This is my current control list for Modern. It plays extremely smoothly and has a ton of answers. It is also, unfortunately for me, completely unforgiving. Keep the wrong hand, counter the wrong spell, you die. On the other hand, if you play tight (i.e. not like I do), you can generally outplay a lot of things you wouldn't expect to. Quite a few people will end up in topdeck mode while you resolve Recalls EOT.
4 Shadow of Doubt
4 Squelch
3 Dismember
4 Disrupting Shoal
3 Remand
3 Condescend
2 Cryptic Command
4 Thought Scour
4 Visions of Beyond
3 Spreading Seas
2 Gitaxian Probe
4 Snapcaster Mage
3 Vendilion Clique
1 Batterskull
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Misty Rainforest
8 Island
//Sideboard
1 Spreading Seas
2 Boomerang
1 Echoing Truth
1 Dismember
1 Cryptic Command
1 Batterskull
1 Vendilion Clique
3 Spell Pierce
4 Mindbreak Trap
The sideboard is kind of slapped together, but the basic premise is value and precision. Some things are ok to let through. Some things are not. If you know the difference, you can gain tremendous value both from ignoring non-threatening cards, and from having an extremely high density of threats and answers yourself. The 16-land manabase and 8 fetches allow for much higher odds of drawing business, and more of it, and the cantrips increase the odds both of hitting your land drops, AND of drawing more business.
Squelch and Shadow eat your opponent's fetches, while Shadow also "counters" Scapeshift and Pod activations, and Squelch counters Pod activations, PW abilities, stalls Kiki, and hits other relevant items such as DRS (yes, all of his abilities), manlands, Aether Vial, equipments.
Disrupting Shoal has been working extremely well, and the card disadvantage is rarely a problem. It even comes down for mana often enough to mention.
First - I don't think you need fetch lands here for a couple reasons:
1. You're mono-blue, so there's no need to find your second color. Accordingly, there's really no need to tack an extra 1 life payment on to a portion of your spells.
2. Deathrite Shaman is a card. By playing fetch lands, you're giving your opponent more Deathrite food than they would otherwise have out of their own deck. This is, unfortunately, a concession that must be made to play multiple colors...but in this case you're mono-blue so there's really no reason to go there.
I realize they get you closer to the pseudo-recall effect of Visions of Beyond...but I can't see this deck ever burning through enough fetch lands to make that a thing while also staying alive long enough.
Second - if you're having trouble with countering the "right" spell, why play only two Gitaxian Probes? It seems to me that knowledge of your opponent's hand (and deck) is extremely important in this style of play, so running the full boat of Probes seems wise. I think I would switch the numbers on Squelch and Probe to accommodate this. Squelch is nice, but it's certainly not Stifle. Shadow of Doubt accomplishes much of the same thing for the most common activated abilities (i.e. fetchlands, Birthing Pod etc.). You might also do something like 4 Probe, 3 Shadow, 3 Squelch.
Third - 16 lands seems incredibly greedy if you ever want to Snapcaster a Cryptic Command or actually cast a Batterskull. You might consider a couple of Mutavaults to give you another angle of attack and/or chump block in a tight spot. You might also consider a couple Tectonic Edge or Ghost Quarter as a concession to the Tron matchup and random man-lands (i.e. Colonnade, Raging Ravine).
A couple of suggestions for your sideboard:
1. Hurkyl's Recall - Affinity is one of the more popular decks, so dedicating a couple of sideboard slots to it is worth it...especially when it's such a huge blow-out vs. them.
2. Hibernation - Pretty self-explanatory. Pod and Jund are decks, and this stops them.
3. Vedalken Shackles - This can be a beating vs. UWR and other creature-light decks. It can also buy you some time vs. the aggro decks in the format.
16 Lands? Of course your deck plays smoothly if you stack it and goldfish.
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Xerox Theory at it's finest; for every 4 cantrips you run that cost 1 or 2 mana, you can run 2 fewer lands and still have the same or better odds of hitting your land drops. Drawing more cards every turn increases the odds of seeing both business AND lands, and running very few lands means that you see a much higher density of spells over the course of the game than your opponents.Originally Posted by kiblast
I suppose this is true to a point. However, how many keepable hands are you getting at 16 lands with only 2 copies of Probe and no other "free" spells? It's one thing to run a low land count when you don't actually need them (e.g. dredge, combo), but it's quite another where you're trying to leverage Cryptic Command and Batterskull vs. a field of aggro and midrange decks.
Perhaps this is some of the reason why the deck is "unforgiving" as you stated in the OP?
