Don't get me wrong, I think it's a perfectly valid way to play. It's just so...unrewarding to play against. I play a creature/enchantment/artifact/dream. It either gets blown up immediately or outright countered. We continue to stare at each other across an empty board. Repeat for 50 turns until my opponent plays his win con. It's just...ugh. I just don't get any kind of interaction I enjoy. I can't play any of my own removal, and my creatures permanents never get their own chance to shine. It's just a constant state of emptiness and it's frustrating and long and grindy and boring. I'm not even an aggro player. I really prefer tempo. I like thinking on my toes every turn and drumming up cool combos and trying to put those combo pieces together and also seeing what cool stuff other people come up with. Not just "You don't get to play that, or that, or that, or that, or that, or that, or that, or that, or that, or that. By the way you're going to take 5 damage a turn for 4 turns now." It's just...ugh. Its frustrating.
Well I mean I guess you'd be technically correct. I don't know how to play around having all my creatures exploded the second they begin existing while the control player plays no creatures so the numerous removal spells I run are dead draws. It's a very frustrating thing, but I mean even when it goes my way and I win it just feels frustrating. It just feels like it's not dynamic or exciting. It's just...a lot of emptiness because the control player doesn't play anything except reactionary spells or spells that make me discard or something. They just sit and wait for me to do something and then say "No." And then the board continues to sit there in a state of perpetual ennui. This isn't a matter of being sore about losing. I lose all the time. It's just a matter of the game not being exciting. Not getting to assess the board and play accordingly, and watch for my opponents cool plays and stuff, or being able to build my own board state. It's the other player strictly and only playing their 'nope' spells whenever I so much as tap a land. That to me is neither dynamic nor exciting. I fully understand it's beatable, it's just not fun getting there. I'd rather just concede and go do something else.
Because you play the game for yor own reasons, which usually include "playing the game." Control players are playing for a specific purpose as well, and their strategy is "do not allow my opponent any meaningful choices." Other strategies attack you in various ways, but control goes directly after you as a person and as a player, removing your agency and ability to make decisions. Being told "you have no options, no choices that can actually make a difference, and no hope of getting away" is not what most people want from a game, hobby, or relaxation activity.
It's a legitimate way to play, but I understand that it can be frustrating to play against. Control players aren't attacking your deck: they're attacking your ability to make choices, removing your options, and beating YOU more than beating your deck. Control players are happiest when they don't have an opponent at all: their plays and deck are designed to remove meaningful choices and completely remove the opponent from the game.
Edited for typos. New keyboard still doesn't feel right, and it wants to make me look like I can't spell.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Because it is hard. Games against (good) control players are some of the most skill intensive games you can play. It is very rewarding to navigate through all their tools and still come out on top.
I don't know you at all but this kind of comment always makes me assume the person just isn't a good magic player.
Well, okay. I'm open to critique and discussion. But just saying "well you're bad" isn't really helping. What sort of things does one do against control? What are things to look out for? How do you deal with it? Practice makes perfect but there is a certain point where you don't know what you're doing wrong and you can't improve. The same phenomenon happens in the fighting game community as well. I play a ton of fighting games, but when I pick up a new game and start getting crushed by a fringe strategy like zoning then it's frustrating. Yes I know it can be dealt with, but not knowing HOW to deal with it is annoying. Nobody's really offering any advice.
So, what DO you do when your spells get countered and your creatures get removed? What DO you do when your options get whittled away in the early game and you're left with 2 cards in hand to their 8 on turn 7? What DO you do when holding back to play a ton of stuff at once doesn't seem to work and neither does playing things as soon as you have the mana? I'm genuinely asking, because it seems like my wins are more flukes than anything and I'm not learning or improving.
Playing against control can be frustrating because you may get in that awkward position where you can't win, but the control player has a really tiny chance to not be able to win and both players have to keep playing because the attacker doesn't wanna just concede.
For me, I'd just accept I can't win and just move on to the next game and try to not get in that game state. For instance, this Khans + BfZ blocks Standard, if a control player resolves 2 Digs and has a full grip and good amount of life and you're in top deck mode, you should just assume you have absolute no way to win. Even if that player has nothing, it safe to assume that the game is done and you're just playing the clock game. For the next game, just don't let yourself get in that situation, but once in this situation, accepting defeat ASAP should save you unfun time and sanity.
