In the coming meta, traditional UW control won't be able to place in top 3.
While I do not 100% agree with this statement, I like your deck. UW control just needs to adapt. Recently, instead of playing a more "control" style of deck, I have been playing UW midrange and have been having great success with it. Here is my current list:
This has always been my style of deck but the meta sort of pushed it away in the past. Now that Jund is good again, this deck feels like it's safe to play for the time being. I am having fun and a decent success rate with it.
@Gen0syde86 : This seems like a good Control/midrange shell for UW. I love the Moorland Haunt and the Calciform Pool, nice manabase. I'm not sure about Oust however, it seems narrow to DS or maybe it's good in combination with some creatures you have and want to cycle their effect.
On another note, I was 2-1 yesterday with the list I posted last page and something struck me from a year ago : I felt sometimes that I wasn't drawing enough cards. I mean Serum Vision is great for fixing what's coming up and Ancestral Vision helps a lot to fuel back in later stages of the game, which I found amazing, but I missed Think Twice. I was a lot of times stuck on dead cards (Path against Ad Nauseam for example) and I wasn't able to generate card advantage. So I'll cut 1 Spreading Seas and 1 Supreme Verdict for 2 Think Twice to have more raw card power.
UW control is a great deck, but it either
a) taps out for jace and is subject to lightning bolt or threats, or
b) doesn't tap out and threats are discarded.
Against black decks, Thoughtseize can also function as Overmaster, making it useless to hold up countermagic. UW is currently stuck between tapping out and playing draw-go. Its threat density is low and it's not proactive enough. The answer is a splash of either black or red. Here is my take on UW control with a red splash:
In my experience, these are traditionally the reasons for playing UW over Jeskai or Esper, not against. Obviously this changes a little with the introduction of Jace to the deck, and I think a lot of your points about not wanting too many copies of the hard-to-protect planeswalker are valid. However, Jace isn't as vulnerable to burn spells as many of us, myself included, had originally anticipated. I feel advantaged as UW against every Jeskai and Grixis Jace deck I have encountered so far. Both Bolt and Thoughtseize do so little against us so long as we don't center our gameplan around Jace alone, which is why I think 1-2 copies of Jace is the correct spot to be.
Thoughtseize can act to clear out countermagic, but we are a deck full of answers looking to 1-for-1 anyways, and we end up ahead on tempo in this exchange. Some of the most prolific players of UW are on record for saying that Thoughtseize decks are THE reason to play UW. I'm not firmly in that camp, but I do lean that way. I feel advantaged nearly every time Thoughtseize is cast against me. If I were to run an Esper variant of UW, Thoughtseize would be very low on my list of reasons to play black, in fact I have a version of Esper and UB that I run online and niether of them feature a single copy of thoughtseize nor Inquisition; they get you behind on tempo and do not effect the board state. If an opponent wants to wait until turn 5-6 to thoughtseize us + try to land a threat, we are happy to let it resolve because we've already constricted their manabase and begun accumulating small advantages while they've done nothing.
Lightning Bolt (and fatal push) on the other hand, does shore up some of UWs issues, namely not having access to enough cheap removal. The fact that Bolt can be redirected to face against noncreature decks is obviously very powerful since it's never a dead card; versatility is a virtue. However, it really is not conducive to what UW is trying to do. Nearly all of our cards are aimed at providing velocity to the deck. Every card is designed to constrict our opponents options (or provide consistency to that plan) and Bolt just doesn't do that. Any player worth their salt isn't going to let you kill their planeswalker with a Bolt, that's a pipedream. I've now played enough with Jace in my deck to realize that Bolt is still very much a dead card against us. Lightning Bolt can be part of a plan that constricts the opponents options, but you need to dedicate many more than 4 slots to that plan. UW just doesn't have the damage output to make Bolt-Snap-Bolt a restricting play. You probably need something like 8 Burn spells to make that realistic.
This brings me around to some of the posts after yours, addressing Oust. I think Oust is a reasonable card, even without the cute field of ruin interaction. It seems likely to me that UW will need to adopt at least a pair of additional removal spells (perhaps at the cost of reducing to 2 sweepers main) but I haven't got a good sense of which removal spells they should be. This is why people are looking to Bolt and Push, and that makes sense. But I don't think the efficiency of Push nor the flexibility of Bolt are worth changing the mana base for. People have suggested dismember, Oust, Condem, Journey to Nowhere and the new Seal Away. I was particularly high on Oust before the unbannings but I think the meta is shifting towards haste threats, and not just because BBE is everywhere, but because people are afraid of planewalkers. For that reason, I imagine that the additional removal spells will have to play at instant speed.
