The Rules of Control

[PhantomS]

It’s a Saturday night. Fredrick and Bill are sitting down to do a little playtesting. Bill draws his card for his third turn and looks over at Fredrick’s untapped vivid creek and island. Bill then plays a fire-lit thicket and taps all three lands he now controls to cast a boggart ram-gang. He holds the card above the table and asks, “Ram-gang?”.

Now, just why is Bill asking that? He knows that the card in his hand is in fact a (boggart) ram-gang, so that’s not the nature of his inquiry. Yes, that question mark is the all too familiar “mother may I?” that needs be asked before resolving any spell against a control deck showing the potential to respond. Today in the Abstract we are going to be focusing on what makes the control deck such an appealing deck type, and what makes these decks tick. In order to fully inspect any magic deck one must consider this oft quoted axiom: There are no bad threats, only bad answers. We will be going back to that several times over the course of this installment.

There are several elements that are necessary for making a good control deck, and all of them can be found in the mother of all control decks, Brian Weissman’s The Deck:

Let’s start by looking at the deck’s win condition. They are incredibly sparse. For one, we have the serra angels, for two there is the potential to “mill” your opponent with a braingeyser in a long enough game, and lastly at this point in magic history mirror universe could actually be used to win the game through a rules loophole. This leads us to the first element of a control deck- win cons need not be abundant. This will be our first reference back to the above stated quote. Win conditions are sparse in control decks because they need to dedicate a lot of slots to answers. Seeing as threats are always going to be good, an answer needs to always be available. The other major influence that playing very few threats has is that the deck needs ways to protect their threats. Serra Angel already had the advantage of surviving a Lightning Bolt, but there were also terrorss and opposing STPs to worry about. As such The Deck features a healthy element of hand disruption in disrupting scepter and amnesia, answers to opposing answers in counterspells, and ways to recur the angel in regrowth and recall.

Further exploring the line of thought that all threats require answers we find the next element of a good control deck- card advantage. If every threat needs to be answered that means that the control player needs to draw perfectly and/or abundantly. For this reason control decks almost always feature some element of card drawing, examples from The Deck being ancestral recall, braingeyser and Jayemdae tomb. Magic theory when The Deck was constructed wasn’t where it is today, and as such the card drawing portion of control decks is more abundant these days.

The next element of a control deck is versatility. Most “bad answers” are in fact good cards that just don’t apply to a situation, i.e. path to exile versus a team of spectral procession tokens. The versatility of The Deck was more subtle than what one sees these days. Mana drain and disrupting scepter were versatile in the sense that they could deal with essentially any card, not versatile in the sense that cryptic command and esper charm do a thousand different things. The best card for a slot in a control deck is going to be the card that remains good in the most relevant scenarios.

Now we will explore one final element of a control deck- timing. It’s time for a pop quiz. What is the best card type? The answer is hands down the instant. The reason being that you can do them whenever you do so desire. Control decks should feature a great deal of instants and cards with flash, as having mana tapped on one’s opponent’s turn means that they no longer need to add that question mark to the end of their actions. Control decks should only deal in sorcery-speed cardboard when it offers good card advantage, high versatility, and/or a very strong win condition. With most answers being in the form of an instant the control player is allowed to remove the opponents threats and cast their own before the opponent can apply additional pressure, and this is essentially the manner in which most control victories over aggro decks are decided.

I’m still trying to decide a proper way to sign off on my column, so today we’re going to end on a really, really terrible joke.

Time Stop?

[Zeek]

Awesome article. I enjoyed it.