If you really hate this situation, just make your 15 sideboard a pain against control. One of the weaknesses of control decks usually they can't cover all situations with their sideboards and it's hard to have a combination of blocks that permits control decks to cover every hole.
Now dealing with the fact of it's not fun for you, I think not much can be done to remedy that. You're the "problem". You have to deal with that yourself. We can't give much advice. On the flip side, a control player could not have any fun against an aggro deck that wins in just 3 ~ 6 turns. The games may be just too short for them to enjoy. How can they deal with those feelings when aggro or any other linear strategy just wreck their control decks (like pretty much happens a lot in Modern, for instance)? Personally I don't enjoy playing versus certain combos decks that are basically playing solitaire MTG. They don't really care about your plays. They are just playing to get the right cards and be done with. For their perspective, they are having fun solving a puzzle, but opponents that disrupt their puzzles too much may not be fun.
I play a lot prison element heavy decks in Legacy, some of which are non blue. Now they are control decks that do not use counters, and this is where it gets interesting. They are very interactive in that if you have removal for enchantments and artifacts, and enough mana you can remove/counter many of my cards or sometimes just the odd card to loosen my grip on the game and I cannot counter it. However, the biggest issue new players have is knowing when they should scoop, especially if they are new to the format and unaware of the lethal combos in it.
Say you are on RUG delver. If you sit there unable to attack or play a spell with your tempo deck whilst I have a couple of trinispheres, crucible, ghostly prisons and am eating your manabase to below 3 lands every turn with a recurring wasteland I will happily play on. If you scoop with five mins to go hoping to win 2-1 well good luck, prison decks generally go long. I might stop munching your mana base let you play a spell, knowing I am holding Geddon. The oorrect ply at that point is to scoop- all spells cost 3, your mana base is basicless, and you can never play a spell again. Eventually the other player will win, and you can't.
Experienced players learn when to scoop.
Simple example- you play Legacy Eldrazi similar to Modern, the opponent plays a Moat- ground based critters cannot attack- you play on as you have an Endbringer to ping them. They drop a Humility making creatures 1/1 or a Leyline so thy can't be targetted - you scoop- you can't win.
It can be less clear. In Parfait, for example, an opponent who has hidden behind a Humility/Ghostly Prison and Zuran Orb who has just switched on a Land Tax Scroll rack combo to draw 6 new cards a turn.....pretty much time to scoop if you are a creature deck- they are drawing 6 a turn, can gain life at will and your creatures are 1/1 with no abilities.
To take that into Modern....you go toe to toe with a UW midrange control deck, they are on 5 life and at EOT they draw 7 new cards and go to twelve....scoop.
You have lost, and playing on plays into their hands. Sometimes when against a combo deck like "extra turns" you have to sit there for ten mins before you scoop with, say, 25 mins to go so that you can win 2 games. Combos that can fail are annoying as sometimes they play for a while before they fizzle.
The answer to your last question is to build a deck thats better. Control decks don't have their own way all the time, and in Modern are weak. A Jund deck rips their hand away whilst putting pressure on soon after- disruption that works. They get value out of lands- man lands. A Thalia via a cavern of souls or Aether vial is hard to answer for control. In fact in Modern control is pretty weak, 1cc discard exists. There is an option, always.
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Because it is hard. Games against (good) control players are some of the most skill intensive games you can play. It is very rewarding to navigate through all their tools and still come out on top.
Do you play hyper aggro (red deck wins/burn)? Learning to balance resources and win before your ramshackle death-machine falls apart and you take that L is one of the hardest things in magic.
I'm not saying control can't be misplayed, or that it's a brainless archetype, but it's not as hard as playing a deck that wants it's user to die almost as much as it wants to kill their opponent.
I play a ton of fighting games, but when I pick up a new game and start getting crushed by a fringe strategy like zoning then it's frustrating. Yes I know it can be dealt with, but not knowing HOW to deal with it is annoying. Nobody's really offering any advice.
Yeah, I've been there.
What's your meta? If it's lots of creature kill, use burn. If it's sorceries, get manlands. If your opponent always counters your first spell, swarm them with cheap stuff. Side in some discard. Build a mirror. If you can get cards with abilities that don't involve them being cast, that can neatly sidestep counterspells. Probably your opponent's deck isn't perfectly unbeatable, and certainly your opponent isn't.