Oust works well for me because the Wall of Omens do a great job of blocking. Initially I had 2 Settle the Wreckage in that spot but felt my interaction with early creatures that don't attack (Dark Confidant) was a little too poor and my 4 mana spot was being gummed up. So Oust felt like the natural fit. That being said, I could agree that Condemn might be better but I also think Oust works better against mana dorks. I am also no playing any Snapcaster Mages in the 75. So instant speed removal isn't exactly my Highest Priority.
With all of that said though, My deck is really designed to beast up midrange strategies like Jund and Abzan. So my deck is just sort of a meta call more than anything. Plus like I stated above, this is one of my all time favorite decks and any chance I get to play it and it be good, I'll take it.
I think Oust is perfectly serviceable, and I think it has been relatively underplayed. I agree, I think it is great against creatures like Bob and mana dorks; the only issue I have with it is that most people don't tend to play it as more than a 2-of, so the chances of seeing it early in the game when it is very effective is far less than that of seeing Path to Exile, which is obviously a pretty lame duck against Bob and dorks. Going late, I think Condemn out shines oust.
I also think it's important to think about the types of decks that run mana creatures and Bob (ie that Oust is good against), and the types of decks that run haste threats(ie where condemn is good) and see how many of our bad matches fall into each category. I would be willing to bet that we are generally better against the Bob and Dork category, but that is just an intuition, I haven't actually made that list. Perhaps I will once I get through the rest of this semester.
Like I said, with my version of the deck specifically, I'm not that worried about haste creatures. most of which get blocked by wall. Those that are bigger than wall usually can't come down until late anyways and I'm not as worried about them yet.
I'm also not looking for Oust to be a spot removal spell like path. I think it's just another cheap piece of interaction that I wanted to have. Resetting Scavenging Ooze or Tireless Tracker is not irrelevant, Getting it early for mana dorks is great, and on the off chance that I have to Oust my own creature is also not irrelevant.
I think we both agree on the card being playable but I think we differ on how playable it really is/isn't or how good it really is/isn't. I deffinitely see what you're saying though. I would just prefer to have Oust over Condemn in my build.
hey UW peeps. was doing a little web surfin and i came across this blogpost by Pierre Dagen (euro pro). he breaks down the decks strengths and weaknesses, and gives his thoughts on UW moving forward (decklist hes currently playing at the bottom). anywho i thought it was moderately interesting
The "downside" of putting the creature 2nd from the top is often actually a hidden upside in the places where Oust is better than something like Condemn anyways - your opponent likely does not want to be drawing mana dorks or bobs or other non-haste non-ETB-effect creatures on t3-4 or later against the Supreme Verdict/Jace deck.
That is why I think it's a meta call and that we really should make a list of decks and creatures where one or the other (Oust/Condemn) outshine the other by a large margin. If you expect to face more haste/ETB creatures/decks and those match-ups are generally worse for you than the match-ups where utility creatures are more likely, then Condemn gets the nod. The converse leads to Oust getting the nod; when you expect to face mostly utility type creatures/decks and those match-ups are generally worse for you than the match-ups where haste/ETB creatures are more likely.
Of course, all of this is predicated on the fact that we actually want/need extra spot removal spells, which I think we do.
I played a few matches today messing around with an idea centering around the extra removal spell discussion we've been having the last couple days. I went with a 3/3 split of Oust and Path to Exile. I know less than 4 path seems blasphemous, but I don't think we want more than 6 spot removal and Oust gets better in higher numbers.
I put the 4th path in the sideboard, and like I said I only played a few matches, so it's a small sample but it felt pretty good against Storm. I also beat Jeskai control and grixis shadow. It was good vs shadow, but hard to evaluate against Jeskai. I Ousted my wall to gain some life in one game, and I Ousted + Field to shuffle away a Snapcaster that was threatening my Jace in another, but it was awkward to set that situation up and I wished it was just a path.
Gideons that can attack are really strong with Restoration angels. If you want to play more of them and play a tap out control, thats the direction that I'd go in.
