@Cipher - I agree that the meta is primed for UWx decks (it's why I've been working on my guilty pleasure Goblins list lol), and I also agree that Esper is a fine UWx approach to take, and that the stock lists should be abandoned. I don't think that running 12 spot removals and 2 verdicts is going to work for us though, we just need to find a shell in esper that works well with Azcanta.
Hold on now...I'm only talking about cards, not entire decklists.
12 spot removals was just an example of someone trying to design a removal package to focus on a specific metagame. Could also be 4-5 verdicts and Runed Halos, or multiple Night of Souls' Betrayal sideboard.
Thing is, UWx Control seems to be Tier 1 in a Modern metagame dominated by creature spam. With the last major Modern even prior to the PT featuring 2 "all creatures must die" decks in the finals, I think a lot of pros will end up doing an audible to UWx Control decks. On top of that, if other decks adapt to creature spam and start shifting towards the reactive end of the spectrum, UWx becomes even better. Decks like classic Jund or Junk may make a comeback if Tron and combo doesn't make a big appearance.
Which brings me to my point: I think Esper may be a legitimate Tier 1 or 2 deck if the metagame holds, assuming it's built right. Back in 2014 with Birthing Pod, Twin, and Jund being the decks to beat, the deck felt like a "best kept secret". We don't have a midrange metagame at the moment, but a creature spam memtagame is also narrow enough to allow Control decks to dominate. I think now is a time to leave behind these cryo-frozen decklists from 2014 and try to metagame with the deck, like the guys playing UWR with 12 spot removal spells and 2 Verdict.
Of course, this only applies to MODO and large paper tournaments. If you're at FNM then it's possible the decks aren't changing.
Also, here's a Top 4 UW Control decklist form GP Santa Clara:
I think against Burn, specifically, Brutality is good in the sense that it can trade 3 cards for 3 card at the cost of just 2 mana, and Burn is good at bottlenecking you on mana.
Humans can be problematic.
Sometimes you open game 1 on 3 lands, snare, knot, think twice, cryptic, and lose the game right there when they go cavern > vial > pass.
Otherwise, I don't think its usually terrible, but counterspells kind of suck against them, and you might not have enough cards in the board to make the matchup good.
I tried settle and didn't like it much. I could see playing it as my sideboard wrath if I felt like humans/dredge/etc was really popular, but only hitting attacking creatures came up a lot for me.
You do seem to have a lot of sideboard stuff for humans, which definitely makes the matchup a lot better.
Honestly, none of that (except for NoSB) was there for humans; they're just leftovers from Death's Shadow, Eldrazi, and Storm. Generic removal (Detention Sphere v. Celestial Purge, for example) is less efficient, but there's a ton of spillover for these random creature decks. The majority of the cards that shut down Control decks die to Sphere/Explosives.
Settle only came up because I had went up to 4x wrath on account of the number of decks that forced you to have it. When I added Azcanta to the deck I made the disruption suite more polarized, going down to 6 hard counters and running more matchup-specific heavy hitters like 2x Runed Halo maindeck.
I really don't think Esper has any terrible matchups except for Burn, even Dredge and Storm can be managed with cards like Runed Halo and Rule of Law. The problem in my mind is the "good" matchups only being 55/45. The number of games where you don't hit a pile of draw spells and have to topdeck with your opponent was too high for me, which is why I experimented with more draw engines (ones that draw more than 2 cards).
Interesting that you guys all think Humans is so poor of a matchup; am I the only one who's tried Settle the Wreckage? I also have a Night of Souls' Betrayal in the sideboard + 2 Detention Sphere and 1 Engineered Explosives. I only just added the 2 Fatal Push back to the Maindeck, as well. Could be that I just haven't played the matchup enough times.
Jund isnt a control deck.
Its a midrange deck.
Breach is closer to false tempo than control, but I'm willing to accept the argument.
Shadow is a midrange deck.
That all being said, search seems to be good in a couple of decks (some jeskai, some UW, some grixis, some UR) but not nearly all.
Would you classify 4C Leovold as control? What about Delver in Legacy? I think there is a false premise that in order to be a control deck, you have to run nothing but counters, kill spells, and board wipes and only have a max of 5 win cons. A lot of people don't think the Esper Lingering Spirits list is a "control" deck, but why not? It runs Cryptics, Logic Knots, and Collective Brutality. Just because it's running Tasigurs, Anglers, and Lingering Spirits it's not control? "Grixis Control" In Legacy has very little counter magic or kill spells. Most lists only run 4 Cabal Therapy, maybe 1 or 2 Thoughtseize, 2 or 3 Fatal Push, and the rest of the list is cantrips, Young Pyros, and Anglers. Limiting control to being only draw-go style of play only hinders your own thought process.
The "Grixis Control" lists in Legacy aren't Control decks either. Calling anything with more than 8 pieces of disruption "control" is like calling anything that plays more than 12 creatures "aggro" The definition for aggro isn't just that a deck wants to clock it's opponent and the definition for Control isn't just that you play for the late game.
Since there's no official theory for any of this, you might as well use deck naming conventions that offer insights during deckbuilding. From a gameplay standpoint, people like to identify the need the need to be offensive or defensive, depending on the matchup. That's great, but calling decks that excel at this "aggro/control" is no more helpful than the midrange label they had originally. What it does do is mess with deckbuilding, in the sense that it encourages people to put strategically different decks in the same category. You can take Jeskai Control (the actual one) UW, and Esper Draw-Go, and directly compare spot removal, draw spells, disruption, etc., and know that the numbers stay within a defined range. If someone decides they want to add Tasigurs to an Esper list, however, they should know that the fundamental ratios should change because you just jumped archetypes.