Worst case, pack it in and find a group to play that fits your style.
This attitude can be applied to any archetype.
Not so accurately as it can be with hard control and certain "solitaire" combo builds. Like Lakanna says, the point of hard control is to remove meaningful choices. When it works, the opponent can't stick anything on the board and has to either concede or wait for the opponent to eventually find and use their wincon. In comparison, Heavy Aggro requires ridiculous amounts of on the fly strategizing to use correctly, as do softer control variants.
Because you play the game for yor own reasons, which usually include "playing the game." Control players are playing for a specific purpose as well, and their strategy is "do not allow my opponent any meaningful choices." Other strategies attack you in various ways, but control goes directly after you as a person and as a player, removing your agency and ability to make decisions. Being told "you have no options, no choices that can actually make a difference, and no hope of getting away" is not what most people want from a game, hobby, or relaxation activity.
It's a legitimate way to play, but I understand that it can be frustrating to play against. Control players aren't attacking your deck: they're attacking your ability to make choices, removing your options, and beating YOU more than beating your deck. Control players are happiest when they don't have an opponent at all: their plays and deck are designed to remove meaningful choices and completely remove the opponent from the game.
Edited for typos. New keyboard still doesn't feel right, and it wants to make me look like I can't spell.
You salty ? I mean "beating YOU more than beating your deck." is just ridiculous.
Nah, I explained that bit: it attacks agency, and removes meaningful choices. That's a way of beating a player, not a way of beating a deck. It's... winning by forcing your game onto the other player, if you understand that concept. Playing Control is all about making sure your opponent can't play their game, they have to play yours. And that's why I said it was about beating YOU, not beating your deck. Control players have to stop only the important stuff, the things that can actually allow someone to make decisions. It's all about disrupting the other player's gameplan and making it, and them, irrelevant so you can goldfish a win in your own time. When it works, the opponent has no choices to make that are ultimately relevant to the outcome of the game.
It's a way f thinking about things, really. It's also why I call Control uninteractive: when a player has no choices that can affect the outcome of the game, then they have no interaction with the game, and might as well not even be playing. Prison Control, Draw-Go, and even tempo to an extent all try to achieve this, the point where no matter what the opponent does, they can't do anything that matters. Reducing an opponent to an obstacle that you will eventually just beat, effectively removing them from the game. So yes, I'll stand by the idea that Control is intended to beat the player, not their deck.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Every win ends up with an ultimate threat that the loser is powerless to do anything about, because if they had the resources to successfully stop it, they would. This is not unique to any "control" matchups--in a two-player rivalrous game, any increase in your own Win Probability comes with a direct and exactly commensurate decrease in your opponent's, and the only way to improve to a 100% state is by reducing the opponent to a 0% state. All games must, after all, come to a conclusion of some kind, and the only other alternative is a draw.
Glad to see the irony wasn't completely wasted. The only real difference is Control is explicit about it. RDW doesn't give you a chance to react to it before it kills you, but you -believe- that there was hope. Tron drops the big game-enders, but you don't feel like you never had a chance. Control, though, makes it very, very clear that you can't possibly win... and then drags the game out for a while anyway.
As for beating control, control is about inevitability. The absolute best way to beat Control is to be faster, come underneath them, and make the kill before they get a chance to set up. Aggressive creatures and lines of play are probably the most effective ways to beat Control. There are a handful of cards that are explicitly geared against control as well: Cavern of Souls lets you get your creatures out, while the entire Bogles deck runs hexproof things to avoid spot removal
To be honest, beating Control takes a lot of practice, and a lot of thought before the match. When you're building your deck, if Control is something you're worried about, then you need to take it into consideration and plan ahead. Put in cards that can work against it. In some cases, this also means you just have to accept that Control is a bad matchup for you, and that it will beat what you have planned. It might be frustrating, but sometimes you'll face decks that you just can't beat most of the time. When you're building a deck, you want to be able to identify these bad matchups along with the good matchups. Sometimes, slow grindy control is just one of those bad matchups. You can plan for it, but even after sideboarding, you might still be the underdog becaue you had to put sideboard slots towards something more important.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
So, what DO you do when your spells get countered and your creatures get removed?
Play more creatures. Play creatures that can't be countered or removed.