Played again yesterday and I had a blast! X-1 on four rounds, so I was in for credits. I was glad that Think Twice worked out well, it gave me some extra card advantage in the early turns. The best moment for me was game 2 against Burn when I was 2-1 overall. I mulled to 5, gained some tempo with Sreading Seas, played Think Twice a couple of times and stalled the game for 8-10 turns. Then, in response to a Helix, I casted Sphinx's Revelation for 11 (so 8 life and 8 cards). Then, I never looked back : I had 14 cards in hand and I found Dragondlord Ojutai to win as well as Gideon Jura. I even used Snapcaster Mage to flashback Rev.
So in all, the deck is really smooth. I may get my hands on 1 jace in the next few weeks maybe! It seems good, not amazingly good in my meta, but a solid card neevertheless!
I think if the library i reshuffled there is really nearly no difference between Oust and Condemn. But 4 Path seems to be the right thing most of the time. How much Wrath do you play at the moment?
I run 3 wraths most of the time, and sometimes 3 + 1 Settle. Adding additional removal spells makes me more inclined to run less sweepers, but that needs to be weighed against the fact that Oust specifically plays better with more, rather than less wraths. If I was going to run 4 Path + 2 Condemn I would run 2 Wrath and maybe a Settle.
I'm going to try 4 Oust, 2 Path and 4 Verdict next. I'm also going to switch out Field of Ruin for Tectonic Edge and Run at least 3 Mana Leak and cut down on the number of colonnade. I think Oust plays well with Jace and Verdict, so I'm going to build around running Jace as the main win con rather than trying to get to the point where we can attack with colonnade and interact in the same turn cycle, and if that's the case, Tec Edge has some upside vs Field, especially with less Path to Exile in the deck. Something like this:
jayjayhooks, I've thought of a different style of control with 4x Oust, 4x Remand, 4x Nevermore and maybe some number of Meddling Mage and Gideon's Intervention. Oust is fantastic with Nevermore...I may have to try this.
Some 5-2 lists from the last Modern Challenge. Both lists on 4 Wall of Omens, 2 Clique, 2 Finks, and 2 Resto. Neither list plays any 2-mana counters. Thoughts?
Thoughts? Personally I think both are worth looking at, but I do feel like I always want at least 1-1 Vendi Clique-Secure in the 60. Instant-speed bodies to block for your Jace or clock your opponent are super useful to our game plan.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing UX Mana Denial until Modern gets the answers it needs.
WUBRG Humans BRW Mardu Pyromancer UW UW "Control" UR Blue Moon
Thoughts? The deck is tier 2. You can put whatever cards you want in it and do reasonably well. The guy that was playing the 5-2 creature list in the challenge also streamed it, his handle is heatchecker.
Mcwinsauce had a good comment on Twitter, the decks good match ups in jeskai, deaths shadow and affinity are down. So the deck isn't as well positioned as it once was.
The deck is okay, not great. Tweaking numbers isn't going to make the deck unbeatable.
While I do not 100% agree with this statement, I like your deck. UW control just needs to adapt. Recently, instead of playing a more "control" style of deck, I have been playing UW midrange and have been having great success with it. Here is my current list:
4 Wall of Omens
4 Blade Splicer
1 Vendilion Clique
4 Restoration Angel
Planeswalkers:
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Gideon Jura
Enchantments:
1 Detention Sphere
3 Spreading Seas
Instant/Sorcery:
2 Oust
4 Path to Exile
3 Cryptic Command
2 Negate
2 Spell Snare
2 Remand
4 Flooded Strand
2 Hallowed Fountain
4 Island
2 Plains
1 Moorland Haunt
4 Field of Ruin
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Mystic Gate
4 Celestial Colonnade
1 Calciform Pools
1 Glacial Fortress
2 Stony Silence
1 Rest In Peace
2 Runed Halo
2 Dispel
1 Celestial Purge
1 Disenchant
2 Settle the Wreckage
1 Ethersworn Canonist
2 Ceremonious Rejection
1 Disdainful Stroke
This has always been my style of deck but the meta sort of pushed it away in the past. Now that Jund is good again, this deck feels like it's safe to play for the time being. I am having fun and a decent success rate with it.
On another note, I was 2-1 yesterday with the list I posted last page and something struck me from a year ago : I felt sometimes that I wasn't drawing enough cards. I mean Serum Vision is great for fixing what's coming up and Ancestral Vision helps a lot to fuel back in later stages of the game, which I found amazing, but I missed Think Twice. I was a lot of times stuck on dead cards (Path against Ad Nauseam for example) and I wasn't able to generate card advantage. So I'll cut 1 Spreading Seas and 1 Supreme Verdict for 2 Think Twice to have more raw card power.
