This weekend marked the 2015 Star City Games Season 1 Invitational, and it was quite the show to watch. It was the first big tournament with Dragons of Tarkir being legal, and it was quite the spectacle. There were some awesome games all weekend, and the finals pitted the two best players in the tournament against one another. You can’t really ask for more than that.

Of course, with the nature of the tournament being split-format, the Top 8 is not necessarily representative of the successful Standard decks from the tournament. Jacob Wilson, despite winning the tournament, only posted a 5-3 record in the Standard portion of the swiss rounds!

As such, it behooves us as players to open up the page for 7-1 or better Standard decks. On this page we find Christian Calcano’s UB Control deck. The deck didn’t gain a ton of unique cards from Dragons, but the few cards that it did gain dramatically improved the strategy.

The big story here is Anticipate, with a minor nod to Ultimate Price. Previous incarnations of UB Control jammed the full four Jace's Ingenuity because it was so difficult to make their individual cards line up right against opposing threats, and the only way to try to address this was to aggressively out-card your opponent. Anticipate gives you the card selection to help line your answers up better and in Calcano’s list even took slots away from Jace's Ingenuity- card that you just couldn’t cut before.

Anticipate also gives you another efficient delve-enabler for Dig Through Time- your other fantastic card selection option.

Most of the buzz for control decks was centered around Narset, Transcendant Master, but I would recommend looking at Calcano’s list over UWx control. His list is just leaner while also being the papa bear of control mirrors.