What DO you do when your options get whittled away in the early game and you're left with 2 cards in hand to their 8 on turn 7?
Draw more cards.
What DO you do when holding back to play a ton of stuff at once doesn't seem to work and neither does playing things as soon as you have the mana?
Play a better deck, or learn to play better.
Control isn't some sort of unbeatable statregy. To win, you play more threats that the control player can deal with. If you can't, then it's either you have a bad deck (or at least, a bad matchup), or you're a bad player.
I mean, compare the decks today to the decks of the period of counter post. The entire deck is nothing but counter and removal. And yet, two of the most prominent decks of the time were sligh (ie mono red aggro) and buried alive (mono black aggro). Why? because they were decks that could beat the crap out of a control deck. Sligh puts out a stupid about of creatures well before a wrath of god gets online, and by the time it does the counterpost player is just a ferw burn spells away. Buried alive makes countermagic useless.
And these days there aren't decks like counterpost anymore, no more "haha! I counter everything! EVERYTHING!" Not only that, but creatures are significantly larger and faster than they were back then. Pure control decks that you've described are almost extinct and incredibly hard to play.
If you're constantly holding dead removal in your hand because your opponent doesn't play creatures, why haven't you sided it out by game 2? And if they're killing or countering your creatures, you need to have more creatures than they have counterspells or spot removal. You still have to watch out for mass removal, so keeping your numbers to something like 1-2 creatures at a time is a safe bet.
Swap out some of your removal with hand disruption! This allows you to "protect" a bomb by removing the counter or removal spell they'd use on it, or it forces them to burn a counter spell they might not have wanted to. Also this gives you information on their hand and what you are dealing with.
Or go more aggressive. lots of 1 drops burn damage and pump spells. It just sounds like your deck has a bad matchup and you are inexperienced. It's frustrating I know.
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As others have stated, different decks have different strengths and weaknesses vs. other types of decks.
The key thing, inevitably, is going to be your sideboard and how you make use of it when playing the second and third games.
If you run into a deck where your creature removal is largely useless, then you can sideboard it out for other cards that will be more useful, whether it be more creatures, or other forms of disruption (like hand disruption for example), or more card draw depending upon.
In the case of burn as others have mentioned, just pull out your creature removal (or most of it) and put in a bunch more burn spells, or similar to keep the pressure on, and make sure the opponent is put into a position where they cannot just keep 100% control of the game.
I noticed as well that you mentioned about putting cool combos together.
The trouble with combo decks, is a lot of the times, control decks will have the ability to disrupt such combos, barring situations where you have the ability to counter their control strategies with your own cheap counters or hand disruption to force your combo pieces through.
You also need to have a willingness to adjust your deck/sideboard to better handle the local metagame you are having to deal with. You have to keep an eye on the different decks you are playing against and recognize where your deck is running into problems against those decks and then what you could do to improve your situation vs. those decks while still keeping your advantage vs. the decks you tend to do better against.
I love playing against control decks, there is the tension of whether they has the right counter to your threat. And when they don't you run them over. And attempting to bait out removal/counters so you can get the real threat out. The subtle hints as to which removal they have in hand.
If you are playing a specific format, you need to learn more about the meta-game. Learn about the control decks. Learn how they work, and how they fail. Learn their weak points and which matches give them trouble (and why).
If you are just playing casual, probably your issue is that your decks are simply outclassed. In that case you want to look for hexproof/shroud creatures,uncounterable creatures (Cavern of Souls is good), and card advantage (Hammer of Bogaradan, Punishing Fire + Grove, undying, etc). Also speed is good! Control wants to win the game with card advantage, which takes time to kick in. Try to over run them with very efficient little creatures.
And I assume you are playing casual because control is not exactly a strong strategy in non-eternal formats.
Oh, you countered my Collected Company at your EOT? Hope you have mana open still, because I'll main phase one.
Oh, you board wiped? Well, now that you're tapped out I'll cast a couple dudes.
Oh, you cast Murder? Boros Charm.
I don't win every game against control, but they're always fun games.
Blue is the only color that does spell battles well.
Every other color is tethered to either a unique zone or requires to interact with permanents. Black is tethered to the graveyard, and the only other "bard" color outside of blue. Red is burn, but lacks the capacity to stop a spell. Green is permanent based. White uses the exile zone.