Aggro: Naya Burn RWG
Combo: Scapeshift RG
Control: Jeskai Control UWR
Legacy
Control: Miracles UW
Aggro: Burn R
In my experience, these are traditionally the reasons for playing UW over Jeskai or Esper, not against. Obviously this changes a little with the introduction of Jace to the deck, and I think a lot of your points about not wanting too many copies of the hard-to-protect planeswalker are valid. However, Jace isn't as vulnerable to burn spells as many of us, myself included, had originally anticipated. I feel advantaged as UW against every Jeskai and Grixis Jace deck I have encountered so far. Both Bolt and Thoughtseize do so little against us so long as we don't center our gameplan around Jace alone, which is why I think 1-2 copies of Jace is the correct spot to be.
Thoughtseize can act to clear out countermagic, but we are a deck full of answers looking to 1-for-1 anyways, and we end up ahead on tempo in this exchange. Some of the most prolific players of UW are on record for saying that Thoughtseize decks are THE reason to play UW. I'm not firmly in that camp, but I do lean that way. I feel advantaged nearly every time Thoughtseize is cast against me. If I were to run an Esper variant of UW, Thoughtseize would be very low on my list of reasons to play black, in fact I have a version of Esper and UB that I run online and niether of them feature a single copy of thoughtseize nor Inquisition; they get you behind on tempo and do not effect the board state. If an opponent wants to wait until turn 5-6 to thoughtseize us + try to land a threat, we are happy to let it resolve because we've already constricted their manabase and begun accumulating small advantages while they've done nothing.
Lightning Bolt (and fatal push) on the other hand, does shore up some of UWs issues, namely not having access to enough cheap removal. The fact that Bolt can be redirected to face against noncreature decks is obviously very powerful since it's never a dead card; versatility is a virtue. However, it really is not conducive to what UW is trying to do. Nearly all of our cards are aimed at providing velocity to the deck. Every card is designed to constrict our opponents options (or provide consistency to that plan) and Bolt just doesn't do that. Any player worth their salt isn't going to let you kill their planeswalker with a Bolt, that's a pipedream. I've now played enough with Jace in my deck to realize that Bolt is still very much a dead card against us. Lightning Bolt can be part of a plan that constricts the opponents options, but you need to dedicate many more than 4 slots to that plan. UW just doesn't have the damage output to make Bolt-Snap-Bolt a restricting play. You probably need something like 8 Burn spells to make that realistic.
This brings me around to some of the posts after yours, addressing Oust. I think Oust is a reasonable card, even without the cute field of ruin interaction. It seems likely to me that UW will need to adopt at least a pair of additional removal spells (perhaps at the cost of reducing to 2 sweepers main) but I haven't got a good sense of which removal spells they should be. This is why people are looking to Bolt and Push, and that makes sense. But I don't think the efficiency of Push nor the flexibility of Bolt are worth changing the mana base for. People have suggested dismember, Oust, Condem, Journey to Nowhere and the new Seal Away. I was particularly high on Oust before the unbannings but I think the meta is shifting towards haste threats, and not just because BBE is everywhere, but because people are afraid of planewalkers. For that reason, I imagine that the additional removal spells will have to play at instant speed.
With all of that said though, My deck is really designed to beast up midrange strategies like Jund and Abzan. So my deck is just sort of a meta call more than anything. Plus like I stated above, this is one of my all time favorite decks and any chance I get to play it and it be good, I'll take it.
I also think it's important to think about the types of decks that run mana creatures and Bob (ie that Oust is good against), and the types of decks that run haste threats(ie where condemn is good) and see how many of our bad matches fall into each category. I would be willing to bet that we are generally better against the Bob and Dork category, but that is just an intuition, I haven't actually made that list. Perhaps I will once I get through the rest of this semester.
I'm also not looking for Oust to be a spot removal spell like path. I think it's just another cheap piece of interaction that I wanted to have. Resetting Scavenging Ooze or Tireless Tracker is not irrelevant, Getting it early for mana dorks is great, and on the off chance that I have to Oust my own creature is also not irrelevant.