If you want "evidence" beyond the gut feeling of some stranger on the internet, take a look at Travis Woo's new mono-u list. The deck runs 20 cantrips and still has 20 lands in it. By your logic above it should be running 14 (assuming a starting point of 24).
Tapping out to try to hit your land drops every turn in a control deck seems terrible. Even if you are cantripping like crazy, you can't keep a hand that has 2 Gitaxian probes + 5 other cards.
The problem with using ratios as a foundation for the idea of the deck is that it doesn't take into account the added variance inherent in running less lands. In short, the chance that you'll have 1 land in hand with the next 4 cards on top of your library not being lands is much higher. This means you'll have more games where you just miss your land drops early and late, and no control deck can handle that happening.
Woo's Delver-Bear list is not a control deck, it is a tempo deck, and as such, it needs to proactively hit land drops without burning cantrips just trying to hit lands. On top of this, 14 lands is simply not supportable in a Xerox deck. Xerox Theory has a lower limit of effectiveness, and it's right around 15-16 lands.
My list, on the other hand, has it's cantrips stapled onto its business spells, or else as instant speed EOT draw that i would be burning either way.
The main factor making the deck "unforgiving" is not keepable hands; those are fine. What happens is that, even though you have a high answer density, most of your counterspells and "true" answers (Dismember, etc.) are still just 1-for-1's. If you burn them all early or on unimportant spells, you might not have what you need Turn 3 or 4 when Lili comes down, or Birthing Pod.
If the land count is bothering you, the math behind it might assuage your fears:
Odds of opening with X lands in a 24-land deck:
0=2.2%
1=12.1%
2=26.9%
3=30.9%
4+=27.9%
Odds of drawing X lands in the first three turns in a 24-land deck (assuming you kept a 2-lander on the draw):
0=19.2%
1=43.7%
2=30.6%
3=6.6%
Odds of opening with X lands in a 16-land deck:
0=9.9%
1=29.2%
2=33.7%
3+=27.1%
Odds of drawing X lands in the first three turns (assuming a 2 lander on the play and cantrips=mana each turn):
0=6.94%
1=24.3%
2=33.5%
3+=35.3%
Essentially, this means that you have a 90% chance to open with at least one land, slightly more than 60% to open with 2 or more. If you were running a 24 land deck with no cantrips, you would have about a 20% to draw no more lands within the first three turns. In a 16 land deck that cantrips every turn, you have only a 7% to draw 0 lands, leaving you comfortably in the 1-3 range, ensuring that you hit your land drops.
In this deck specifically, most of your early "business" is just stall that also cantrips, meaning that during the most important turns of hitting land drops, you don't have to choose between interacting or playing Visions of Beyonds all day long. When you get to the later turns, you can use your mana more efficiently and worry less about hitting specific land drops without falling behind too much.
I guess the question you should be asking yourself is "is this better than the other blue-based control deck in Modern (UWr Control)?" I mean, if you want to play with Cryptic Command, Snapcaster Mage, Vendilion Clique and Batterskull, why not UWr Control? UWr Control is pretty "forgiving" as it has lots of answers to spells that may have slipped past your counterwall (turn 2 Liliana of the Veil versus MUC seems to just win on the spot) and you have access to better control finishers in Ajani Vengeant/Sphinx's Revelation.
One of the positives of going MUC over UWr is being immune to Blood Moon (Twin Exarch and Affinity will commonly play Blood Moon somewhere in their 75), which I admit is quite a big deal, but at what cost? Your BGx matchup looks dreadful (Liliana of the Veil + Abrupt Decay for your creatures) and I don't understand how you out control UWr Control when they're applying more pressure on your life total (burn) while having a better late game than you.
Those statistics are fun but kind of meaningless. We aren't talking about the times where you get 2+ lands in hand and can then draw into more lands. The other 40% of the time you're sitting on 1/0 lands and floundering for your land drops. If you had 2 lands you're probably going to be fine, but hitting your 2nd land drop after keeping a 1 land + cantrip hand is more important because it can very frequently lose you the game if you fail.
Odds of opening with 1 land: 29%
Odds of drawing a land by turn 2 after keeping a one-lander: 64% [on the play]; 74.8% [on the draw] (61% and 72% if your land was a fetch)
And none of this is taking into account your original statement:
These statistics are showing that the mulligan chances are similar to normal, 24-land decks. It's not about "the games where you get stuck on no lands". It's about "the games that you mulligan a no-lander". In normal decks, there are similar odds for opening with 0-1 land or 4+ lands, and mulliganing. The difference here, is that you have slightly higher odds of opening with 0 lands (2.4% vs. 9.9%), slightly better recovery if you open on one land (and have a borderline hand that you don't mulligan; because of 12 1cmc cantrips, 4 free counterspells, and 3 1cmc killspells), and significantly lower odds of opening with 4+ lands (7.4% vs. 27.9%).