If I were to say is that Magic's greatest weakness is the effort to do spell vs. spell combat and interactions. If Magic as a game is Magical. The lack of intricate effort to push the thinking onto using the stack.
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Life is a beautiful engineer, yet a brutal scientist.
IMO, aggro vs aggro is the absolute worst possible magic game.
I mean, get, for example a burn mirror match... this is decided almost solely by the order of the top 12 to 15 cards in each player libraries.
unless somehow one of the players makes a REALLY dumb decision, nothing else other than card order in libaries is deciding that match.
People call control "not interactive" and that's absolutely not true, in fact it's the opposite, control (not prison) decks are BY FAR the most interactive decks, you'll always have to play on reaction, access threats, choose which spells to counter, which creatures to remove, which artifacts to destroy, there are very few "I'm playing this now and I don't care what you do" plays in control decks, you ALWAYS have to play close attention to your opponent and choose the best time to actually drop your wincon, or a part of your engine.
Prison decks are more of a combo deck than control deck as you're trying to assemble a number of pieces in the battlefield that will shut down your opponent's ability to play magic.
Playing against control is not boring or frustrating, playing against something that beats you might.
I really doubt you'll find a lot of players that will complain that playing against a deck that they beat 8 out of 10 times is boring, playing against control is not frustrating, losing is.
I mean, assemble a rogue deck and go play modern against the swarm of Eldrazi Aggro decks (hopefully the baning of Eye of Ugin will end the issue) and try not go home frustrated, you certainly are, and definitively not because you're playing against some kind of control deck.
People really need to stop hating on strategies, they're not to blame.
Magic having plenty of completely different strategies in the form of Aggro, combo, control, tempo, midrange, ramp, prison... etc, etc, etc is precisely what makes the game so good.
People making HEAVY complaints about counterspells (Counterspell isn't powerful enough to see play in legacy and won't be printed so it can be used elsewhere because people somehow think that a 1 for 1 that forces you into keeping mana open is unfun or "too good"), discard (how much time since the last playable discard spell that actually gave the caster card advantage? everything that discards more than 1 card is really bad nowadays, making hand destruction strategies not that viable) and mana denial only (alright, too many efficient land destruction can generate a really bad environment, but having one Stone Rain or Pillage on standard, if you can't have too many of it in your deck would not be the end of the world)
The complains might only end up making wizards to steer the game in the direction of a full midrange meta.
While I agree that midrange decks tend to generate more interesting matches all around, if they're all that exists, the game becomes bland quickly.
1) They win the game before the game actually ends. This is especially a problem with the dedicated control decks that play only answers, card draw, and one or two win conditions. This means either sitting around a lot waiting for their actual win condition or scooping. Turns out people don't really like either of those things very much.
2) Counterspells are extremely annoying. After everything you do, you have to wait for your opponent to make a decision. Worse, even if he has no decision to make, he has to *act* like there is one so you don't know he doesn't have it. It gets tiresome pretty quickly.
Now, control decks don't have to have these problems. Wizards has been trying to make it so control decks don't play tons of counterspells and play enough win conditions that they can usually end the game in short order after stabilizing. Esper dragons did a reasonable job of this. Once the control player gained control, the dragons usually did a pretty good job of killing you.
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It's a legitimate way to play, but I understand that it can be frustrating to play against. Control players aren't attacking your deck: they're attacking your ability to make choices, removing your options, and beating YOU more than beating your deck. Control players are happiest when they don't have an opponent at all: their plays and deck are designed to remove meaningful choices and completely remove the opponent from the game.
Edited for typos. New keyboard still doesn't feel right, and it wants to make me look like I can't spell.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
I don't know you at all but this kind of comment always makes me assume the person just isn't a good magic player.
So, what DO you do when your spells get countered and your creatures get removed? What DO you do when your options get whittled away in the early game and you're left with 2 cards in hand to their 8 on turn 7? What DO you do when holding back to play a ton of stuff at once doesn't seem to work and neither does playing things as soon as you have the mana? I'm genuinely asking, because it seems like my wins are more flukes than anything and I'm not learning or improving.
