The other day my old padawan (and fellow CoolStuffInc columnist) Roman Fusco called me about restarting our podcast, Ancestral Recall*. Now of course the conversation eventually got to the state of Standard, which (at least pre-bans), Roman found to be a little boring.

"I really think you should try CGB's new U/W deck," I told him.

Taking a Look at CGB's Deck

I don't say this often, but it's the rare deck that I look at, that I play, and I wish I had designed myself. It's just great. One thing though... This is not like other U/W decks. Get ready for the longest games of Standard, on average, that you have ever played.

CovertGoBlue-White | Standard | CovertGoBlue

• Creatures (1)
• 1 Beza, the Bounding Spring

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Ugin, Eye of the Storms

• Instants (17)
• 4 Consult the Star Charts
• 4 Erode
• 1 Get Lost
• 4 No More Lies
• 4 Three Steps Ahead

• Sorceries (10)
• 4 Day of Judgment
• 2 Spirit Water Revival
• 4 Stock Up

• Artifacts (9)
• 4 Clay-Fired Bricks
• 1 Pinnacle Starcage
• 3 Soul-Guide Lantern
• 1 Valor's Flagship

• Lands (22)
• 3 Island
• 7 Plains
• 4 Floodfarm Verge
• 4 Gleaming Bastion
• 4 Hallowed Fountain

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There is a lot going on here, and most of it goes counter to almost all your default expectations not only of Standard, but of CGB Clay-Fired Bricks decks.

CovertGoBlue has been the lone voice of playing Clay-Fired Bricks in conventional Control decks (rather than Simulacrum Synthesizer decks) over many builds and iterations, but mostly so he can remove them himself and bring them back for big bursts of life (and sometimes) card advantage later in the game.

But this deck has only one Pinnacle Starcage. It's a little wonky: And like I said, there's a lot going on here.

Playing This U/W Control Deck

First and foremost, this is the best Three Steps Ahead deck I've ever played.

Most of the time you're aiming for a five mana Three Steps Ahead. That is, countering the opponent's threat and going up a card. In the midgame you will often take a Land and a Three Steps Ahead over a Stock Up or Consult the Star Charts because it will keep your game going, and at sufficient mana, Three Steps Ahead is just more card advantage.

I like to call five mana the "Dismiss" mode of Three Steps Ahead; but its filtering ability is actually quite a bit better than merely drawing a card, especially because the deck has clunky answers that aren't good in every matchup. You might want to discard Day of Judgment against an opposing Control deck, for instance.

The reason CGB's is such a good Three Steps Ahead deck is because you will willfully opt for a six-mana mode (Counter + "Clone") instead of stranding the last mana as you would with most decks.

Here, if you "Clone" a Clay-Fired Bricks it's usually better than the default "Catalog" mode. First, you're getting multiple cards of value instead of just +1 card. The usual Artifact you'll copy is a Clay-Fired Bricks, which is +1 card (that is always a Plains) and an additional Philosophy of Fire unit (2 life). Subtly, you also get a Lotus Petal's worth of value because any Artifact can help you Waterbend a Spirit Water Revival later in the game.

But more than just willfully paying six mana instead of five for a little extra value, you use all three modes on Three Steps Ahead here a lot. As we've said, this deck plays the longest games of any Standard deck I've ever touched, so you will often have plenty of mana (and no bounds). Go crazy: Eight mana it is!

Oh, and there's one more reason this is such a great Three Steps Ahead deck: Sometimes you can even Counterspell Inevitable Defeat. Just yesterday, I had an opponent point a pretty near-lethal Inevitable Defeat at my poor Clay-Fired Bricks. They could have targeted Pinnacle Starcage, but that would have been counterproductive, as it would have "released" an earlier Clay-Fired Bricks, giving me a little life back.

So, what did I do? I Cloned the Starcage itself, of course, which exiled the Bricks he targeted. Though I would lose the Clay-Fired Bricks in both cases, this way I at least didn't lose three life, and I still came away with an additional permanent for Spirit Water Revival shenanigans later.

But Wait, There's More

Secondly, it's also one of the best Soul-Guide Lantern decks I've ever played. I'm a sucker for Soul-Guide Lantern in U/W Control anyway. Last year I won an Arena event with it as a random cantrip that could sometimes mess up Omniscience combo but didn't terminally slow you down against Red Aggro. Here it's a tool that can absolutely shred Superior Spider-Man decks through Cavern of Souls.

Then there's Ugin, Eye of the Storms. I've never really liked Ugin in Standard, in part because I felt like it didn't really do anything to win the game, it just created a giant advantage. But in this deck, you have Soul-Guide Lantern as an ultra-cheap way to trigger even a solo Ugin again and again.

Soul-Guide Lantern is the "glue guy" that every championship squad needs. Messes up some opponents' strategies, makes the overpaid free agent look like an absolute Greek god in the endgame.

Third, Erode just sets up Beza, the Bounding Spring.

For a lot of decks you have to take a long breath and ask yourself if you even want to cast Erode. The answer is usually "yes" but you get kind of mad about it. You're giving them a card; you might be giving them card advantage and acceleration.

Remember: Erode is so good for the player whose Creature is being Eroded, they will often do it to themselves in response to other removal.

But this deck has no illusions whatsoever about managing resources in the early game. It basically only has one question to answer: Will this keep me alive to keep playing? If the answer is yes, it doesn't care so much about conceding a paltry Basic. Some decks don't even have them to look for, remember. If you give CGB's U/W time to keep breathing, its card advantage will be so great that almost nothing can keep it in check.

