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Main » Articles » Understanding Control – Establishing an Identity Pt. 2

Understanding Control – Establishing an Identity Pt. 2

Chingsung Chang
Posted on November 30, 2010
 Reddit

I talked last week about the basic principles involved in the design of classical-style control decks, what they are trying to do and the tools they use to accomplish their goals. So what happens when we move the classical-style strategy into non-blue control decks (yes they exist)? Control is, after all, a fundamentally sound strategy so naturally non-Island-dwelling mages would seek to apply it.

The fundamental strategy of classical-style control is to trade one for one and come out because you have more cards. The simplest way to have more cards is just to draw more cards, but drawing cards is pretty much blue's territory, so what can the other four colors do? To generate card advantage, they came up with a different way. What happens if before we trade cards, I get something out of mine and you don't? Then I'm up whatever I got right? If I play a 2/2 that deals you one damage then trade it with your Grizzly Bear, I'm up that one point of damage. With this in mind, Incremental Card Advantage was born, and it became the center of one of the most popular archetypes ever.

"The Rock and his Millions by Sol Malka"

Rock is a classical-style control strategy applied to a non-blue deck, and thus the execution is different. Rock decks are happy to consistently trade with you because their cards normally provide value the second they hit the table, and thus trading on-board resources is generally very good for them.

Of course, this type of advantage has to be consistent across an entire deck. If I only have a few of these cards, they aren't going to generate me advantage against the single, more powerful card drawers the blue decks play. Thus, the majority of cards in this style of deck need to work toward the "card advantage" goal. The best type of value to get out of this is, of course, another card's worth of value, so the two-for-one is born. If I play a bunch of two-for-ones, I can come out ahead against even a blue deck.

To further illustrate how this works, here's a modern example of Rock by Owen Turtlewald on ChannelFireball:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

4 Putrid Leech

4 Sprouting Thrinax

4 Bloodbraid Elf

1 Broodmate Dragon

1 Siege-Gang Commander

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

4 Lightning Bolt

2 Terminate

4 Maelstrom Pulse

4 Blightning

4 Bituminous Blast

2 Sarkhan the Mad

[/Spells]

[Lands]

4 Savage Lands

4 Verdant Catacombs

4 Raging Ravine

4 Dragonskull Summit

1 Lavaclaw Reaches

3 Mountain

3 Swamp

3 Forest

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

4 Goblin Ruinblaster

4 Duress

2 Pyroclasm

2 Doom Blade

2 Prophetic Prism

1 Malakir Bloodwitch

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

AAH It's back! Take it away!

Yes, Jund is a Rock deck. It's amazing how many people failed to realize that while it was legal. Jund may be the best Rock deck ever printed (although Pernicious Deed would beg to differ). It was designed as such and remained that way through its entire reign in Standard.

Jund was such a good deck for such a long time because it was built on such a solid foundation. Rock decks have a history of cropping up in many formats, because of their incredible consistency and resilience. Rock is one of the most successful archetypes in Magic history, and if you look closer, it's easy to see why.

Control performs so well for the following reasons:

  1. Fundamentally sound strategy

  2. Providing the player with options and avenues to outplay his/her opponent

  3. Redundancy in design creates consistent draws

Rock decks take #3 and push them to an extreme. Instead of having essentially four types of cards (land, removal, permission, card draw) Rock decks have two (lands, two-for-ones). This kind of sheer redundancy creates for extremely strong draw consistency, meaning that over the course of a long tournament, variance will not screw up you that much.

However, it also creates a strong degree of design resiliency. Because so many of your cards are strategically interchangeable, it is very easy for all control decks, and Rock decks in particular, to adapt to changing metagames. This comes from a wider card pool, because Rock decks only care about one thing – does the card generate incremental advantage. If the card generates useful incremental advantage it is perfectly playable, and thus Rock decks tend to have a huge variety of tools to select from during deck construction. All that matters is selecting the right tool for the right job.

Hybrid control decks

Next, I want to talk a little bit about Hybrid control strategies. Hybrid control decks are decks that do not follow the classical-style strategy of "put your opponent in a position where he can't win through resource Attrition" but still frequently assume a controlling role in games. Control strategies can be hybridized with aggro or combo and frequently range in how controlling various decks are. We'll begin with combo-control:

"Covetous Wildfire by Kai Budde"

"Psychatog by Carlos Romoa"

Let's talk about Covetous Wildfire and Psychatog first. These are both combo-control hybrids. Covetous Wildfire leans much more toward the "combo" side of things whereas Psychatog leans much more toward the "control." Now, most of you probably question my evaluation of Psychatog as a combo-control deck. Let me explain why.