For me, I'd just accept I can't win and just move on to the next game and try to not get in that game state. For instance, this Khans + BfZ blocks Standard, if a control player resolves 2 Digs and has a full grip and good amount of life and you're in top deck mode, you should just assume you have absolute no way to win. Even if that player has nothing, it safe to assume that the game is done and you're just playing the clock game. For the next game, just don't let yourself get in that situation, but once in this situation, accepting defeat ASAP should save you unfun time and sanity.
If you really hate this situation, just make your 15 sideboard a pain against control. One of the weaknesses of control decks usually they can't cover all situations with their sideboards and it's hard to have a combination of blocks that permits control decks to cover every hole.
Now dealing with the fact of it's not fun for you, I think not much can be done to remedy that. You're the "problem". You have to deal with that yourself. We can't give much advice. On the flip side, a control player could not have any fun against an aggro deck that wins in just 3 ~ 6 turns. The games may be just too short for them to enjoy. How can they deal with those feelings when aggro or any other linear strategy just wreck their control decks (like pretty much happens a lot in Modern, for instance)? Personally I don't enjoy playing versus certain combos decks that are basically playing solitaire MTG. They don't really care about your plays. They are just playing to get the right cards and be done with. For their perspective, they are having fun solving a puzzle, but opponents that disrupt their puzzles too much may not be fun.
Say you are on RUG delver. If you sit there unable to attack or play a spell with your tempo deck whilst I have a couple of trinispheres, crucible, ghostly prisons and am eating your manabase to below 3 lands every turn with a recurring wasteland I will happily play on. If you scoop with five mins to go hoping to win 2-1 well good luck, prison decks generally go long. I might stop munching your mana base let you play a spell, knowing I am holding Geddon. The oorrect ply at that point is to scoop- all spells cost 3, your mana base is basicless, and you can never play a spell again. Eventually the other player will win, and you can't.
Experienced players learn when to scoop.
Simple example- you play Legacy Eldrazi similar to Modern, the opponent plays a Moat- ground based critters cannot attack- you play on as you have an Endbringer to ping them. They drop a Humility making creatures 1/1 or a Leyline so thy can't be targetted - you scoop- you can't win.
It can be less clear. In Parfait, for example, an opponent who has hidden behind a Humility/Ghostly Prison and Zuran Orb who has just switched on a Land Tax Scroll rack combo to draw 6 new cards a turn.....pretty much time to scoop if you are a creature deck- they are drawing 6 a turn, can gain life at will and your creatures are 1/1 with no abilities.
To take that into Modern....you go toe to toe with a UW midrange control deck, they are on 5 life and at EOT they draw 7 new cards and go to twelve....scoop.
You have lost, and playing on plays into their hands. Sometimes when against a combo deck like "extra turns" you have to sit there for ten mins before you scoop with, say, 25 mins to go so that you can win 2 games. Combos that can fail are annoying as sometimes they play for a while before they fizzle.
The answer to your last question is to build a deck thats better. Control decks don't have their own way all the time, and in Modern are weak. A Jund deck rips their hand away whilst putting pressure on soon after- disruption that works. They get value out of lands- man lands. A Thalia via a cavern of souls or Aether vial is hard to answer for control. In fact in Modern control is pretty weak, 1cc discard exists. There is an option, always.
"All he does is turn dudes sideways"
"All he does is play solitaire"
This attitude can be applied to any archetype.
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"Knowledge is such a burden. Release it. Release all your fears to me."
—Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver
I'm not saying control can't be misplayed, or that it's a brainless archetype, but it's not as hard as playing a deck that wants it's user to die almost as much as it wants to kill their opponent.
Yeah, I've been there.
What's your meta? If it's lots of creature kill, use burn. If it's sorceries, get manlands. If your opponent always counters your first spell, swarm them with cheap stuff. Side in some discard. Build a mirror. If you can get cards with abilities that don't involve them being cast, that can neatly sidestep counterspells. Probably your opponent's deck isn't perfectly unbeatable, and certainly your opponent isn't.
Worst case, pack it in and find a group to play that fits your style.
Not so accurately as it can be with hard control and certain "solitaire" combo builds. Like Lakanna says, the point of hard control is to remove meaningful choices. When it works, the opponent can't stick anything on the board and has to either concede or wait for the opponent to eventually find and use their wincon. In comparison, Heavy Aggro requires ridiculous amounts of on the fly strategizing to use correctly, as do softer control variants.
Art is life itself.
