drain, could arguably be considered a win con if the mana is being leveraged in a way that puts the game out of reach for an opponent.

The old RGD/Timespiral constructed format had some really great ones:




Vampire is like a flying wrath that kills you, firemane angel would be discarded to fuel the deck's life pay draw engine, than come back to kill you, and whelk tends to break the back of an opponent's attempts to get back into a game with a counter on a critical spell, which turns into the threat that kills you. Totem would provide mana ramp and color fixing, than after the deck controlled the game, come over to kill you.

Mono black cards like corrupt, gray merchant of asphodel, or pestilence can power a deck while turning into a win con later.

If it must be a dedicated win con, rather than a control tool that has utility as a win con, I would prefer at least a creature that can control the board somewhat: serra angel or aetherling.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

 

[genericco]

I feel like that's a riptide lab post from 2017: "Who's ready to double up on Mesmeric Orb?"

 

[Chris Taylor]

I feel like that's a riptide lab post from 2017: "Who's ready to double up on Mesmeric Orb?"

all the people on etheriumastrolabe.com bemoaning our lack of vision all the while

 

[vennythekid]

BTP has been on this since OG Mirrodin

 

[Chris Taylor]

BTP has been on this since OG Mirrodin

Wasn't there that one guy who came up with a custom card way back when that was basically the same?
Not sure if I believe him though

 

[RavebornMuse]

I'm going to (potentially) hijack this topic, because I was working on a similar(-ish?) post; I'd like to plant some more durdle value engines in my list, which naturally tend to be control tools. I think my issue is essentially the same, adding some interest/depth to control (control being used here to mean: a strategic orientation favouring stopping the opponent or outlasting the opponent, seeking to win through inevitability, card advantage, and/or dominating the board state). Some of these ideas have likely come up (by who's hand, I wonder?) in the Community 4-at-a-time Battlecruiser Cube thread, but what about some of these for a cube that trends towards lower converted mana costs?

.

Has anyone ran any of these? What was your experience? I don't mind forcing them a few times to showcase their strength; that usually baits any of my other draft partners into trying them out as well, if I can give them a good showing.

I've ran Bounty before and it was too slow at that point in my cube; now, I think it's probably at the sweet spot between power and cost, but it looks potentially too good. The same goes for Obelisk; high cost, but the payoff is pretty strong, too. Mimic Vat was tried once before, but again, it was too slow and awkward at that time. I probably am minutes away from suffering a stroke for suggesting that fucking Well, but I think it'd be easy enough to pack in more incidental life gain to make it a cool theme, and what does control like more than drawing cards and gaining life? But it's probably a really bad idea (yall know by now that safra has me figured out in the stock poster biases thread). The Closet and the Orrery are two of my all-time favourite durdle cube cards, but can they play a role in our more brisk formats? Narset is sweet, but 3 colours hurts me deeply...

I don't mind narrow enablers (see: Buried Alive); what I want to avoid is things that depend on narrow enablers (see: Empty the Warrens). I think these all represent potential candidates for durdle engines as "speculative picks you might want to shift your drafting priorities to maximize upon", and that's great by my book. SOI limited has been a blast for me so far in a lot of regards, and primarily in the way that things you might already want to pick shift in priority based on what kind of themed tools are available to you, so I'd like to capture a little of that for my list without it feeling like you're just pulling a deck from the packs. I'm currently trying to push enchantress for this route, and may opt to include a more narrow enabler for it as I've done for reanimator/recursives in Buried Alive (Entomb's purpose is much, much more far-reaching fyi), but I'm not sure where to go beyond that.

Another angle:



Who here has actually got a fair tinker setup figured out? I tried to do a "value tinker" package for about 3 drafts and cut it swiftly; I could give it a fairer shake, though, if I heard something a bit more positive. Links to cubes where it works would be welcome, as well. My general issue with artifact themes is that they demand such a density, it's hard to justify, or, alternatively, your // sections end up feeling like they have more cards due to artifact synergies.

