(Not quite) UW Tron, or "UW Control plus Tron"

[Piceli89]

I post it here because I don't have any particular trust in MTGS' people to provide constructive feedback. Not to insist on attacking that forum, but...

Anyways.

I have been looking into UW Tron, lately, and I am somehow fascinated by it. Having been a long-time Blue Tron fan, but ultimately giving up due to the chronic lack of a decent removal spell in a format filled with 1-mana buff creatures and now also the Delve superheroes, I am intrigued by the possibility of having Path to Exile and even Wraths.

However, after little testing with the already-existing UW Tron, I found out that the deck is quite... bad?
Not to use strong terms or anything, but I spotted several issues with the way it is build:

- The Gifts plus Rites package tends to be very swingy and it may win you games at least as much as it may lose you others. Rites is a dead card when drawn naturally and fatties tend to rely on Thirst to be discarded, resulting in very bad draws that get exacerbated by the quantity of air needed to make the Tron engine work (i.e. Maps and the Signets). The fatties themselves are also very matchup dependent and they tend not to be that good anymore. Sure, Iona is still likely to spell game over against mono-colored decks like Burn and Merfolk, but the first now plays Path to Exile and the second still has the non-zero chance of vialing in a Harbinger of Tides when attacking with the white lady. Just saying. Elesh Norn may wipe out entire boards, but she can still be removed and people may somehow play around her with their Noble Hierarch decks by avoiding overextending their smaller pieces. The bottom line is that both these creatures are very powerful, but they are still creatures and thus no safe score.

- I feel the deck inherits the weaknesses of both the parts it means to play. As a Tron deck you tend to be susceptible to Stony Silence post-board and, most importantly, you cannot play your own, which is almost needed for a control deck to stop Affinity dead in its tracks, but also to speedbump Tron and Ad Nauseam. Ancient Grudge may be painful against Signet. Kolaghan's Command is likely to strike a 2-for-1 against you. However, that you must accept if playing that shell, and can be somehow mitigated by holding Signets in hand when against Jund/Grixis and waiting for Thirsts to pitch them to.
As a UW control deck, you are slow and your interactive spells are interfering with Tron's potential of going straight and doing something powerful. Sometimes this tradeoff is worth it (otherwise you'd be playing straight Gr Tron instead), at other times it is not. Speaking of UW Tron, the aforementioned occasional dilemma of having garbage polluting your draws tends to make things swing on the not-worth-it side, at least in my opinion.

- Speaking of Gifts, I don't feel like it is actually that good. Everyone praises Gifts as the only remaining quadruple-Demonic Tutor-like spell in the format, but when playing actual games I often find it is clunky, especially versus decks built on very fast sequences of spells. Dispel is also a very real issue these days. Last, Gifts prompts deckbuilding hoops just to satisfy its singletons requirements with worse results (Day of Judgement is clearly a worse Verdict/WoG and that may matter).

On the other hand, having Tron allows you to naturally reach mana superiority and that by itself is enough to let your spells, albeit weaker at times, win against the Remand decks (Twin and Scapeshift). Manabase weakness becomes a concern, but the payoff may be worth it- instead of grinding out games from the first to the last turn as regular UW Cryptic Command-based control does (with little to no success given its performance), you start doing powerful things to close the games in a timely manner. Having an actual turn one play in Expedition Map is quite good, as you don't "waste" half of your first turns by going Colonnade, go or tapped shockland.

I also like how Tron can leverage X spells very well. Secure the Wastes has been printed recently and I think it would fit perfectly such a shell - very low color requirements, scalable according to the stage of the game, instant speed, Snapcaster-able. It is the updated equivalent of Decree of Justice, a staple of previous Extended takes on the subject.

Long story short, I want to build a different take on UW Tron deck- basically a UW control including Tron instead of a mish-mash of random power singletons and fatties. I also like to start the deckbuilding process by ditching Gifts for the time being, but I also know that I need to have a reliable and safe win condition and Mindslaver would ensure that in a Thirst shell, which kinda calls for Gifts as well.
Anyways, this is what I envision:

12 Tron lands
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Academy Ruins
2 Hallowed Fountain
3 Flooded Strand
3 Island
1 Plains
2 Celestial Colonnade

4 Expedition Map
4 Azorius Signet

3 Remand
1 Dispel
2 Spell Snare
2 Condescend

4 Path to Exile
2 Repeal
2 Supreme Verdict
1 Engineered Explosives

4 Thirst for Knowledge
1 Sphinx's Revelation
1 Crucible of Worlds

1 Secure the Wastes
2 Snapcaster Mage

0-1 Gideon Jura
0-1 Jace, Architect of Thought

Actually, this is more a collection of cards I think would fit rather than an already well-planned list. Running Gifts would need a retooling, of course.