Nah, I explained that bit: it attacks agency, and removes meaningful choices. That's a way of beating a player, not a way of beating a deck. It's... winning by forcing your game onto the other player, if you understand that concept. Playing Control is all about making sure your opponent can't play their game, they have to play yours. And that's why I said it was about beating YOU, not beating your deck. Control players have to stop only the important stuff, the things that can actually allow someone to make decisions. It's all about disrupting the other player's gameplan and making it, and them, irrelevant so you can goldfish a win in your own time. When it works, the opponent has no choices to make that are ultimately relevant to the outcome of the game.
It's a way f thinking about things, really. It's also why I call Control uninteractive: when a player has no choices that can affect the outcome of the game, then they have no interaction with the game, and might as well not even be playing. Prison Control, Draw-Go, and even tempo to an extent all try to achieve this, the point where no matter what the opponent does, they can't do anything that matters. Reducing an opponent to an obstacle that you will eventually just beat, effectively removing them from the game. So yes, I'll stand by the idea that Control is intended to beat the player, not their deck.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
As for beating control, control is about inevitability. The absolute best way to beat Control is to be faster, come underneath them, and make the kill before they get a chance to set up. Aggressive creatures and lines of play are probably the most effective ways to beat Control. There are a handful of cards that are explicitly geared against control as well: Cavern of Souls lets you get your creatures out, while the entire Bogles deck runs hexproof things to avoid spot removal
To be honest, beating Control takes a lot of practice, and a lot of thought before the match. When you're building your deck, if Control is something you're worried about, then you need to take it into consideration and plan ahead. Put in cards that can work against it. In some cases, this also means you just have to accept that Control is a bad matchup for you, and that it will beat what you have planned. It might be frustrating, but sometimes you'll face decks that you just can't beat most of the time. When you're building a deck, you want to be able to identify these bad matchups along with the good matchups. Sometimes, slow grindy control is just one of those bad matchups. You can plan for it, but even after sideboarding, you might still be the underdog becaue you had to put sideboard slots towards something more important.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Play more creatures. Play creatures that can't be countered or removed.
Draw more cards.
Play a better deck, or learn to play better.
Control isn't some sort of unbeatable statregy. To win, you play more threats that the control player can deal with. If you can't, then it's either you have a bad deck (or at least, a bad matchup), or you're a bad player.
I mean, compare the decks today to the decks of the period of counter post. The entire deck is nothing but counter and removal. And yet, two of the most prominent decks of the time were sligh (ie mono red aggro) and buried alive (mono black aggro). Why? because they were decks that could beat the crap out of a control deck. Sligh puts out a stupid about of creatures well before a wrath of god gets online, and by the time it does the counterpost player is just a ferw burn spells away. Buried alive makes countermagic useless.
And these days there aren't decks like counterpost anymore, no more "haha! I counter everything! EVERYTHING!" Not only that, but creatures are significantly larger and faster than they were back then. Pure control decks that you've described are almost extinct and incredibly hard to play.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
Or go more aggressive. lots of 1 drops burn damage and pump spells. It just sounds like your deck has a bad matchup and you are inexperienced. It's frustrating I know.
Decks
Modern
BGR Jund RGB
BW Eldrazi and Taxes WB
BWGAbzan Company GWB
Mtgo Modern
G Company Elves G
The key thing, inevitably, is going to be your sideboard and how you make use of it when playing the second and third games.
If you run into a deck where your creature removal is largely useless, then you can sideboard it out for other cards that will be more useful, whether it be more creatures, or other forms of disruption (like hand disruption for example), or more card draw depending upon.
In the case of burn as others have mentioned, just pull out your creature removal (or most of it) and put in a bunch more burn spells, or similar to keep the pressure on, and make sure the opponent is put into a position where they cannot just keep 100% control of the game.
I noticed as well that you mentioned about putting cool combos together.
The trouble with combo decks, is a lot of the times, control decks will have the ability to disrupt such combos, barring situations where you have the ability to counter their control strategies with your own cheap counters or hand disruption to force your combo pieces through.
You also need to have a willingness to adjust your deck/sideboard to better handle the local metagame you are having to deal with. You have to keep an eye on the different decks you are playing against and recognize where your deck is running into problems against those decks and then what you could do to improve your situation vs. those decks while still keeping your advantage vs. the decks you tend to do better against.