I think we both agree on the card being playable but I think we differ on how playable it really is/isn't or how good it really is/isn't. I deffinitely see what you're saying though. I would just prefer to have Oust over Condemn in my build.
http://www.hareruyamtg.com/article/en/category/detail/291
UWGSnow-Bant Control
BURGrixis Death's Shadow
GWBCoCo Elves
WCDeath and Taxes(sold)The "downside" of putting the creature 2nd from the top is often actually a hidden upside in the places where Oust is better than something like Condemn anyways - your opponent likely does not want to be drawing mana dorks or bobs or other non-haste non-ETB-effect creatures on t3-4 or later against the Supreme Verdict/Jace deck.
That is why I think it's a meta call and that we really should make a list of decks and creatures where one or the other (Oust/Condemn) outshine the other by a large margin. If you expect to face more haste/ETB creatures/decks and those match-ups are generally worse for you than the match-ups where utility creatures are more likely, then Condemn gets the nod. The converse leads to Oust getting the nod; when you expect to face mostly utility type creatures/decks and those match-ups are generally worse for you than the match-ups where haste/ETB creatures are more likely.
Of course, all of this is predicated on the fact that we actually want/need extra spot removal spells, which I think we do.
I put the 4th path in the sideboard, and like I said I only played a few matches, so it's a small sample but it felt pretty good against Storm. I also beat Jeskai control and grixis shadow. It was good vs shadow, but hard to evaluate against Jeskai. I Ousted my wall to gain some life in one game, and I Ousted + Field to shuffle away a Snapcaster that was threatening my Jace in another, but it was awkward to set that situation up and I wished it was just a path.
So in all, the deck is really smooth. I may get my hands on 1 jace in the next few weeks maybe! It seems good, not amazingly good in my meta, but a solid card neevertheless!
Aggro: Naya Burn RWG
Combo: Scapeshift RG
Control: Jeskai Control UWR
Legacy
Control: Miracles UW
Aggro: Burn R
I'm going to try 4 Oust, 2 Path and 4 Verdict next. I'm also going to switch out Field of Ruin for Tectonic Edge and Run at least 3 Mana Leak and cut down on the number of colonnade. I think Oust plays well with Jace and Verdict, so I'm going to build around running Jace as the main win con rather than trying to get to the point where we can attack with colonnade and interact in the same turn cycle, and if that's the case, Tec Edge has some upside vs Field, especially with less Path to Exile in the deck. Something like this:
3 Wall of Omens
2 Snapcaster Mage
Walkers (6)
2 Gideon of the Trials
3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar
Consistency (8)
4 Serum Visions
3 Spreading Seas
1 Search for Azcanta
4 Oust
2 Path to Exile
3 Mana Leak
1 Logic Knot
2 Detention Sphere
2 Cryptic Command
3 Supreme Verdict
1 Wrath of God
3 Celestial Colonnade
4 Tectonic Edge
4 Flooded Strand
2 Blue Fetch
1 Hallowed Fountain
2 Glacial Fortress
6 Island
3 Plains
Deprive is not where you want to be in a UW list. Most of the time, your land drops are the most important part of the game.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/992687#paper
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/992692
UWB Esper Draw-Go Control (clicky)
UW Azorius Control (clicky)
Currently pursuing a degree in Biochemistry.
EDH: I've decided I don't like multiplayer formats.
Rochenbach's was a pretty standard list, with a sideboard Crucible of Worlds and a lack of Stony Silence that wrecked him twice on-camera (once vs. Mono-Green Tron and once vs. Krark-Clan Ironworks combo). Cesar Garza's was more Superfriends, lacking Wall of Omens and Vendilion Clique and instead running 3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor and a 2-1-1 split of Gideon 3-4-5 respectively. He also maindecked 3 different wraths (Day/Verdict/Wrath) to get around Meddling Mage. Neither had Secure the Wastes, but both ran a Timely Reinforcements in the board.
Thoughts? Personally I think both are worth looking at, but I do feel like I always want at least 1-1 Vendi Clique-Secure in the 60. Instant-speed bodies to block for your Jace or clock your opponent are super useful to our game plan.
WUBRG Humans
BRW Mardu Pyromancer
UW UW "Control"
UR Blue Moon
Mcwinsauce had a good comment on Twitter, the decks good match ups in jeskai, deaths shadow and affinity are down. So the deck isn't as well positioned as it once was.
The deck is okay, not great. Tweaking numbers isn't going to make the deck unbeatable.