But if you do, in fact, have to worry about a Land coming into play, the one Beza will just pay you back.

Fourth -- and this is the big one -- it's wholly unclear whether Jeskai Revelation or Improvisation Capstone remain the most powerful top-ends in Standard. I'm not saying that I win every game that someone resolves a Jeskai Revelation (or certainly Capstone) but the endgames end up far more interesting than you might have assumed.

Like, Jeskai Revelation breeds more Jeskai Revelations, and none of that is good for the person being Revelated. Here, though, you have two Spirit Water Revivals to match or even exceed the card advantage of opposing big sevens. You have all kinds of ways to wash out four damage, Flashback possibilities, or a couple of 1/1 Monks.

Improvisation Capstone will sometimes be more problematic than problem-solving. There aren't so many Creatures in this deck, and you will not often have spells on the stack when Capstone goes Paradigm each turn. Meaning that if all that is happening is they are revealing Creature elimination or permission, Improvisation Capstone might do more deck damage to the opponent than structural or strategic damage to you.

I've also found -- at least in the games where you've resolved a Spirit Water Revival with Waterbending -- that you can just Counterspell the opponent's big Capstone reveals and ignore everything else. Either way, it's a ride that makes Standard a lot more interesting.

This Deck's Win Cons

What do you mean you don't know how this crazy rich deck works? All right: Let's take a step back.

I've said repeatedly this is probably the slowest deck to win in all of Standard. That's because of how it wins. Today's U/W Control decks are mostly Jeskai or four-color decks that bury the opponent in a flurry of Jeskai Revelations once they've turned the corner.

But this deck has all of one copy of Beza, and sadly no Jeskai Revelations to compound its advantages. Sure, you might functionally have multiple Bezas, either through graveyard recursion or sneaky Three Steps Ahead Cloning; but it's not like Elemental beatdown is anywhere close to a consistent path to victory.

Generally, there is one main way you win: The opponent sees the writing on the wall and concedes.

Structurally, there are three general paths to get there.

You Cycle a Big Valor's Flagship

You'll probably do this at the end of the opponent's turn, and this is actually only part one. You are going to want to cycle for ten, or at least seven, to make ending it go faster. Ideally you can flip a Clay-Fired Bricks to Cosmium Kiln on your turn, which will make 10 Pilots into 20 lethal damage from a single Valor's Flagship cycle.

But I guess in a pinch you can run your opponent out of resources and just attack multiple times. Because this deck is so harmonious unto itself, Valor's Flaghip can represent the paired Artifact for Cosmium Kiln from the graveyard; or in really cheeky games, you can main phase three mana from Ugin to make a big enough cycle for a one-turn lethal.

Any Old Spirit Water Revival (With Waterbending)

Resolving this card at its full potential is like going into the Avatar State yourself. First, if you have the mana for it -- and you get it off -- that probably says something about how the game is going.

Now the opponent is going to have to contend with nine or eleven or even more cards in hand from someone who can cast all of them. You're likely going to be Kicking Consult the Star Charts every turn, so you always have Counterspells at the ready. The most likely way you'll lose if any of this happens is being burned out by cards like Death to Our Enemies or Inevitable Defeat, so don't be shy about getting life from Bricks, Beza, or Ugin.

The one thing I will caution is that any Spirit Water Revival will Exile itself. That means if you have to play one for three mana (like a poor man's Stock Up) you won't have it to Waterbend later. As gaga as this sounds, you are often called on to Waterbend both your Spirit Water Revivals in a successful game, so be mindful and plan accordingly.

A Spirit Water Revival is itself a win condition (by helping to deck the opponent) but they might not know it yet, which is why games continue to be long. Either way, you'll usually have plenty of card advantage to run them over with a hybrid Ugin plan.

Ugin Just Keeps You Alive

Ugin keeping you alive is annoying enough to concede to. Three life a turn adds up while you're bonking permanents and drawing no fewer than an extra card per cycle. In this deck that tends to add up to three or more extra cards.

Ergo, most opponents will just concede to Ugin after a few go 'rounds, but what ends up actually happening is that "keeping you alive" translates to more Land drops, more random permanents like Clay-Fired Bricks or Vindictive Soul-Guide Lanterns, which translate to Spirit Water Revival with a ton of mana open.

So, it's not Ugin that wins, but it was Ugin who got you there. Of course, all these plans work together, so Ugin might buy you the time to Waterbend Spirit Water Revival, which gets back a Valor's Flagship you had to Cycle earlier, which is later +3 fueled by Ugin for a spectacular single attack.

Conclusion

I will leave you with just one caveat, especially since a few months ago I was mooning over a Roman Fusco U/W deck. If you imagine U/W Control to be a deck with Aang's Iceberg and Ultima (two cards that are not present in this CGB deck), you will imagine Simulacrum Synthesizer decks to be easy prey.

You probably have more than enough cards to deal with essentially four ways to win in their entire deck. That's not going to happen here. You're in a Clay-Fired Bricks shootout where you essentially have to keep their Synthesizers off the battlefield. That is the one matchup that goes completely sideways with this shift, though I suppose if you played Best-of-Three, you could fix it with all manner of sideboarding.

But CGB is The One in Best-of-One, and this article approaches Arena from that orientation.

LOVE

MIKE

*If you haven't listened to Ancestral Recall yet, I honestly envy you. The second-ever episode was referenced on the Mother Ship of wizards.com at the time; and leading up to his Top 4 run at Paupergenesis, Daniel Sweat told me that revisiting Tomfidence helped to get him there.