Going into Baltimore, we had a very small and disorganized group of local players functioning as a sort of team, as long as you use the term “team” pretty loosely. We didn’t really communicate much other than coordinating rooming and travel; we didn’t talk much about the format; and we certainly didn’t test very many games. Up until the week before the Grand Prix, the bulk of my testing was purely theorycraft and talking about the format on Twitter.
The Beginning
Up until that point, the only Standard I’d played in months was FNM, and I’d been playing the greediest, highest-variance deck I’d played in a very long time. It was a twist on the four color control/[card]Unburial Rites[/card]/[card]Faithless Looting[/card] decks that had been posted by Gerry T and Ali Aintrazi less than a week into the format. It was tweaked to try to beat the decks that I was seeing a lot of. For anyone interested, here’s the list that I played last:
[deck title=4.5 Color Reanimator]
[Lands]
2 Evolving Wilds
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Shimmering Grotto
1 Copperline Gorge
2 Blackcleave Cliffs
3 Seachrome Coast
3 Mountain
2 Plains
1 Swamp
1 Island
4 Sulfur Falls
4 Clifftop Retreat
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
3 Sun Titan
2 Phantasmal Image
2 Inferno Titan
1 Grave Titan
2 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Faithless Looting
4 Desperate Ravings
3 Forbidden Alchemy
4 Unburial Rites
2 Ratchet Bomb
2 Galvanic Blast
1 Whipflare
1 Slagstorm
1 Day of Judgment
1 Pacifism
2 Oblivion Ring
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
1 Ratchet Bomb
2 Ancient Grudge
1 Pacifism
1 Day of Judgment
1 Ray of Revelation
2 Nihil Spellbomb
4 Mental Misstep
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Haunted Fengraf
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]
Honestly, this deck was doing pretty well in the limited games I’d played with it, mostly agaist Wolf Run, Humans, and bad control decks of different colors. The Spirits match up was a little worse than I would have liked, and to be honest, it was probably only close because we weren’t playing it right.
The mana is much, much better than it looks, but you can get some awkward draws. Personally, I like a deck like this better than Frites because the control elements mean that you aren’t just racing to Elesh Norn, and that you won’t just lose games to random pieces of hate. The control elements are present enough that you can just hardcast Titans on turn six against aggro decks, but you also have the potential for an incredibly powerful, proactive plan that ends the game before it really starts.
What I ended up deciding was that the deck was too inconsistent and too susceptible to cards that are commonly played in the format, like [card]Vapor Snag[/card] and [card]Nihil Spellbomb[/card]. Over the course of the billion rounds we were going to play, something bad was going to happen. You stumble on mana, or run into the guy who decided he wasn’t going to lose to graveyard deck. Sure, you have the chance to just win the game, but your nut draws aren’t as good as Delver or Frites and happen less often. The downside of playing a deck like this is too low, and the upside not high enough.
Revelations
Having decided that, I looked at the most recent SCG results, and saw a format dominated by Spirits and Wolf Run. There were two cards that seemed very well positioned in that kind of metagame: [card]Daybreak Ranger[/card] and [card]Sorin Markov[/card]. So many of the best decks in the format rely on small creatures, with or without flying, and so having a trump to these sort of cards seems like a good place to be. Unfortunately, [card]Daybreak Ranger[/card] puts you solidly in a midrangey RG beatdown deck, which isn’t really where I wanted to be when people are going to be playing [card]Flashfreeze[/card].
Here’s where I’ve got to give a huge shoutout to one of the players in our testing group, Ian, who’s probably the best player among us. After setting on a gauntlet of mostly Spirits, Humans, and Wolf Run, we were both very interested in UBx control decks, because UB is traditionally good in a format with a small number of dominant decks. You can build UB to be 65-70% against one or two decks, and then construct a sideboard to help your worst matchups.
