I do agree that when we lament the absence of control we jump straight to blue based control. Nobody means we need more tron or lantern or 8rack. But those decks all operate on a very funky axis where you’re leveraging synergies to be effective.

The idea of control is that at some point in the mid game your opponent is effectively dead because you can answer whatever they try to do. The most effective answer here is a hard counter like cryptic command (cavern of souls and cast triggers on ulamog notwithstanding). A fist full of paths and wraths looks prety embarassing when your opp casts scapeshift.

Classic uw control was built around counterspell, swords to plowshares, and wrath of god – I dont know how it originally drew more cards :p but the idea was if opp slow rolls threats you efficiently one-for-one them, if they overextend you wrath them and counterspell had your back against any noncreature problems while also still hitting creatures if you couldnt swords.

In modern we need countermagic to do the same job of covering you against weird cards while still hitting creatures when you cant path. But 2cmc counters all have drawbacks and we get turfed by cavern or vial in a way old school control never did. You can use discard instead, but those become dead draws late game and push you towards midrange with goyfs or tasigurs instead of control just wining with a tar pit or shambling vent.

That deck list doesnt exactly look like the next evolution of magic. It looks like it’s trying to be cute but is actually just not gonna work X amount of time, which is terrible because it relies on winning g1

Which is why I was specifically referring to beating Modern aggro. I fully intend to address this two articles from now.

While Sunlance, Condemn, Path into Verdict will probably kill most aggro decks (especially if you can chase that sequence with something like Sun Titan), it won’t do anything against linear combo like Ad Nauseam. The reason control decks do so poorly in Modern is that they don’t have enough efficient, versatile tools to get through the early game against a diverse set of opponents.

If winning were as easy as running more removal, we’d see blue-based control actually perform in Modern. But it’s not. The pros and other high-level Modern deckbuilders didn’t just forget Supreme Verdict exists.

I’m not saying that those things are not good against aggro decks. You’re basically describing UWr Nahiri though. Bolt is just a MUCH better card than both condemn and sunlance. It’s not hard to throw in 2 MD sweepers in UWr, there’s no reason to play UW for that express purpose. I always play 1 MD sweeper in UWr Nahiri and 1-2 more in the SB. Sweepers can be good, but they’re sorcery speed removal that cost 4 mana. Against aggressive decks I want my deck stacked with cheap effecient removal.

There will obviously be days where you wish you filled your deck with WoGs, but overall and from the pov of a UWr player, I think you’re wrong. You’re not looking to get ahead on cards early. You just want to kill all their stuff and let vision resolve then play cards that they can’t deal with. Preferably at instant speed, but Nahiri/Elspeth will do. Also, UWr is already very good against most aggressive decks. Sweepers would help against Eldrazi/Merfolk but would be quite redundant in most MU’s and useless in all the others. We need counterspell!

The way I remember it, control means disrupting your opponent’s “Plan A” enough to force the game into later turns when you can deploy and protect a game-ending threat. Just because you can’t do the disruption phase purely on the back of hard counters and efficient draw spells doesn’t mean it can’t be done. You just have to put more thought into it than “pile of the best blue instants, fling them at everything”. I think the fact that there have been formats in the past where that was the best way to do control has put some very narrow-minded paradigms into the Magic community’s thinking.

Any chance on sharing the Jace deck list when you make your final decisions?

Not to mention that there are available early game sweepers we can use in Esper and Jeskai. Zealous Persecution comes to mind, as does Flaying Tendrils etc, as well as the increasingly relevant Anger of the Gods for Dredge.

The list of options really goes to say that the problem for control is and has always been finding the right diversity of different answers. Sure, in Legacy it’s simpler than in modern because there are more unconditional answers, but that doesn’t change the base premise.

If modern was one hundred percent aggro? Sure load your deck with path condemn verdict playsets. Then proceed to lose to dredge, valakut, ad naus, tron etc. Being the reactive deck means you need universal answers – verdict is lousy vs bgx decks and useless vs the ones above. I still play 3 in esper control because you have to. But if you dont play spell snare and logic knot you’re basicaly giving your opponent three turns to do whatever they want in a turn four format.

As you say david a topic for another time – but the question of why theres no control in modern is a lot more engaging than how to build an aggro deck in modern :p

Vial and cavern are problems if you’re focused on counters as your answers, but are far more manageable for control than you might expect, and I’m saying this as a Merfolk player. Remember, traditionally control decks boarded out counters against linear aggro because they were bad in the first place, so Cavern is not as big a factor as you might think. Vial is a problem, but that’s why I say they need to play ways to sweep multiple times. I do have more lengthy explanations, but I will be saving them for the article I’m planning on the subject.

As I say later on, I know this from the side of an aggro player. Merfolk cannot deal with multiple sweepers. It’s why I shifted to Spell Queller. Most linear aggro decks cannot recover from being swept once, much less twice, and as a result UW control has been very good for weeks at a time in my local meta and online. UW control with Condemn, Path to Exile and Sunlance backed up by Supreme Verdict is shockingly strong against the agro decks and Ancestral Vision plus planeswalkers gives it solid game against BGx. Expect more on this in an article soon.

Sorry, but what? Most decks kill t4-t5 in Modern and you’re advocating playing more sweepers instead of Lightning Bolts? There are UW/Esper control decks in Modern that play MD sweepers. They rarely put up good results. So this claim of yours seems largely unsupported. Have you ever played any of these decks yourself or are you basing you claim solely on the fact that you play a fringe deck that sweepers are good against?

Yeah cavern of souls is a nonzero problem for control, and aether vial and coco can squeeze you too. Now you may also have quellers and selfless spirits and flashed in drogskol captains making a mockery of your removal.

Control is squeezed by all these sorts of cards plus the general versatility of modern. How does esper control beat dredge g1? And how do you like the autolose to tron and valakut decks? Now watch your deaths shadow or infect opponent roll you down with one body while you look at your painfully slow four mana removal spell.

But controls big problem imo is randomly getting obliterated by vial or cavern in a match that should otherwise be good. Hatebears, merfolk, eldrazi, and random tribal decks where spell snare logic knot esper charm verdict should be an awesome curve turns to trash with t1vial or t2cavern. You also get no free wins w control because your finisher will by necessity be slow. No chording for kiki jiki for gg or just casting become immense. You take the long road everytime and any mistake usually costs you the game because as per above – there are no free wins.

I don’t think that’s going to work for the purposes of testing. That deck looks horrible. The issue isn’t pulling up decklists – an hour on MTGTop8 and you can come up with some good decks to test out. The issue is finding pilots that are experienced with the archetype and willing to put the time in to jam games. You’re not going to play against bots to make determinations as important as whether a card should be unbanned.

It’s sort of a grixis control deck. Keep in mind that it isn’t humanmade, so it has some radical cardpicks which can all be defended if you want to know about any specific card.

Much obliged, wickeddarkman.