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[Standard as of 11/28/2012] One of my favorite control decks, recently rebuilt to remain standard legal. (I used to run Necrotic Ooze, Inferno Titan, Wurmcoil Engine, and Massacre Wurm instead of Guttersnipe, but otherwise this is a similar playing style.) Game play is fairly straight-forward, mostly a Draw-Go deck in the early game, playing your control spells on the opponent's turn, then ramping to your bigger threats around turn 5. While the deck does have an element of a burn deck with Guttersnipe, the primary game is a straight up control game to disrupt the opponent's plans, with either Olivia, Niv-Mizzet, or Guttersnipe as the win conditions. Card draw is important, in order to keep your hand full of answers; Underworld Connections and Think Twice are key components to winning.
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A couple questions I have: - Is Bonfire of the Damned a good mainboard card for this deck? I don't have them to test with online (too pricey), but I have paper copies -- just not sure what to remove. Ideally with as much control as I have, opponents won't be overrunning me with creatures, but Bonfire is just so good regardless. Not sure. - Full playset of Dreadbore mainboard? I'd like to go with four, just not sure what to remove. - Full playset of Snapcaster Mage? Same as above. It seems a lot of players don't like Rewind, but I feel it is perfect for this style of Draw-Go deck, since it's basically a free spell, and leaves you with mana for pinging with Olivia or Forbidden Alchemy on the opponent's end step, rather than having to choose one or the other. If an opponent is able to somehow nullify those six cards (3x Olivia, 3x Guttersnipe), there is no alternate win condition. Ideally, your control elements should be enough to prevent that from happening. If not, Bonfire, Rakdos's Return, and/or Talrand can be boarded in for additional offense in those rare cases. The other main weakness is a fast aggro deck that is able to play a lot of creatures in the early game. For these, board in Cyclonic Rift, Bonfire, Stab Wound, and/or the Staticasters. Shrieking Affliction is also a surprisingly effective win condition against those fast aggro decks since they empty their hand out so quickly. Combined with Exquisite Blood, it's a great delay tactic! But I don't know what to take out for it, so it remains out of the deck.
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This might help in your decision making. http://cockatrice.de/index.php?a=download. You can test your deck against players all around the world for free.
Thanks KJ, I've tried Cockatrice before, it's pretty good for being free, but I'm so used to MTGO that Cockatrice drove me nuts with how cumbersome I found it to be. Bonfire is bound to come down in price eventually, right? :)
Other cards that would work well (main or side): - Liliana of the Veil - Slaughter Games - Sever the Bloodline - Mizzium Mortars I'm also looking to add 2-3 "bombs" to the deck, hopefully without messing up the control elements. My previous version ran an Inferno, Wurmcoil and Massacre Wurm, and it worked great. Thinking about one or two of these options: - Necropolis Regent (6) - Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius (6) - Moonveil Dragon (6) - Hamletback Goliath (7) - Utvara Hellkite (8)
Try Thundermaw Hellkite
Izzet Charm serves Grixis decks well due to its three options all being useful for control
Both good suggestions, thanks! I'll playtest a bit online tonight and post back with how it goes. Appreciate the input!
I run Grixis Control at local tourneys and it does alright, check it out, you may get more ideas
Some good ideas from your deck, thanks! Thinking about Nicol Bolas now, and leaning towards Niv-Mizzet and Thundermaws as my "bombs" to add. Will also probably put Slaughter Games into the SB, and possibly Tamiyo as well.
no worries. its a tough deck to run in today's standard. Bant, Angels, Rakdos, Blue White control, Blue Red White Control, and Jund are all competitive. These r the decks to beat and i find Grixis matches up strong to Bant, and Jund, and is weak against blue white control, and angels
Ok, I ran about 50 games last night and made quite a few tweaks in the process, the most noticeable is that I'm running a 67 card deck now. Going to try to reduce that back down to 60, but right now it works really well how it is -- unlike how it worked with my original list, which was too permission heavy and lacked the necessary removal to survive the early game. This deck is very strong if you can survive to turn six or seven with at least 10 life or so. I played against a lot of fast aggro last night, which was eating my lunch, so I replaced some permission with a playset of Searing Pain to help out and it made a surprisingly big difference. I also added Underworld Connections which won me a number of games simply by keeping my hand ready with answers, something I was running out of in earlier games. I got to a point where I was doing really well against Rakdos, Jund, and pretty much all control decks (except safety sphere, oddly enough), and the tribal humans decks weren't bad either once I got the removal in. The only decks I had a tough time with were enchantment decks, as this deck has no removal for that stuff. I played against a couple of them and did poorly. I added Nicol Bolas late, but didn't really get a chance to use him yet. 50 games isn't a lot but it was enough to smooth it out and determine whether the flow is consistent. I'll tweak it some more over the next few days. A few specifics though: - Bonfire sucked in this deck. - I liked Niv-Mizzet MUCH better than Thundermaw, but I left one in the deck for spirits opponents. Niv's card draw is so powerful in this deck, and I found that Thundermaw was just a 5/5 flyer most of the time. - Izzet Charm was good almost every time I drew it in the early game. Late game, it was sometimes a dead card, but the early game is a weakness for this deck so it's definitely a valuable card to play. And card filtering is usually still a good option late game. - Tamiyo is incredible in this deck. I was able to Ultimate (and win) with her about 75% of the time I got her out. - However, Olivia is what won more games than anything else. It's rare that running 4 legendary's is good, but in this case, I never minded if I had one in my hand and one on the table. As long as one was on the table, I could control the board. Also, she's vulnerable to removal and a significant target, so she's killed a lot - I wish I could run more than four! It's playing very well currently, so I'm going to have a hard time removing 4-5 cards (and 2-3 land), but I'm going to try.
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