After drafting some builds and running them against the gauntlet a few times, we couldn’t find another color that was really worth it. The additional power and interactions that you get from extra colors is always good, but generally isn’t worth ruining your mana when GPs have so many rounds. Because of that, we settled on a generic UB list that looked something like this:
[deck title=UB Control V1]
[Lands]
4 Darkslick Shores
4 Drowned Catacomb
3 Ghost Quarter
2 Nephalia Drownyard
7 Swamp
5 Island
[/Lands]
[Spells]
2 Doom Blade
2 Tragic Slip
2 Liliana of the Veil
2 Tribute to Hunger
2 Snapcaster Mage
1 Go for the Throat
2 Ratchet Bomb
2 Curse of Death’s Hold
3 Black Sun’s Zenith
1 Blue Sun’s Zenith
1 Karn Liberated
1 Sorin Markov
3 Mana Leak
3 Dissipate
3 Forbidden Alchemy
3 Think Twice
1 Negate
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
1 Dissipate
1 Negate
3 Flashfreeze
4 Phyrexian Crusader
3 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Surgical Extraction
1 Nephalia Drownyard
1 Bloodline Keeper
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]
This build was mostly a mishmash of cards we wanted to try. Since I don’t want to dwell too much on a pretty terrible list, here are the highlights: How reliable is the Drownyard/Planeswalker win condition over other six drops? Which of the removal spells do you want more or less often than they show up? Which of the sideboard cards, particularly [card]Phyrexian Crusader[/card], perform as expected in the appropriate match ups?
What we found was the the planeswalkers crushed control decks, but lacked the immediate impact necessary to really close a game against more aggressive decks. It’s great to counter and kill their first few plays, but you need a Titan or Sphinx to actually put the game out of reach. Without them you’re just seeing who can topdeck better going into the late game.
The suite of removal spells was pretty good, but the there were a few too many concessions to [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card] and Thrun when those weren’t showing up in the same numbers that they had been a few weeks ago. The biggest decision was that [card]Tragic Slip[/card] was not as good as we’d hoped it would be at shoring up all of your aggro match ups. Killing all of the relevant one drops in the format is great, but Morbid can be surprisingly difficult to get sometimes, and it feels pretty terrible to have a removal spell in your hand that can’t kill the Titan or [card]Hero of Bladehold[/card] that’s about to kill you.
What we did find out that was really pretty exciting is that [card]Phyrexian Crusader[/card] and [card]Bloodline Keeper[/card] are insane sideboard cards. Crusader is all but unbeatable for the Humans decks, which is typically one of your worst match ups, and shores up Mono-Red, which is almost unwinnable. [card]Bloodline Keeper[/card] is a great, cheap threat in the mirror. It is also insane against a lot of the more midrangey aggro decks like Zombies and Spirits.
The Results
After some more tweaks, here’s the list that we ended up on:
[deck title=UB Control V2: Baltimore Edition]
[Lands]
4 Darkslick Shores
4 Drowned Catacomb
3 Ghost Quarter
2 Nephalia Drownyard
7 Swamp
6 Island
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
2 Consecrated Sphinx
3 Snapcaster Mage
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Mana Leak
3 Think Twice
3 Forbidden Alchemy
1 Blue Sun’s Zenith
3 Dissipate
2 Doom Blade
2 Liliana of the Veil
1 Karn LIberated
1 Ratchet Bomb
2 Curse of Death’s Hold
3 Black Sun’s Zenith
1 Tribute to Hunger
1 Dismember
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
2 Phantasmal Image
2 Batterskull
1 Ratchet Bomb
1 Dissipate
2 Flashfreeze
2 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Surgical Extraction
3 Phyrexian Crusader
1 Nephalia Drownyard
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]
Ian and I were pretty happy with this list, and ended up playing the same 74 of 75 cards; he ran an extra [card]Tragic Slip[/card] main where I ran another [card]Dissipate[/card].
Overall, I was very happy with the list we came up with. You basically could never lose to Wolf Run unless they boarded in 2-3 Karn and 2-3 [card]Garruk, Primal Hunter[/card], and even then it took some pretty sick draws on their part. Unfortunately, I never played against any of the decks we were metagamed against throughout the entire event. I played against Bant Pod, UB Zombies, UB Infect, the mirror, and RG aggro with [card]Brimstone Volley[/card] instead of [card]Sword of War and Peace[/card]. Ian ran into the mirror twice, Frites, Wolf Run, and another match that I missed.
