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If you would build with archetypes in mind it would help you focus your deck

- a control deck devotes most of its spells to breaking opposing strategies and is very low on win conditions because of that, traditionally one good creature is played midgame and starts doing the heavy lifting while the control player keeps mana open to disrupt his opponent.

- aggro is a strategy where you try to outrace your opponent by putting so much pressure on him in the openening stage of the game he can't keep up and his attempts to control fall short.
This stratgey is based on the theory that an opponent will be playing a diversity of cards, of his starting 7 a few cards will be land, there will be maybe a counterspell and few a removal spells and a creatures
The aggro player doesn't need all that much land, he'll have 1 or 2 lands and nothing else but creatures and in a 1 for 1 card battle the aggro player will win because the control player will run out of disruption spells against such redundancy

The problem with aggro is that it can't win against decks that are even faster like combo decks because it has no means of slowing their strategy down.

So this leads to a 3th archetype named aggro control or tempo. Tempo decks are decks that play a cheap very powerful creatures as fast as they can, prefferably turn 1 (delver is a great example of a cheap overpowered creature) and then keep their mana open to play disruption spells. The big difference with control is that they have a clock that starts Turn 1 while control only starts attacking mid or late game. Another big difference is that tempo decks can afford to play tempo cards where control decks can't because they are slow and time doesn't matter to them. A tempo card is a card that helps you race at the cost of card disadvantage. It's a card like Unsummon, in the long run unsommon doesn't gain you anything, on the contrary it costs you a card and doesn't cost your opponent anything. What it does do if you can play it early enough is buy you an extra turn to attack. Basically it gives you time. If that allows you to win the game it's mission accomplished = tempo.

Now to your deck. Detain is a tempo strategy, you delay your opponents defenses so you can get through, it buys you time. It's like a timewalk when played on the offensive. If however you play it somewhere mid game where you don't control the board or when your opponent has a nice fat shrouded creature it doesn't do antything just like unsommon.

Your mana curve might look nice in total but take out the everything but creatures and look at the curve. You'll notice that you don't have an aggresive creature base. This goes against the tempo strategy. So what you need is to build a far more aggresive strategy to allow your detain to have a devestating impact on your opponent.

Also concider the possibility that you don't have any creatures at all in your hand or on the board. With only 20 creatures in your deck and no means of drawing extra cards a lot of your spells are going to be useless. As your decks isn't all that fast the possibility of someone sweeping the board and taking over control is quite real because you give them time to do so. If you end up getting into a long game your tempo deck will be weak compared to what the control player is playing. All those 2/1 and 1/1 creatures are going to be useless draws if your opponent has a big hitter that is killing you fast on an otherwise empty board.

a second issue of the deck:

Playing instants like Render Silent have a big impact on your deck building strategy because instants require you to keep mana open. In order to keep mana open you must end your turn without playing a threat of your own. This is only good when you can either use your mana regardless of what your opponent does at instant speed or you already have a great board position and you can ride it out while keeping mana open for your counterspell (this is typical for tempo decks).

- if you have but few instants in your deck and most are counterspells you will give away your play to your opponent. He'll just play nothing and you will end up with unused mana = losing a turn. There's an entire theory about this and how you should always spend all your mana every turn.

- if you have lots of stuff you can do at instant speed you won't give away your intentions. If your deck has flash creatures, spot removal, burn and counterspells your opponent can only guess and that gives you the advantage. If he doesn't play anything worth countering you play your lightning bolt to his face at the end of his turn and make his position even worse, if he does play a threat you counter it. That's instants at their best.


Now I'm not saying every archetype is viable in a limited environment like standard but if you build a deck you should recognize it for what it is and every card in the deck should support that strategy.

hope this helps you make a winning deck

Thank you for your advice. I wasn't aware of a lot of that. I've made some changes to my deck based on some of the advice I've received via the deck page but I can't seem to get a variety of instants and I've reduced my creature count to 18 somehow.

Deck building is such a challenge. lol