Don't Worry About the Vase: Blue Control

Don't Worry About the Vase: Blue Control

I was planning to write an article about San Diego and booster draft in general, but leave it to most of WotC to leave for Thanksgiving before Tuesday afternoon. Since there are some issues I want to discuss with them first, this is probably going to wait until after Chicago. Instead, I'm going to return this column to its normal topic, deck construction and strategy. First I examined Stompy, this time I'm going to tackle Blue Control.

Once again, I'm going to use the decks that won state championships as a starting point. There aren't as many of them this time, so if something important isn't illustrated, I'll pull out one of the fifteen variations submitted to the Clinic. At this point, stop and take a look at these decks, although I've put them at the bottom of the article. The first thing to note is that they divide immediately into two camps. The first three are based on playing pure controlling strategies, while the last two try (the horror, the horror) to DO something. Ian P. McDonald played aggressive flyers backed up by counterspells, and Steve Jarvis played for the Opposition or Temporal Adept lock. I respect the Adept strategy a lot, since it does devastate a lot of decks, and is enough of a threat that your opponent will normally have to spend the turn you're tapped out killing it. The Opposition strategy puzzles me a lot more. When these blue decks get a 4-cost card on the table and can keep a creature around, they tend to be in a winning situation anyway. The strategy with the flyers also seems sub-optimal to me, since you're not really doing something another color couldn't do better. What that deck does look like it can do is perform very well against Bargain, so it makes sense if that's what you expect to face, the same way master personal metagamer Nicolas Labarre played cheap blue creatures and counterspells to crush Academy decks in Rome. But what I'm going to concentrate on is the straightforward version of the deck.

Again, like Stompy, the first part of this deck builds itself, and the decisions revolve around how to finish it. Clearly, the deck has four each of Miscalculation, Counterspell, Treachery, and Powder Keg. The deck shouldn't even consider running less than about 25 lands, so there are only about 19 slots remaining. Everyone plays some number of Masticores. Four copies would force you to play it too often when you don't want to, and often you won't, so the right number is probably three. But the next card in the deck is one I completely disagree with, although all three copies that won state championships used four of it, and that card is Brainstorm.

In general, I like Brainstorm. It's a great card. I've come a long way since I had to figure out during play why Brainstorm was good with Land Tax, or why Finkel was using it against me with Thawing Glaciers. But that was when those players were shuffling their decks. Brainstorm is very different when you never shuffle your deck, and if you look through these decks you'll note none of them have a way to shuffle their libraries. That leaves Brainstorm to do only two things. One is allowing you to hide cards on top of your library from black discard spells. The other is to dig two cards deeper on one specific turn, although after that turn it serves as a pure cantrip. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not worth a slot in your deck just for that. The question becomes whether you want it in the deck to protect against black, in particular Persecute, which is the discard spell you really fear. But looking over the winning decklists, there is a grand total of one Persecute in several black control decks. So stop being so paranoid and give yourself some room. You'll need it.

The second question is whether you want to accelerate your blue by playing Grim Monolith. If you do, you plan your deck based on the fact that you will often have six mana on turn three and can later generate a lot of mana without tapping out. The downside of playing Monolith is that it causes you to play quite a lot of mana sources, and to take full advantage of the card you make decisions that will hurt you if you don't have one. Still, the Monolith solves a lot of problems for this deck. Cards like Morphling, while expensive and useless in the early game without a Monolith, are cards that can dominate the game. Opponents are normally very happy to trade two cards for a Morphling or Palinchron. There is a similar situation with Stroke of Genius or Opportunity, of which an accelerated version is probably better off with Stroke. Playing these huge cards allows you to "get back" the cards you lost by playing all those mana sources. But you can also make up for it with those lands.

Your land slots are a resource, just like your nonland slots. One thing you get from them is colored mana, but you shouldn't take more than you need. This deck has a lot of uses for colorless mana, and the only really intensive use of blue mana is for Morphling. With other spells, you can tap colorless mana on your own turn, or with Palinchron and Treachery your lands untap anyway. The main reason to play a lot of islands would be to support Thwart. But Thwart is just a bad card in this deck. Every land play is valuable to this kind of deck; you would almost never want to pay the alternate casting cost. It's just a four mana counterspell. Rewind actually works with Grim Monolith, so it's worth considering, but in the case of Thwart you're nowhere near that desperate. That takes away the need for a lot of Islands. Some people might be wondering about Dust Bowl as a reason, but there really aren't enough of them right now to make that a major consideration. If it was, besides, you should have your own to stop them. The Bowl is still going to be worth killing, since Rishadan Port and Faerie Conclave are clearly in the deck. The question now is how many blue sources you need. Since Rewind untaps your lands, the most blue mana you really need early on is three, two for Counterspell and one for Miscalculation. But if you only have two, it's no big loss. This sounds like you want about 18-20 blue sources. Indeed, both accelerated versions went with 19. That leaves room for the 2-3 Dust Bowls they used, and I think two is enough.