So I managed a pretty miserable 4-3 after two byes while Ian pulled a more respectable 4-2-1 after one bye. The deck felt very good, and I think with some better match ups and tighter play, things could have turned out a little better, but not too much. The sheer amount of UB at the top tables was both encouraging and terrifying. Encouraging because it meant we’d picked the right deck for the event, but terrifying because we were so poorly set up for the mirror, since it was not a matchup that we’d anticipated seeing a ton.
An Aside on the Mirror
I’m am by no means a great constructed player; I think I’m pretty good at building and tweaking decks for particular metagames, but I have no illusions of being a “great” player or deck builder. That said, I think that there are a lot of people who just have no idea how to approach Control mirrors, and that showed through the games I was watching. The problem is that UB is actually a very straightforward deck to play against more aggressive and midrangey decks. There’s a pretty logical order to your counterspells and removal. You have to hold answers to some cards you can’t beat, and use your life total as a resource to get to where you can start casting bombs with back up. In general, there’s not much to it.
In the mirror though, all of that changes, because there are a number of angles either player can attack from. The mirror fundamentally comes down to identifying what resource is the most important at any given time. You have to know how you’re going to win, how they’re going to try to win, and whether or not you can race or disrupt their clock.
The first level to fight on is with [card]Nephalia Drownyard[/card]. Whoever is winning the Drownyard fight is generally in control of the game, beacuse they don’t ever have to do anything to win until you dirsupt their Drownyards. Furthermore, if you do spend a bunch of mana to deal with their Drownyards, it usually puts you far enough behind on mana that they can resolve one of their bombs and ride that to victory.
A reasonably common approach to the mirror was to flash in an early [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card] if your hand was weak, and just try to sneak in 12ish points of damage, then resolve a late five or six drop and have them suddenly very close to dead. Generally, this is only a good plan if you don’t think your hand or deck is capable of winning the more traditional, grindy UB mirror, since you’re giving up a lot of value for your [card]Ambush Viper[/card] beatdown.
The second thing you can do is just go over the top. You can board into [card]Batterskull[/card]s and [card]Bloodline Keeper[/card]s, and just jam threats with [card]Mana Leak[/card] or [card]Dissipate[/card] back up until one of them resolves. The important thing is to recognize who has inevitability at any particular point in the game. In general, if the game is even, don’t do anything you don’t have to. The easiest way to lose is to play the first non-cantrip spell, because then your opponent can choke your mana on their turn.
If you’re behind, you need to try to sculpt a series of turns or plays where you can stick a threat that changes what’s important. That’s part of why [card]Grave Titan[/card] is so good in the mirror; you can be very far behind on cards and Drownyards, but if [card]Grave Titan[/card] Resolves, none of that matters, because suddenly your opponent is facing a two turn clock.
I think that the mirror I played at the GP is actually a pretty reasonable example of identifying what is important in any particular game. The first mistake my opponent made was complaining about the number of UB mirrors he’d played already today before we’d presented. I knew what I was playing against so when I won the roll I promptly chose to draw and mulliganed into five lands and Karn. In the end, I won a game where the only spell I cast was Karn because he thought he had to be proactive to beat my Drownyard. I knew that the only thing that mattered was whether or not Karn resolved.
In the second game, I missed my fifth land drop and then won because he decided to [card]Ghost Quarter[/card] my Drownyard early, and then lost because I drew more lands and he didn’t. The problem is that if I’m behind on lands, Drownyard doesn’t actually matter. You can just overwhelm the few lands I do have. At that point, the only important resouce is lands. Until I manage to deck you, Drowning you just puts you ahead cards, and makes it easier for you to pull further ahead on lands.
