Deck Drilldown – Blood Sapphire Control

After looking into how to kill our opponents as quickly and efficiently as possible in last week’s installment of Deck Drilldown, this week we are going to pump the brakes a bit. Since the release of Primal Dawn, an archetype that I have been working on intermittently is Blood Sapphire Control with Dreaming Fox as the Champion. Control decks are a tricky beast to perfect. Their power level is directly correlated to how well their selection of answers lines up against the decks seeing play.

Let’s take a look at my current iteration of this archetype:

Champion: Dreaming Fox



As I am writing this, the most popular decks in constructed have become Wild based ramp strategies such as Wild-Ruby Cressida and Wild-Diamond Rutherford Banks. Underneath these are various forms of Kagulichu midrange, aggressive Yotul Mogak / Morgan McBombus decks, and the occasional Boris Blastforge propelling a rabbit into the skies.

Aside from Yotul Burn, Extinction lines up fairly well against all of the decks in that list. Mass Polymorph Dingler tends to be a bit slow against Blastforge and McBombus, but it thoroughly goes over the top of anything the ramp or midrange decks in the format are able to bring to the table.

Past our two sweeper effects we have three different pieces of removal to help control the board:

While all of these cards are similar in function, they all excel at doing slightly different things. This is why we play a 2 / 2 / 2 split of these cards instead of simply maxing out on one “best” choice. Transmogrifade is not always a true piece of removal, but what it does do is turn a “must answer” threat into something far less scary while you buy time to set up an eventual sweeper. Kill has the benefit of being a quick action, while having the downside of missing cards that see play like Eternal Sage. Finally, Reap is not only unconditional, but also provides thresholds for us. This is useful for fixing our own shards when playing against an opposing sapphire deck, but also good for activating gems on troops you might steal.

Speaking of stealing troops, we have two real sources of card advantage in our control deck:

I cannot express in words how powerful Lanupaw’s Sight is. When I first saw it during the Primal Dawn spoiler, there was some hesitation to if this card was going to be better than the already existing Oracle Song. I can now say that without a doubt, in any deck that has even close to a reasonable mix of troops and actions, Sight is far and away better than Song. While our total troop count is a bit on the low side, you often see two cards from Sight right away which help you keep pace in a game. Then when you find the third card down the road, it is generally enough to help you pull out ahead.

Lanupaw’s Sight also “combos” to a degree with our other card advantage spell: Relentless Corruption. Because Relentless Corruption puts itself back into your deck after it resolves, this means we have a chance to find it again and utilize the Prophesized draw more than once. In addition to generating card advantage, Relentless Corruption also provides us with two nice alternative win conditions. The first of these is your opponent’s win conditions! There is something oddly satisfying about beating your opponent down with their own deck. The second is that eventually, Corruption will be drawing enough cards from your opponent’s deck that you can simply deck them.

Next let’s take a look at our troops. First up we have a pair of utility / value troops:

A lot of my early iterations of this deck had a full four copies of Exarch of the Egg. While Exarch is a powerful card for defending against ground troops, such as Rune Ear Hierophant, while you gear up to sweep the board with Extinction, it is a bit awkward with our copies of Relentless Corruption. This is because Exarch puts Spiderling Eggs in our opponent’s deck. When you draw a spider egg from your opponent’s deck with Relentless Corruption, it gives them the spider.

Then we have our two “bombs” at the top of our curve:

Vampire King does not need much introduction. Evasion? Check. Lifedrain? Check. A text box that forces our opponent to play out their hand into our Extinctions? Check. Not only does Vampire King close out most games in a reasonable amount of time, but against aggressive decks he can single-handedly stabilize a board if he goes unanswered.

Uruunaz is a card that sees quite a bit less play than Vampire King, but is still powerful none the less. Any game that makes it to turn seven or beyond generally involves a plethora of troops being placed into our opponent’s crypt. This means that as soon as Uruunaz resolves he will generate “value” by putting a second body into play. This way, even if your opponent is able to answer your terrifying dragon, they are still left to deal with whatever he brought back. Should Uruunaz go unanswered for even a single turn cycle, he starts bringing back additional threats for your opponent to deal with.

The last cards I would like to talk about in the main deck is our shardbase. The question I get the most when playing this deck is:

“Why 27 shards?”

There is a short answer to this question and a long answer. The short answer is because control decks like this desperately need to hit their first four resources on time. You will lose far more games to stumbling on 2-3 shards than you will because you drew too many shards.

