UW Draw-Go

 As I mentioned in my last two posts, this weekend represents the first time that Standard Mtg will be played with Innistrad. As a result, the internet is furiously buzzing with deck ideas, with everyone trying to get a leg up on the other. I am, of course, no different in this, and I've been furiously brewing for the last weeks (along with my comrades, who have come up with some pretty disgustingly good lists on their own.) From all counts, the format appears to be wide open, with there being no clear best deck, and more archetypes than I can count.

I expect that to narrow down over the next few weeks – especially after the first few Star City Games Open Tournaments. (First one is this weekend, in Indianapolis. If you live in the area and enjoy magic, you should stop by, even if you don't feel up to competing! Big gatherings like this are always a blast.) In the meantime, though, I'll be attending a local event at my shop. Personally, I'll be running the UW Puresteel list that I built and tested over the last two days, but I've also got a friend coming down from New York, and he...well, he loves his control decks.

He, as far as I know, doesn't have a list at the moment, so I took the evening to brew one. Admittedly, this is a little self-serving, since I hope to eventually run a UW draw-go style deck myself. So, consider this a preliminary deck.

A little bit of insight into my deckbuilding process. There's basically two points that I can start at, which depends entirely on if I'm building off an established archetype or not. In this case, UW Control has been theorycrafted to hell and back, twice, within the last block, so we've got a solid starting point. I'm personally using the U/W/x Control thread from MTGSalvation as a resource here. When in doubt, use more people.

Seriously. There's dozens of people on that thread, and most of the threads over there. They're all testing and theorycrafting and trying to find the same edge that you are. It's not cheating to use their answers – as long as you understand the answers. That's the flaw with netdecking. (For those who don't know, the process of grabbing a decklist from the internet and copying it wholesale) Netdecking doesn't give you the nuts and bolts knowledge that you need to play a deck at it's best. It's the kind of thing you only get after the fifth time you get blown out by an aggro deck in a row, or just can't quite get there with your last five damage before they land Gideon with counter backup and can't close out the match.

However, as you get more experience playing in general, you can kind of cheat a bit.

My friend has been playing magic for a long time. He remembers Mirrodin, the first time. As a result, he's got a ton of play experience below his belt, and he can leverage that into knowledge of an unknown format. There's tons of graveyard play? Flashback? I remember that mechanic from Time Spiral! Midnight Haunting is kind of like a less-good Spectral Procession, while the basics of control all stay fairly constant. Even Sword of Feast and Famine is vaguely reminiscent of the untap mechanic from Urza's block.

We have a frame of reference here, even if the picture itself is a little blurry.

I'll admit straightaway that I've never designed a pure control deck – much less a control deck in the draw-go style. The closest I've come is the draft deck I put together, and dozens upon dozens of games against Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Gideon Jura.

I hate those guys.

Here's what I came up with:

My first reaction is that of an aggro player. There aren't nearly enough threats in this deck. Even most of the control players from the last year are probably wincing more than a little – control over the last year has bowed it's head to the insane card advantage of Squadron Hawks and Swords. They'd be more properly be called Aggro-Control than anything else – true hybrids.

We're back to basics here, kids! We don't run threats! We stop threats.

Then drop one card that WILL win the game for us.

As long as we can get to that point intact, we can win.

Let's get there.

So, immediately, I'm going to say something – I'm leery of this strategy. Not because I don't think it'll work, but because I have no frame of reference to compare it to. By all logic, the things that I'm talking about doing – making blockers at instant speed, counterspelling, being able to board wipe, recurring all my cards twice – seems good. I just don't know if it's good in practice, and I sadly have hit the second snag of all players.

I don't have time to test this tonight.

Tomorrow, my friend arrives around 7-8pm. With any luck, we'll have the deck proxied up and testing it against some random decks before the night is out, and we'll have a list for him by the next morning, when we head out to All-Star's Collectables for some spell slinging.

That'll be tomorrow's article, by the way. Our two-man test bed, iterating on the deck, possibly even switching to a different archetype. I'll be documenting our thoughts as we go and posting lists when we've got a testable version.

Until then, sleep and work in the morning. Here's hoping that tomorrow's testing goes well.

-Andrew