MTG Salvation

So, the very first deck I ever made entirely on my own was a mono-green Hero Standard-Pauper deck. It was very simplistic, but after I fine tuned it for a while I got it to win about half the time, which I was pretty happy with for it being my very first deck I built on my own, and also considering I'm a giant n00b in general.

But, just playing that one single deck got pretty boring pretty quickly, so I recently decided I wanted to try building something that is more like the exact opposite of that aggro mono green style of deck.

So, I tried making a mono-blue Standard-Pauper deck that has a bunch of counterspells and card-drawing cards etc but very few creatures, and I'm pretty sure I did a horrible job of it, cuz I haven't won a single match with it yet, and usually its not even close, like I just get lopsidedly utterly destroyed, lol. Which is kind of what I expected, since I have no experience with blue-style decks or "control" or anything since I'm such a huge novice.

So yea I guess this is partially a what's-wrong-with-my-deck type of thread, but also sort of a "explain the most basic/fundamental concepts of playing blue/control in terms of general overall philosophy of what the overall gameplan is generally even supposed to be with these types of decks." type of thread, since I'm so new to it.

So, this was my extremely terrible attempt at a generic mono blue Standard Pauper:

edit: Not sure why the deck thingie isn't showing properly. I typed the bracket deck bracket and all the cards and then bracket slash deck bracket but it just shows that blank thing.

The decklist was supposed to show up as follows:

Lands
20 Island
4 Radiant Fountain

Creatures
4 Triton Shorestalker
4 Mystic of the Hidden Way
2 Jeskai Windscout

Spells
4 Cancel
4 Negate
2 Nullify
4 Voyage's End
2 Griptide
2 Void Snare
2 Singing Bell Strike
4 Divination
2 Treasure Cruise



Sighhhh My deck sucks. As does my lack of knowledge of the basics of how to make a mono blue deck and/or control type of deck. Help!

I know this post is old, but if I can still help I will try.

The first thing I noticed were the creatures. Unblockable sounds great, and it can be, but the issue here is that it doesn't stop removal. Every deck plays some kind of removal which means your creatures can die. I know that counter spells help with that but over all the creatures aren't that impressive. One of the things that a control deck wants out of its creatures is a way to "Stabalize". Simply put, stabalizing means stopping the bleed. Its a card that stops your opponent from further damaging your life total and not in the temporary kind of way. It should be something that your opponent just can't easily get around or kill. Hexproof guys work pretty well this way. In Pauper those kinds of cards might be like Ruin Processor but outside of Pauper might include things like Sphinx of the Final Word, Pearl Lake Ancient, or Ætherling. These cards do double duty. 1) They discourage your opponents from attacking you because they are likely/guaranteed to lose their best creature during combat. 2) They end the game very quickly if you start attacking with it. If you can find a way to deal with your opponent's board, Ruin Processor is a 3-turn clock. That means if you hit the opponent with Ruin Processor every turn you can attack with it then they only have 3 turns to draw an answer and cast it. Spells like Ponder might help them draw the answer but if they can't cast the answer, then drawing it doesn't do them any good (obviously).

Another thing are the spells you are using. Online at least, you have options such as Ponder, Brainstorm, and Preordain to use to draw cards. Why are they so good? Well 1 mana gives you the pick between 2 and 4 cards. (Ponder could let you see as many as 4 different cards where Preordain might only show you 2 and then you draw one of those). That means that if you cast it you get to pick the card you need right now. If your deck is built right then shuffling away the others shouldn't mean never seeing them again. That's why control decks run a lot of versatile answers like Counterspell and Mana Leak instead of Nullify.



There are other decks out there that you could take away from but I put this together specifically based on the information I gave. There might be things about a particular meta game that may make this more or less good. Delver of Secrets is a low opportunity cost inclusion that, while it doesn't particularly fit any of the criteria I mentioned, is a very powerful creature that will occasionally come down on turn 1, and start hitting for 3 a turn from 2-9 while you harass your opponent with counters. Sometimes you will just steal games that way. Other times you will land a Wall of Kelp and hold up counter magic each turn. If the opponent doesn't do anything worth interaction with then you make another blocker at the end of their turn. Eventually you will have stalled the opponent to the point where you can drop your Ruin Processor, restore your life total, and begin your own onslaught.