The longer answer is that in reality, we are not really playing 27 resources. Sure, there are 27 cards with the word “resource” in their text box, but three of these cards have functionality other than playing them for a resource:

Any time you draw a Shard Prism and do not need an additional resource, you can simply pay three to draw another card. When you do draw Shard Prism and really need to play a resource in that same turn, you will be happy to have had it. So in reality, think of the deck as playing 24 resources with three additional “sometimes” resources.

Dreaming Fox is also an ideal champion for a control deck with a ton of resources. First, the card advantage he generates in a long game is exactly what this type of deck generally needs to go from treading water to pulling ahead. Second, the high starting health total he provides makes the aggressive decks that are typically harder match ups for control decks much less difficult. Four or more extra points of health is often the difference in getting an entire extra turn.

Matchups

Your best matchups with Blood Sapphire control are the Wild based ramp decks such as Wild-Ruby Cressida and Wild-Diamond Rutherford Banks. The reason for this is that these ramp decks have a low density of cards that actually matter. This means our removal and discard can easily run them out of relevant threats. When it comes to the reserves, we don’t need many changes in this matchup. I like to cut the copies of Transmogrifade because most of their threats cost a lot of resources anyways. The second copy of Mass Polymorph Dingler and one of the Countermagic are reasonable to bring in.

This deck also lines up fairly well against the Boris Blastforge “Rocket Rabbit” deck. We have Inquisition to help prevent early Rune Ear Hierophants and four copies of Extinction to kill resolved rabbits. When playing this matchup, it is important to remember that your health total is very much a resource. Your opponent does not have reach in their deck, so spending a few health points to get more value out of an Extinction is often the correct decision. Another thing to keep in mind is that saving your Relentless Corruptions for after your opponent resolves a Prophecy trigger is ideal so you have a chance to draw their powered up cards.

When boarding against Boris, I find the Transmogrifades fairly lackluster, again, because their best threat has Spellshield. Just bringing in a second Mass Polymorph Dingler and a Countermagic here is fine.

The Blood Sapphire Control deck is slightly favored against the Kagulichu midrange decks. Occasionally they can have a fast start and get under our disruption, but as the game goes longer we become more and more favored. The most troublesome card in this matchup is the Drowned Shrine of Ulthar they occasionally have in their reserves. Because of this, you want to be sure to bring in your copies of Chaos Key. I also like the additional copy of Mass Polymorph Dingler and the Charge Colossus. I am not a fan of Inquisition in this matchup. Sure it is great in the first few turns of the game, but your opponent will often end up empty handed in the mid-late game which makes Inquisition a dead top deck and unlike many other matchups where stumbling causes the majority of your losses, bricks off the top kill you much faster against Kagulichu.

The Prophecy Burn matchup can be tough for Blood Sapphire Control. The important thing to keep in mind is that you do not want to fire off your Relentless Corruptions right away. Their prophecy cards are their best tools against you and Relentless Corruption allows you to steal these powerful effects from them.

We do a good bit of reserving in this matchup. Mass Polymorph Dingler, Exarch of the Egg, Thunderfield Elder, and a couple copies of Extinction generally come out. Verdict of the Ancient Kings, Vampiric Kiss, and Vampire Princess are all great to bring in.

The Yotul Burn matchup is the most difficult for Blood Sapphire Control. While it is not unwinnable, you will have little margin for error in this matchup. The important thing is to keep hands that can actually kill your opponent. While this can be difficult to always have game one, post board when you have a full eight Vampires in your deck, you generally want to mulligan any seven that does not contain one.

In addition to the Princesses, you want to bring in the Kisses, Verdicts, and Countermagics. Extinction, Mass Polymorph Dingler, Uruunaz, and Exarch of the Egg are all fine cuts.

Gameplay Videos

I spent some time streaming with different iterations of this deck that you can find below.

Wrapping Up

If you are looking for a control deck that can be tooled to beat almost any deck you are expecting that I would encourage you to give Blood Sapphire Control a try.

Have a question about this archetype that I did not cover in the article above? Let me know by leaving a comment in the forum!

Thanks for reading.

~Jeff Hoogland

Jeff is a professional gamer who enjoys the competitive aspects of HEX: Shards of Fate. Constructed is his preferred format and he is always looking for that new piece of technology to give him a leg up on the competition.

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