If you are just playing casual, probably your issue is that your decks are simply outclassed. In that case you want to look for hexproof/shroud creatures,uncounterable creatures (Cavern of Souls is good), and card advantage (Hammer of Bogaradan, Punishing Fire + Grove, undying, etc). Also speed is good! Control wants to win the game with card advantage, which takes time to kick in. Try to over run them with very efficient little creatures.
And I assume you are playing casual because control is not exactly a strong strategy in non-eternal formats.
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Oh, you countered my Collected Company at your EOT? Hope you have mana open still, because I'll main phase one.
Oh, you board wiped? Well, now that you're tapped out I'll cast a couple dudes.
Oh, you cast Murder? Boros Charm.
I don't win every game against control, but they're always fun games.
Every other color is tethered to either a unique zone or requires to interact with permanents. Black is tethered to the graveyard, and the only other "bard" color outside of blue. Red is burn, but lacks the capacity to stop a spell. Green is permanent based. White uses the exile zone.
If I were to say is that Magic's greatest weakness is the effort to do spell vs. spell combat and interactions. If Magic as a game is Magical. The lack of intricate effort to push the thinking onto using the stack.
Modern
Commander
Cube
<a href="http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/cube-lists/588020-unpowered-themed-enchantment-an-enchanted-evening">An Enchanted Evening Cube </a>
I mean, get, for example a burn mirror match... this is decided almost solely by the order of the top 12 to 15 cards in each player libraries.
unless somehow one of the players makes a REALLY dumb decision, nothing else other than card order in libaries is deciding that match.
People call control "not interactive" and that's absolutely not true, in fact it's the opposite, control (not prison) decks are BY FAR the most interactive decks, you'll always have to play on reaction, access threats, choose which spells to counter, which creatures to remove, which artifacts to destroy, there are very few "I'm playing this now and I don't care what you do" plays in control decks, you ALWAYS have to play close attention to your opponent and choose the best time to actually drop your wincon, or a part of your engine.
Prison decks are more of a combo deck than control deck as you're trying to assemble a number of pieces in the battlefield that will shut down your opponent's ability to play magic.
Playing against control is not boring or frustrating, playing against something that beats you might.
I really doubt you'll find a lot of players that will complain that playing against a deck that they beat 8 out of 10 times is boring, playing against control is not frustrating, losing is.
I mean, assemble a rogue deck and go play modern against the swarm of Eldrazi Aggro decks (hopefully the baning of Eye of Ugin will end the issue) and try not go home frustrated, you certainly are, and definitively not because you're playing against some kind of control deck.
People really need to stop hating on strategies, they're not to blame.
Magic having plenty of completely different strategies in the form of Aggro, combo, control, tempo, midrange, ramp, prison... etc, etc, etc is precisely what makes the game so good.
People making HEAVY complaints about counterspells (Counterspell isn't powerful enough to see play in legacy and won't be printed so it can be used elsewhere because people somehow think that a 1 for 1 that forces you into keeping mana open is unfun or "too good"), discard (how much time since the last playable discard spell that actually gave the caster card advantage? everything that discards more than 1 card is really bad nowadays, making hand destruction strategies not that viable) and mana denial only (alright, too many efficient land destruction can generate a really bad environment, but having one Stone Rain or Pillage on standard, if you can't have too many of it in your deck would not be the end of the world)
The complains might only end up making wizards to steer the game in the direction of a full midrange meta.
While I agree that midrange decks tend to generate more interesting matches all around, if they're all that exists, the game becomes bland quickly.
1) They win the game before the game actually ends. This is especially a problem with the dedicated control decks that play only answers, card draw, and one or two win conditions. This means either sitting around a lot waiting for their actual win condition or scooping. Turns out people don't really like either of those things very much.
2) Counterspells are extremely annoying. After everything you do, you have to wait for your opponent to make a decision. Worse, even if he has no decision to make, he has to *act* like there is one so you don't know he doesn't have it. It gets tiresome pretty quickly.
Now, control decks don't have to have these problems. Wizards has been trying to make it so control decks don't play tons of counterspells and play enough win conditions that they can usually end the game in short order after stabilizing. Esper dragons did a reasonable job of this. Once the control player gained control, the dragons usually did a pretty good job of killing you.