I'd like to build a list that skips on creature win conditions to virtually bypass creature removal g1, and then siding-in fatties only when backbreaking vs specific matchups (e.g. Wurmcoil vs Jund). I like the single Engineered Explosives as a way to asimmetrically sweep cc0-1.dec (Infect, Burn, Affinity), while Crucible is probably the only way of having a shot against Bloom Titan and Tron pre-board.

On the other hand, I also think that the Thirst artifact count should be at least up to 13-14. As said, traditional UW Tron also uses Thirst to pitch fatties, whereas here it would be used more with the purpose of generating CA. So yes, perhaps it is worth to include some fatty even maindeck, despites the risk of turning on stuff like Path to Exile.

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Has anybody every toyed with something similar, and/or suggestions?

[Phoenix Ignition]

I've thought similar things about UW tron, basically like you said you're combining the worst of both worlds. The only problem when you take out all the fatties is that now you have a lot of investment to get Tron lands but not that much payout. The only cards in the list that benefit from it are:

2 Condescend (usually used early, before you assemble tron)
2 Repeal (Similar experience to Condescend, basically you don't need Tron assembled to bounce a "normal" deck's permanents)
1 Sphinx's Revelation (Great to get X = 7 or something, but I would argue not really that game breaking)
1 Secure the Wastes (Probably the best reason for Tron in the deck, but I think if you want to go UW control there are plenty of other cards that would fit just as well as this one, without Tron investment)

The shell gives you the ability to run Academy Ruins + artifact recursion, but I dunno if all this beats out just running a more traditional UW control list that gets to play Cryptic Commands.

I'm actually a fan of the UW control lists that currently play ~2 Dragonlord Ojutai alongside Minamo, School at Water's Edge right now. Not only do you get most of the aspects of UW tron, you also get the option of running things with heavier colored requirements, giving you things like Cryptic + Kitchen Finks options. Something like this, but tweaked: http://www.mtgtop8.com/event?e=10598&d=260596&f=MO

[Piceli89]

I've thought similar things about UW tron, basically like you said you're combining the worst of both worlds. The only problem when you take out all the fatties is that now you have a lot of investment to get Tron lands but not that much payout. The only cards in the list that benefit from it are:

2 Condescend (usually used early, before you assemble tron)
2 Repeal (Similar experience to Condescend, basically you don't need Tron assembled to bounce a "normal" deck's permanents)
1 Sphinx's Revelation (Great to get X = 7 or something, but I would argue not really that game breaking)
1 Secure the Wastes (Probably the best reason for Tron in the deck, but I think if you want to go UW control there are plenty of other cards that would fit just as well as this one, without Tron investment)

The shell gives you the ability to run Academy Ruins + artifact recursion, but I dunno if all this beats out just running a more traditional UW control list that gets to play Cryptic Commands.

I'm actually a fan of the UW control lists that currently play ~2 Dragonlord Ojutai alongside Minamo, School at Water's Edge right now. Not only do you get most of the aspects of UW tron, you also get the option of running things with heavier colored requirements, giving you things like Cryptic + Kitchen Finks options. Something like this, but tweaked: http://www.mtgtop8.com/event?e=10598&d=260596&f=MO

You are definitely right on not having enough payout to justify running Tron. That is, in fact, the aspect I am still struggling on for the most.

By the way, Condescend and Repeal are exactly in the quantities that I feel are "right" in general. In Blue Tron you need to run more, but they are very weak against your worst matchups. As for Sphinx I agree-- it is great with a bunch of mana from Tron lands, but not great anyways I am including it because I would like to have more card drawing and Think Twice feels a bit underpowered, even if it would fit the early draw-go turns nicely. Perhaps Jace's Ingenuity, which is as mediocre-ish in this format.

I do feel that the Tron engine makes it worth picking it over a traditional UW Control. You get a version that is overall slightly clunkier and susceptible to hate, but in turn you get to lead a game that somehow becomes unfair at a certain point and you have Thirst which is a great draw spell, perhaps the last true one in the format. I kinda don't believe in fair Cryptic Command decks anymore. They need to manage all the linear deck that are infesting Modern right now and you can't prepare for such a depth of angles they attack you on.
I also don't feel comfortable in running decks with a curve skewed towards heavy drops (with an overabundance on 4s) as the aggressive decks are going to get under you with so many cc1-2 spells. Well, maybe with Burn being the exception, given Walls and Finks to gum the ground early on.

I want to be able to do powerful things myself, instead of nickling and diming every single inch of advantage, if you get what I mean.
UW Control is more solid, but it runs too much of a fair game in my book to be picked over, say, something like UR Twin, which has a similar tempo-esque approach but has the luxury of sealing things out of nowhere. Ojutai is powerful, but he will never beat an unfair finish. This seems to be the implicit, unwritten law of the format anyways, at least for blue shells (perhaps with Grixis being the exception due to Tasigur and Angler being so cheap).

Not that I wouldn't run Twin instead of UW Tron if I had the cards anyways. Well, perhaps I would still run the jankier deck, I love card draw too much.