For instance, the odds of taking one mulligan and not seeing 2+ lands either time: 13.6%. So, in 86% of games, you see a 2-lander within one mulligan.
There's no purpose to the fetchlands and I don't see the reason for Visions of Beyond; are you really going to get those 20 cards much? If you're just looking for an Instant-speed cantrip, why not Peek? Seeing your opponent's hand is a heck of a lot more useful than the extremely dim chance of drawing extra cards.
On a more problematic basis, the deck looks like it gets eaten alive by Jund and Tron.
Fetches might go, but I can't live without Visions. Rarely do I not hit 20+ in a game; it isn't usually Recall the first time, but there's been at least one active Visions in nearly every game I've played, and one resolved Recall generally leads to more resolved Recalls.
I can't really speak for the Jund matchup, as I haven't played it much. It does seem scary, since they slam down threat after threat, but from the little I've seen, the Shadow/Squelch/Seas package can totally destroy their mana and net value in the early turns. If I don't manage to do that, I expect a couple things will slip through and start wrecking me.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Tron is hit hard by Seas, but Squelch and Doubt do minimal work and instead of a steady curve of must-answers, they play a handful of them (all of which are immune to Shoal).
Spreading Seas can hit their mana, but it can't do that until turn 2. Even if you go first, Jund will be able to lay a land and cast one of their 1-drops, which are either discard (which can take out Spreading Seas before you cast it) or Deathrite Shaman (which helps fix any mana problems they have). They usually have one of those options available.
Tron isn't hit as hard by Spreading Seas as you might think. Unless you're casting it on a Forest or Grove of the Burnwillows (which doesn't slow down their ramp), it does nothing to color screw them because the Tron lands produce colorless mana anyway. Certainly it makes it harder for them to assemble Urzatron, but they still do get one mana from the land enchanted. And Tron can certainly cast their bombs even without Urzatron just by getting enough lands into play.On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Tron is hit hard by Seas, but Squelch and Doubt do minimal work and instead of a steady curve of must-answers, they play a handful of them (all of which are immune to Shoal).
The issue your deck has compared to the other deck that's big on Spreading Seas (Merfolk) is that Merfolk is able to accompany the delay with their Merfolk to beat down on Tron, plus the fact that islandwalk can occasionally be relevant if they manage to drop a Wurmcoil Engine. Your deck, on the other hand, doesn't have the kind of pressure Merfolk can have on Tron, so, even if it can't assemble one of each land, it can just assemble enough lands to cast Wurmcoil Engine and friends and win anyway.
There is no way 16 lands is sufficient in a deck that's looking to play Batterskull, Cryptic Command, Snapcaster Mage and Condescend. You've got 10 cantrips that each let you look at a single card. Even with Brainstorm and Ponder I would consider that plan very greedy, and when you're trying to get there with Gitaxian Probe and Thought Scour you're being very optimistic. 20 lands is probably the lowest you can realistically go- if you're worried about flooding out, play some combination of Mutavault, Faerie Conclave, Tectonic Edge, and Ghost Quarter so your lands do something other than make mana.
I appreciate the idea of trying to use Visions of Beyond as an endgame trump, but this deck looks to be very all-in on Shadow of Doubt/Squelch preventing the opponent from establishing a manabase in order to drag the game out to that point. The counter base will let you shut down some opponents some of the time, but it doesn't even have Mana Leak early to make opponents actually put their threat in the graveyard rather than just back into their hand. Condescend can sometimes fill in for that role, but with the low land count it's tough to see it being reliable enough in a deck with so few solutions to threats that do successfully resolve.
I'm also not sure I see the advantage of trying to use this shell to play a control game rather than playing some Delvers and having pressure and an early game. This looks to me like a variant of the TWoo Phantasmal Bear deck except much more fragile. I think the mana denial angle and the Visions of Beyond angle are both interesting ones to pursue but I don't know that I see this deck forming a coherent whole that can pursue a solid plan and do so with enough consistency to be superior to other similar decks.
16 lands has been plenty. I understand that it looks exceptionally dangerous and unconventional, but the math proves that the high level of consistency seen in my experience is not a fluke.
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