Psychatog is still a very good classical-style control deck, but it doesn't need to follow the same game plan. Psychatog only needs to survive until it can cast Upheaval floating 2 or 3 mana. Most control decks need to actually grind out a win. Psychatog doesn't. It only needs to be a classical-style deck until it assembles its combo, thus occasionally the right play as the Psychatog player is not the same as the right play from a control player's perspective. Just as an example, consider the following situation:

You are at 10 life and the board is empty.

You have seven lands in play and your opponent has six.

Your opponent has three cards in hand and you have a land and a Psychatog in your hand (among other cards).

You play Fact or Fiction at the end of your opponent's seventh turn (he is not playing Island). It reveals the following cards:

Fact or Fiction

Upheaval

Counterspell

Island

Cunning Wish

The correct play here is to take the Upheaval, even if he splits Upheaval against. Your deck is near the point where it can "go off" and you really aren't in danger. The classical-style play would be to try to get the most value out of the split and to try to grind out a longer advantage. The Psychatog play is to put the Upheaval in your hand and just win.

Of course, Covetous Wildfire Execute its "combo" much faster. All it wants to do is resolve a Wildfire with a Covetous Dragon or a Masticore that sticks around afterwards. Because this normally happens by fourth or fifth turn, it doesn't need to maintain the control role for nearly as long, and thus it has very few actual "control" components. You'd almost call it a pure combo deck, and its pretty close.

Most control hybrids with combo are this way. They tend to lean very far in one direction. Many "combo" decks are actually combo-control hybrids because they have to be able to play control to a limited extent. Pure combo decks (Ad Nauseum Tendrils and Belcher for example) are essentially non-interactive. Interactive combo decks (like Pyromancer's Ascension), are actually combo-control hybrids that just lean very heavily on the combo side.

On the other hand giving a classical-style control deck a combo finish (like Psychatog), presents a different end-game which changes how a pilot plays the deck. Grinding out card advantage was is no longer necessary, and only a few key spells become important. If you read the discussion concerning Romao's World Championship victory you'll see this come to light.

Many Psychatog players fought the Psychatog mirror like a classical-style control mirror. They would focus on things like card advantage and card economy. None of that mattered. Romao realized that none of that mattered. Psychatog and Upheaval were the only spells that mattered.

Think about that for a moment.

In the Psychatog mirror, Fact or Fiction DOESN'T MATTER.

It took a while for that to sink in, but it's true. That's because the Psychatog mirror is playing for a combo end-game, and when playing that kind of game, only the combo pieces matter.

Let's take a look at a different hybridization – aggro-control:

"Faeries by PVDDR"

"Counter-Sliver by Brian David-Marshall"

Aggro and control hybrids, on the other hand, occupy a real spectrum. Counter-sliver and Faeries are just two of many examples of the "aggro-control" archetype. The goal of the hybridization is to utilize tempo as a weapon.

All aggro-control decks seek to establish an advantage on the board, then defend it by becoming a control deck. Yes, even Faeries actually wants to do this. While this might seem weird to you, think about it this way.

Faeries had, effectively, two different draws - draws where it had T2 Bitterblossom and draws where it didn't. These games played out very differently. Why?

When Faeries had T2 Bitterblossom it was able to function as a true aggro-control deck, as it was designed. Bitterblossom was a sufficient threat on T2 to put Faeries "ahead" of many decks and draws, and thus all Faeries had to do was parley this advantage into a victory. This is why T2 Bitterblossom was so hard to beat.

But Faeries was also a pretty good normal control deck. It frequently had to play this role when it didn't have T2 Bitterblossom. The fact that it won so many of those games too speaks to the deck's abilities as a normal control deck. This two-fold design is why the deck was so powerful. Even functioning outside its designed role Faeries had a ton of game. Still, because it wasn't designed to function as a control deck, it was much easier to beat Faeries when it didn't have Rebecca's two-mana monstrosity.

Conclusion

What differentiates the various types of control decks is how they approach the problem of actually winning the game.

Classical-style control decks win the game via some late-game mop-up card or ability that they turn to once the game is already firmly in their control.

Rock decks take care of this problem with whatever creatures they have lying around that provide them with their incremental value.

Combo-control decks take care of this through whatever their combo pieces are.

Aggro-control decks take care of this through a (generally early) tempo advantage that they establish.

Understanding the identity and strategy of control is absolutely crucial to knowing how to build, play, and play against the decks correctly. If you know which type of control deck you are playing or playing against then you will know how it is you are seeking to win the game, and therefore how to best enable or disable that win condition based on the tools at your disposal.

Control decks offer their pilot many decisions and opportunities, both to succeed and to fail. All of these are built upon the framework I have laid out here, however, and understanding and internalizing it will serve you well as a foundation for building and understanding "control" as a super-archetype.

Chingsung Chang

Conelead most everywhere and on MTGO

Khan32k5@gmail.com

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