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A no frills, simple, affordable and efficient control deck. A control deck doesn't always need a playset of cryptic commands and snapcaster mages to be competitive. This deck is aimed for someone with a limited budget that just wants to have fun. Perfect for FNM or kitchen table. Torrential Gearhulks have tanked in price and are now under 5 bucks according to TCG. This deck doesn't do anything crazy. Just ramp, deny your opponent spells, recycle spells with gearhulk and smash face. That's pretty much it.
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NOTE: Set by owner when deck was made.
27 Islands seems a bit overwhelming to me. You could add some lands that will value for example Faerie Conclave
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Yes it’s a lot of lands
I agree completely about the 27 lands, especially since there are no tactical lands or man lands. Ironically, as we are suggesting a drop in lands, there also seems to be a bit of a curve problem here. You have no actual 1-drops (the X counters need at least 2 available), and an extremely limited supply of 2 drops, both of which are necessary for a pure blue control deck to survive. The 1 drop tactical cards will help speed this up a lot, and they are affordable (namely opt).The 2 drop soft and hard counters would also go a looooong way to helping this out, such as negate, remand, essence scatter etc.I don't see counterbore being worth the 5-drop spot, even with the extraction effect. Having a brick like that in the opening hand would be death, especially since this deck has almost no ability to interact with anything on the field once it actually resolves.
Good point, Mausoleum Wanderer could be a good example here. It is (or I just think) cheap and can counter additionally for 1+ mana
good list though!
Thanks everyone for your deck building advice. I did shave off some lands down to 23 and added some utility lands (field of ruin/GRS). I also added 4 serum visions and slashed the 2 counterbores for 3 opts. The sideboard has more creature hate/artifact hate that I can bring in against more aggro decks.
Also, I believe that remand works better in more combo builds like Storm/Scapeshift kind of decks because you are delaying your opponent while digging for your combo pieces. In a pure control build like this one I think hard counters are where it's at. Remand also works great with thing in the ice, but I opted not to use it in this build to keep it budget.
Remand is expensive as you already mentioned, so if going into a more expensive build, I strongly recomend for- Remand, as an alternative to Mana Leak- Spreading Seas, to down-block some of your opponents important lands- Psionic Blast, as a maybe removal- Hurkyl's Recall, for Affinity/Artifact hate- Jace, the Mind Sculptor, at least as a one drop as additional Win-Con and control card
1. I think too many people underestimate mana leak. Mana leak sucks late game but in your opening hand it is a game-changer. Being able to deny your opponent a turn 3 Karn Liberated or Liliana or some other bomb card is huge. So I would always run 1-3 mainboard in every control build. Remand is great too, but without a hard counter to back it up you are just delaying your opponent-not disrupting them. 2. Spreading seas in a control deck I could see running it in the SB for Tron or affinity but main board just seems like a dead card in some matchups.