The final question is: How many lands can you afford to have come in tapped? Remote Isle is a valuable asset to this deck, allowing you to play more lands than you otherwise would be able to. In many ways, it's going to take the place of Brainstorm. On turn one, you have no spells to cast since you don't start Annul. That means drawing one such land doesn't harm you. And for every two of them you add, your land count can go up by one. So I suggest playing all four. They're better than Brainstorm, because they increase your land ratio when you want them to and lower it when you don't, while Brainstorm always leaves it the same. That gives us a lot of land, probably 27-28. That in turn gives us more colorless lands. While you want Dust Bowls for the mirror matchup and you want them to kill opposing man lands, you almost never want to go into Armageddon mode with them. I know this seems weird, but Blasted Landscape is probably better than additional Dust Bowls. Not too many, but some. If we play 20 blue mana sources to stay on the safe side, we can run two Blasted Landscape and have 28 lands. Add in four Grim Monoliths, and the deck will have all the mana it needs without going into overload too much. Add the sixteen core cards and you reach 46. The deck wants to have slightly more countermagic, and the question is what the next best counter is. Power Sink becomes an option with all this mana, but Rewind still seems like the best one outside the core. Misdirection is interesting, but doesn't really do all that much for this deck. The rest of the deck will consist of the four game winning cards: Palinchron has gotten weaker due to the new black removal, so run two of that and three of the others.

Now, on to the sideboard. Clearly you're going to want Annul, and while I congratulate Alan Tetu for winning without the Hibernations, I wouldn't leave home without them, either. This version is fast enough that Hibernation works instead of just delaying the inevitable. Chill also seems to be a consensus card, but I would question that more than the first two. Arcane Laboratory is big too, and the deck isn't going to beat Bargain that much without it. The other two things you might want in the SB are something for the mirror matchup, probably Turnabout, and something for Phyrexian Negator or black control. If you face a lot of Negators, you generally need to bite the bullet and use Unsummon. Against black control, again all you need to do is survive. This deck has "inevitability." If nothing goes seriously wrong, it will eventually win the game. There are only two things black can really do, Persecute and Negator, and Negator is the only one seeing much play. So here's the version I would use if I were going to use this kind of deck:

There's something strange going on in all of this. You always want to play exactly sixty cards, at most sixty-one in those rare decks where the land ratio won't work at sixty. But every card slot of the sixty is a valuable asset. Clearly, you would love to play a fifty-six card deck, which is what Brainstorm seems to give you. But requiring that one mana to get rid of the card is huge. Among other things, you need to know how good your hand is when deciding whether to mulligan. If there's a Brainstorm in your hand, you basically have less information. That problem is less severe when you start with a cycling land because early on, you normally want to use it as a land. It can still be frustrating, of course, to start with a hand where you're basically going to cycle or draw into all but one or two of your spells. But it's generally clear you keep them. Even the smallest hiccup early on can be fatal. It's an easy mistake to think that Urza's Bauble belongs in every deck but that delay in both card access and card knowledge keeps it out when it can't be abused. It's not just a lack of disciple in every deckbuilder who uses Yawgmoth's Will.

Sometimes a card like Brainstorm is so useful, though, that there's no question you want it. For example, I was (like everyone) testing a Draw-Go deck for Worlds based on the then-broken Thawing Glaciers. At first I had Whispers of the Muse, but I quickly realized you didn't need it. Brainstorm was the card drawing engine, because you put lands back and shuffled. A lot of people didn't have four, or even didn't play them; most of the time, they said they couldn't find room. I asked them why the deck wouldn't be better just adding the Brainstorms without cutting cards. Before the "must... have... sixty... cards... " brainwashing kicked in, they generally knew I was right. At that point, you KNOW something else should be cut. The disadvantage of a card like Brainstorm is playing them increases your long term land ratio without increasing it as much early... but when it actually lessens it later on by getting rid of lands you have exactly zero use for it's amazing.

That brings up another point. Often players will have decks they simply cannot cut down. The best way to deal with this is to just prevent it; I won't even take a sample draw on Apprentice with more than sixty cards anymore. But for those who do get into this problem (and you know who you are), there's a very simple way out unless your deck is doing a lot of tutoring. Choose the cards that are the very best in the deck, leaving plenty of extra space. Then choose the best lands in the deck, selecting the same percentage of lands. Then do something radical: Shuffle the remaining cards and randomly remove them from the game until you're down to sixty. Then, if you want, you can trade cards on a one-to-one basis. If you think about it, this has to improve your deck if you do it before the start of every game. You draw your best cards more often, so you have a better deck. It will get even better when you start switching cards in and out.

I'd be much more inclined to run Accelerated Blue than I would be to run Stompy. If nothing else, it's much more my style. Still, it's a shadow compared to CMU Blue from Worlds, and faces the huge challenge of Rishadan Port, which almost forces it to take this activist approach.

NEW YORK Max Alicea

Alan Tetu TEXAS

NEVADA Robert Swarowski

UTAH Steve Jarvis

MISSOURI Ian P. McDonald