Jeskai Control

[btm10]

The banning of Sensei's Divining Top has gotten me excited to sleeve up Tundras for the first time since 2009. I never enjoyed playing with Counterbalance, nor have I been impressed with Stoneforge Mystic in blue decks since Deathrite Shaman and Abrupt Decay gave BUG decks the tools to do everything that Stoneblade did, but better. Miracles eliminated the need to develop the broader UWx Control for the 2017 Legacy metagame, leaving it lagging badly behind other major archetypes once it lost Top.

I set out to try to build a non-Stoneblade UWx deck with the following goals:

1. As much as possible, the deck should avoid sliding into midrange as it's likey to be worse at playing the attacking and blocking game than BUG or Blade decks. Generally speaking, we aren't using creatures to both stabilize the board and win the game. Creatures should have a card advantage function or interact with our opponent beyond power and toughness.

2. Have an overwhelming win condition. If we're trying to drag the game out and overpower other fair decks, we need to actually overpower them, not merely exhaust their resources. While combo and mana denial strategies force a lot of midrange and control decks to use similar closers, we should be very selective with the few slots we dedicate to threats.

3. Prepare for combo. Counterbalance​ gave control a lot of play against combo since with enough Counterbalances and Top, most combo decks could be completely locked out, giving control a way to not lose to a combo deck that could reassemble before being killed. Much of the sideboard should be dedicated to the combo matchup, but there should still be sufficient interaction in the maindeck to have a better combo matchup than a similarly built midrange deck.

With those factors in mind I built a crude UWr shell last week and tested it 10 matches each against stock Grixis and BUG Delver lists, and then tested UWr Stoneblade against the same lists. The list derived from that testing is below. UWr Stoneblade was about even against the Delver decks (5-5 against Grixis and 4-6 against BUG, with the matches themselves being 2-0 or 0-2 only once for Grixis and twice for BUG), while the list below was favored (6-4 against both, with 5 2-0s, all but one (against Grixis) going for the control deck ). Obviously this is quite preliminary, but I'm confident that it's a reasonable starting point.

4 Snapcaster Mage
2 Vendilion Clique

4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Force of Will
4 Swords to Plowshares
2 Counterspell
2 Spell Pierce
2 Lightning Bolt
2 Supreme Verdict
1 Spell Snare
1 Preordain
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Council's Judgement
1 Fact or Fiction

2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Keranos, God of Storms
1 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar

4 Flooded Strand
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Wasteland
3 Tundra
2 Volcanic Island
3 Island
2 Plains
1 Mountain

Sideboard
3 Surgical Extraction
2 Red Elemental Blast
2 Pithing Needle
2 Meddling Mage
2 Flusterstorm
1 Kozilek's Return
1 Stony Silence
1 Containment Priest
1 Disenchant