Expanding the Drownyards
That said, the format has changed pretty substantially since Baltimore. There’s a lot more RG Aggro and Zombies, two of the worst match ups for UB Control. The deck needs to be restructured in some ways to make those match ups better. I’m trying to build UB for a cash event this weekend. Let’s talk about how the stock in some cards changes with new aggressive decks revolving around Undying creatures.
First, the stock of [card]Curse of Death’s Hold[/card] has gone up even further. The card has always been a trump for [card]Moorland Haunt[/card] decks, but is now also a trump for most of the Zombie deck and RG deck. You certainly want no more than two main, but I can see wanting a third for the sideboard.
Because more decks are condensing their curves, [card]Dissipate[/card] is worse than it was a week ago, as are the slower cards in the deck, like [card]Blue Sun’s Zenith[/card]. You can’t afford to durdle too much, or your life total will be too low when you stabilize and you’ll die to random burn spells or [card]Geralf’s Messenger[/card].
Your choice in removal spells is even more important in the coming weeks than it was before. Before the decision you were making between [card]Go for the Throat[/card] and [card]Doom Blade[/card] was one between killing [card]Inkmoth Nexus[/card] and [card]Grave Titan[/card]. Now you can’t kill any Zombies or [card]Phyrexian Metamorph[/card]s. This leads me to believe that both [card]Sorin’s Thirst[/card] and [card]Tragic Slip[/card] are much better now than they were last week.
Additionally, [card]Phyrexian Crusader[/card] isn’t as good as it was. Humans is still popular, but there are different aggressive decks that you need to worry about. It’s likely that [card]Bloodline Keeper[/card] is a better card for that slot at this point.
Here’s the list I’m working with right now:
[deck title=UB Control V3]
[Lands]
4 Darkslick Shores
4 Drowned Catacomb
2 Ghost Quarter
3 Nephalia Drownyard
7 Swamp
6 Island[/Lands]
[Creatures]
3 Snapcaster Mage
2 Grave Titan
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Mana Leak
4 Think Twice
2 Dissipate
3 Forbidden Alchemy
2 Tragic Sip
1 Sorin’s Thirst
1 Go for the Throat
1 Doom Blade
2 Liliana of the Veil
1 Karn Liberated
1 Ratchet Bomb
2 Curse of Death’s Hold
3 Black Sun’s Zenith
1 Tribute to Hunger
1 Dismember
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
2 Batterskull
2 Phantasmal Image
2 Bloodline Keeper
2 Surgical Extraction
1 Flashfreeze
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Dissipate
1 Nephalia Drownyard
2 Phyrexian Crusader
1 Sorin’s Thirst
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]
The reason that I’m excited about this combination of cards is that it’s more streamlined than the build I was on. You still have the Drownyard plan as a way to just crush traditional control decks, but you also have a huge suite of answers to the various aggressive decks in the format. [card]Batterskull[/card] and [card]Sorin’s Thirst[/card] come in against just about every aggressive deck, but the rest of the cards are more flexible.
Spellbomb and [card]Surgical Extraction[/card] are great against the graveyard decks, and [card]Phyrexian Crusader[/card] is clearly for the White and Red decks. You also have access to [card]Bloodline Keeper[/card] for the more grindy aggro decks, or [card]Phantasmal Image[/card] against [card]Strangleroot Geist[/card]. You can really customize your removal spells after sideboarding to answer a particular deck, instead of hoping that your maindeck answers will do the trick, which is what I did in Baltimore. Now your maindeck removal is diverse enough that you can find the appropriate answer, cast it twice with [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card], and then move on to sideboard games where you get more copies of appropriate removal.
So that’s my take on UB control! The deck is a ton of fun to play, and even more fun to build. You have an absurd amount of options available to you during deckbuilding, and every singleton matters a ton. It’s really very skilltesting to try to predict the metagame and build your deck appropriately. Regardless, I’m going to be on this deck for the forseeable future at least, and I’m looking forward to hearing what other people have to say about the deck and its evolution!
Carlos is a Commander and Cube specialist who has recently decided to focus his deckbuilding chops on the competitive formats of the game. He has been an author for both Quiet Speculation and Legit MTG.