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Type 1 Control
This next deck that I'm tuning was sent by a player who
has a lot of resources at their disposal, and would like
to focus on forcing their opponent to discard cards and
basically limit their options by hurting their mana,
their hand, or countering spells, using the best of
blue, white, and black. Here's how it looked when
it was sent to me:
3 undermine
3 absorb
4 counterspell
1 memory jar
1 mox sapphire
1 mox jet
1 mox pearl
2 parallax tide
4 orims chant
3 capsize
1 black lotus
2 denying wind
2 sunken hope
2 rising vaters
2 moat
2 force spike
4 mana drain
2 ertai the corrupted
1 alexi, zephyr mage
4 savannah lions
3 morphling
3 avatar of woe
3 tradewind rider
4 meddling mage
1 maze of ith
3 island of wak-wak
2 the tabernacle at pendrel vale
4 coastal tower
4 salt marsh
4 tundra
4 scrubland
4 underground sea
6 island
4 swamp
3 plains
side board:
2 ertais trickery
2 glacial chasm
1 null brooch
3 foil
2 douse
2 abjure
2 tidal control.
The first thing that I see with this deck is this:
the deck tries to do too much. This goes a long
with the cluster theory of magic: put cards in a
deck that all work together, and whenever any two of
them come up, you'll have a combo that will give you an
advantage. When I say the deck tries to do too
much, I mean that it wants to use hand destruction,
counterspells, fast mana, fast creatures, AND bounce,
and now it wants to add discard. When a deck tries
to do this many things, it will usually run into the
problem that it does none of them well enough to win the
game or reliably enough to count on them. What I'm
going to do, then, is take the white out of this deck
altogether and focus on making it a blue/black type 1
discard deck.
Another thing that's probably a good idea is to cut the
deck down to 60 cards. This allows the deck to
draw reliably, so you can predict the way it will play,
and so you draw your better cards more often.
We'll also fix the land, as there are plenty of land
available to the type 1 black/blue mage. We can
play the ice age pain land, underground river, the
revised dual land, underground sea, and 9 swamps, and 1
maze of ith. Only one maze of ith because I assume
that's all that is in this player's posession. If
not, they could drop 2 swamp to add 2 more mazes.
So, now that this player has established themselves as
not being short of high quality cards, lets list all of
the type 1 cards that we can safely assume they have for
this deck:
1 Mind twist
1 Mox sapphire
1 Mox jet
1 Black lotus
1 memory jar(mainly for megrim, but not bad by itself,
to find a needed contagion, recoil, or hyppie or two)
1 yawgmoth's agenda(not a type 1 card, but fairly
incredible in type 1, I would think)
Now lets add some of the obvious choices for black/blue
discard in type 1:
4 dark ritual
4 Hypnotic specter
4 duress
4 Hymn to tourach
4 Recoil
4 megrim
So, now we've got the obious 48(including land)cards out
of the way, onto the tough last 12. I'm going to
take a little bit of a different approach with the last
9 cards, and I'm going to make them look like this:
4 Oppression
4 The Rack
4 Contagion
Now, for the explanation. If you have either a
rack or a megrim out, oppression will severely punish
your opponent. With megrim and hypnotic specter
being your only real ways to win, the rack not only fit
well, but was a very needed third threat for this deck.
Last but not least, contagion. Contagion serves to
control early creatures that might just sneak through
the hand destruction. We REALLY don't want them to
live, becuae the way the deck is designed, they could
easily go the whole way against us. So contagion
helps take care of everything, it makes ernham djinns
0/3, and also kills jackal pups and svannah lions fairly
easy. So, here's our finished product:
Lands/Mana Sources:
4 Underground River
4 Underground Sea
9 Swamp
1 Maze of Ith
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Black Lotus
Creatures:
4 Hypnotic Specter
Spells:
1 Mind twist
1 memory jar
1 yawgmoth's agenda
4 Dark ritual
4 duress
4 Hymn to tourach
4 Recoil
4 megrim
4 Oppression
4 The Rack
4 Contagion
Now, while blue seems to be just about useless in this
deck, not only does recoil play an impotant part as a
desert twister type of card, but the sideboard also gets
help from blue.
Here's our new sideboard:
4 Ensnaring Bridge(should be easy to empty your hand,
once you do, no one can attack you unless they attack
with 0 power creatures and then pump them, side hyppies
out for these, and watch as oppression and megrims wreck
your opponent complimented by the other discard)
4 Chill(not quite as dominating as douse, but with less
blue sources in the deck and the fact that chill doesn't
require you to leave mana open, i'll take it, side this
in and megrims out against burn)
4 Gainsay(counters blue spells, which I hear are pretty
popular in type 1, what with the remaining three
of the power nine being blue, side this in and 3
contagions out against combo)
3 Annul(this is always good, but I'm thinking of
specifically cards like necropotence, cursed scroll,
tranquil grove, etc, etc.)
Well, Good luck, I hope I helped you do what you wanted,
-Wally West
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