April 13th Deck Tech [U/B Control]

April 13, 2012

More building on a budget this week. I try to keep the cost low so you can build the deck for around $20.

We’ve been doing aggro variants for the last few weeks, let’s change it up and do U/B control.

Control has been an ever present and usually somewhat dominant side of high level magic. It requires a lot of thought, patience, and a good understanding of the game. We seek to control the flow of the game, prevent our opponent from playing threats, remove the threats they do play, and eventually play our big threats to win us the game. Blue is the core of most control decks, counter spells and bounce spells being its biggest weapons. Black has kill spells to remove threats your opponent does manage to land.

With a control decks mana hungry nature, we need to load up on lands. We can’t afford to get mana screwed, with our reliance on finishers at the top, and our need to constantly have mana open while playing threats. Ghost Quarter is included as our out to enemy spell-lands or man-lands since we don’t have a good way to interact with them.

With our high density of instants and sorcerys Delver is a no brainer for inclusion. We don’t have a lot of turn 1 action as it is, giving us a potential 3/2 flyer to aggro with is just too good to pass up. After Delver if it didn’t blind flip we can set up a flip with Ponder. Ponder is already a good cantrip (meaning we won’t have card disadvantage for playing it), but the ability to setup our next two draws (or shuffle them away) is great. Vapor Snag is our last 1 drop, it lets us easily bounce threats while giving us a small push in the life-race.

Once we drop our second mana we can really start to play the control game and start countering spells. Mana Leak is our go-to counterspell, it will be relevant and hard to get around until things get to the late game and the 3 mana toll can be payed. Dissipate is our counter-all spell, We can’t play it until we have 3 mana, but there is never a point when this counterspell won’t work. The exile feature attached to Dissipate is also good, this prevent’s reanimation or flashback later in the game. Negate is our final counterspell, and it’s conditional, we can’t remove creatures, but we can stop everything else. I don’t know of almost any decks that only run creatures, so while it may not be an ideal card some of the time, it will rarely be a 100% dead card in our hand.

If something does dodge our counterspell and get played, we have some spot removal to deal with it. Doom Blade is cheap and works on a lot of things, unless your opponent is mono-black you should have at least 1 pest to remove with this card. Go for the Throat works on a much wider range of targets, most targets Doom Blade can’t hit GftT will be able to take care of. Tribute to Hunger is our last bit of black removal, and it works on Sacrifice to get around those pesky Hexproof creatures, since we should have prevented/destroyed most of the other threats our opponent shouldn’t have any choice but to sacrifice the creature we want. The life gain attached is a small bonus, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it hasn’t saved my bacon at least once.

Asside from Ponder we need a little more card draw. Think Twice is a very good card for that. The instant speed means you can leave mana up for a counterspell, and if you don’t need to play one you can draw cards with Think Twice. Blue Sun’s Zenith is our last good source of card draw, as we burn through our hand and the late game comes around, we can’t afford to rely on topdecking, dumping our excess mana into USZ allows us to draw a burst of cards for more gas.

Now all we have is our final two creatures. Aether Adept may not be the classic Jellyfish Man-O’-War, but a creature that can bounce a threat and chump/aggro for us is still a good card. Frost Titan is our big finish, we can keep a threat (or land) tapped down allowing us to beat in for 6 a turn.

I have included a sideboard with options (trying to stay budget friendly, but it’s hard…) against aggro and control matchups.