 

[blacksmithy]

I've had mimic vat in every iteration of my cube, and it's always a hit. My people play a lot of edh, where its a format-defining utility card, and so they get what it does and respect it. It creates a little mini-game too of "should I imprint this or keep this in my vat? Do I want to attack or block with my vat token?" It's good stuff.
If you want to try a fair or unfair tinker package I think the most important cards are the ones that actually make it castable. You can alway just increase the size of your colorless section, but it's also good to include colored cards that make artifacts. My suggestions (of varying power level):

Plus basically any of the new investigate cards, they're great.

 

[ahadabans]

My cube is too powerful for fair tinker. It's just not worth building if you can't fetch a bomb. But unfair tinker is too good of a deck for my current list, so I put tinker in the pandora's box module (along with several super bomb artifacts). Tinker is just feast or famine IMO. It's either broken or it sucks.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

The problem with tinker is that its a combination card that requires a significant resource investment. Your payoff has to be pretty big (game winning) to justify that investment.

I kind of would like to see some interesting control shells, rather than individual cards. I thought we had a pretty interesting line to go down with gifts ungiven

Thats actually probably how you want to use gifts as a tutor; where its like a super buried alive, grabbing these graveyard pieces, and making those decks more consistent as a result.

Flashback cards in general seem like a very easy way to build a control deck around that principle, with gifts functioning like mystical teachings. Its also less narrow than buried alive as you can just use it for value.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find higher power flashback control pieces. I like the idea of having a very focused deck, built around removal and card draw, where the control engine transitions into the win con.

Though, it probably just makes more sense to draft a bunch of planeswalkers alongside sphinx's rev and/or dig through time /sigh

 

[Aston]

As another thought, are there any constructed control decks you would think of as "interesting"? The only ones that spring to mind for me are Teachings, and maybe Esper Dragons and Caw-Blade. Maybe it's just very hard to make a control deck that's interesting as the main components of card advantage, answers and finishers don't make for a great deal of variety, whether you're Fact or Fictioning in to Psychatog or Sphinx's Revelationing into Aetherling.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Interesting control decks from constructed:

Dralnu du louvre
BWR Firemane Control
UWR Firemane Angel Control
The Deck
Miracles
Cruel Control
Pauper Mono Black Control

There are also some tron variants I like: triscuit tron and so forth.

I also like some of the limited control decks, like burning vengeance and the new SOI card that puts zombies on the board for each instant/sorcery in the yard.

But it probably makes more sense from an efficiency point of view to make your control/win con revolve around planeswalkers.

 

[japahn]

I think Standard Psychatog was neat, it's control in its purest form.

 

[ahadabans]

I do run Molten Vortex and Life from the Loam, and had it come together once. It's a really cool little engine, and plays well in RG/RUG/jund control

Can confirm.

 

[genericco]

I'll put in a good word for Obelisk of Alara.



It's been in the cube since the beginning, pretty highly picked. There you usually don't see it cast and activated on the same turn, it's more take the tempo hit as soon as you can afford to and try to turn the corner on the following turns. So siding in artifact removal against it should be effective.

It's a win condition for the end-game, it doesn't even seem that good if you were to cheat it into play early. It takes some planning about which colors you can use or any-color sources to make it really shine. I think it's good that the ability isn't as strong as the other colors, it's perfect for three-color decks that don't include blue which is a cool archetype to incidentally support.

 

[sigh]

I'll probably try to find one of those now . I've always had it in the back of my mind, but never went in on it until this in depth analysis. Like that it rewards solid deck construction/splashes, and is firmly a cool control win con in the spirit of this thread!

Also can basically have "converge", and it'd be cool to see someone in my group push for >3 colors.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

I dont know how cube specific a thread like this can be, so making anectodal judgements on cards seem like a poor way to make the most of the topic.

I think it is better to say what kind of format a fun looking card would be a best fit for, rather than saying "this card is bad because I run my cube this way".

For obelisk of alara, maybe it would belong best someplace where 3-color goodstuff isnt as strong of a deck and the cube both is more synerge oriented and has a mana base that allows splashing?