How do you feel about the current state of control and permission decks in Standard? It sometimes feels like blue has lost almost all of its identity as counterspells, card drawing, and bounce have all been reduced in quality and quantity.

Awesome question! I’m a blue control player at heart, too.

My answer is that we intentionally try to make different strategies vary in strength across different standard seasons. It’s true that blue-based control decks aren’t popular in standard right now (and blue in general is a little weaker than we’d like), but it wasn’t long ago that UB control and Esper Dragons fueled by Dig Through Time were top decks. Before that, we had Sphinx’s Revelation control decks in RTR-THS standard.

When we’re “taking a break” from pushing strong control decks in standard, we try to find other cool things for blue to do. My favorite recently was Mono-Blue Devotion with Thassa and Master of Waves.

The danger of always having strong, general-purpose counterspells and card draw around is that it can create decks that don’t care what the opponent is doing – they’ll just counter it regardless. In my opinion it’s more fun when counterspells are tactical answers to certain types of threats, rather than cards you blindly play “on curve”.

Dissolve, Silumgar’s Scorn, Ojutai’s/Silumgar’s Command and Clash of Wills are some recent counterspells that I think ended up in a fun spot and saw play at the highest levels. We’ll certainly continue to see blue control cards around that power level showing up in future sets.

-Ian