There's also a clarity in gameplan once the archetype is defined. Control is an archetype where you lock out your opponent, either by using card draw to scale your disruption package (draw-go/Esper), by playing positional advantage pieces that effectively blank your opponent's draws (prison/Lantern Control), or a combination of the two (UW Control). The Scapeshifts, Blue Moons, and Delver decks of the world don't lock-out, they just stall, and the entire disruption package changes to reflect that. I don't see any functional value in presenting these as control or hybrid decks, aside from making people feel better about their deck choices.
Even if you're playing against these decks, you'd be a fool to treat them at all similar. Creature decks can board in card advantage to outgrind the midrange decks, but hand disruption is better against actual Control, since actual Control decks have to recoup positional advantage lost from playing draw spells and lock pieces with a sweeper or other comeback mechanic. Decks like Grixis Shadow or Jeskai Midrange have a "hidden weakness" of having almost no card advantage outside 1-2 playsets of 2-for-1s. A card like Lead the Stampede can bury them, but Esper Draw-Go can basically goldfish all that with sweepers.
The only control deck? Last time I checked Blue Moon, Through the Breach Moon, Temur Blood Moon, Death's Shadow, Esper Lingering Spirits, Jeskai Control, Nahiri Control, UB Fairies, Urzhov, Grixis Control, Cruel Grixis,4c Control, are all still decks. The only other deck Search KINDA fits into is Jeskai, and to me it feels forced. UW is the only deck I feel that fully utilizes it.
Breach and Death's Shadow aren't Control decks, and the rest either do run Azcanta or aren't successful.
I think Search for Azcanta is a over-hyped honestly. I think the only deck this fits in is UW do nothing for Modern and Miracles in Legacy. Any other decks trying to force it with Thought Scour, just feels off.
Come on, now. You just said that the card only fits in every successful Control deck in Modern and Legacy, except this one...
4x Snapcaster was so strong that I ran it before Search came out, even alongside 3x Logic Knot. I'm currently testing 3x Search for Azcanta, so I went down to 3x Snapcaster with 0 Logic Knot.
Biggest problem is suddenly having all those mostly-dead graveyard hate cards people bring in against you actually matter. It feels nice to be able to punish those draw, normally.
I'd add that 4 Cryptics isn't necessary, at least not in my opinion. I don't think I've ever seen a Wafo list that went down to 3, but it's pretty much universal among other control archetypes and I've been running 3 for half a year, now.
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12 spot removals was just an example of someone trying to design a removal package to focus on a specific metagame. Could also be 4-5 verdicts and Runed Halos, or multiple Night of Souls' Betrayal sideboard.
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Which brings me to my point: I think Esper may be a legitimate Tier 1 or 2 deck if the metagame holds, assuming it's built right. Back in 2014 with Birthing Pod, Twin, and Jund being the decks to beat, the deck felt like a "best kept secret". We don't have a midrange metagame at the moment, but a creature spam memtagame is also narrow enough to allow Control decks to dominate. I think now is a time to leave behind these cryo-frozen decklists from 2014 and try to metagame with the deck, like the guys playing UWR with 12 spot removal spells and 2 Verdict.
Of course, this only applies to MODO and large paper tournaments. If you're at FNM then it's possible the decks aren't changing.
Also, here's a Top 4 UW Control decklist form GP Santa Clara:
http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=118121
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Honestly, none of that (except for NoSB) was there for humans; they're just leftovers from Death's Shadow, Eldrazi, and Storm. Generic removal (Detention Sphere v. Celestial Purge, for example) is less efficient, but there's a ton of spillover for these random creature decks. The majority of the cards that shut down Control decks die to Sphere/Explosives.
Settle only came up because I had went up to 4x wrath on account of the number of decks that forced you to have it. When I added Azcanta to the deck I made the disruption suite more polarized, going down to 6 hard counters and running more matchup-specific heavy hitters like 2x Runed Halo maindeck.
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Interesting that you guys all think Humans is so poor of a matchup; am I the only one who's tried Settle the Wreckage? I also have a Night of Souls' Betrayal in the sideboard + 2 Detention Sphere and 1 Engineered Explosives. I only just added the 2 Fatal Push back to the Maindeck, as well. Could be that I just haven't played the matchup enough times.
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Since there's no official theory for any of this, you might as well use deck naming conventions that offer insights during deckbuilding. From a gameplay standpoint, people like to identify the need the need to be offensive or defensive, depending on the matchup. That's great, but calling decks that excel at this "aggro/control" is no more helpful than the midrange label they had originally. What it does do is mess with deckbuilding, in the sense that it encourages people to put strategically different decks in the same category. You can take Jeskai Control (the actual one) UW, and Esper Draw-Go, and directly compare spot removal, draw spells, disruption, etc., and know that the numbers stay within a defined range. If someone decides they want to add Tasigurs to an Esper list, however, they should know that the fundamental ratios should change because you just jumped archetypes.
There's also a clarity in gameplan once the archetype is defined. Control is an archetype where you lock out your opponent, either by using card draw to scale your disruption package (draw-go/Esper), by playing positional advantage pieces that effectively blank your opponent's draws (prison/Lantern Control), or a combination of the two (UW Control). The Scapeshifts, Blue Moons, and Delver decks of the world don't lock-out, they just stall, and the entire disruption package changes to reflect that. I don't see any functional value in presenting these as control or hybrid decks, aside from making people feel better about their deck choices.
Even if you're playing against these decks, you'd be a fool to treat them at all similar. Creature decks can board in card advantage to outgrind the midrange decks, but hand disruption is better against actual Control, since actual Control decks have to recoup positional advantage lost from playing draw spells and lock pieces with a sweeper or other comeback mechanic. Decks like Grixis Shadow or Jeskai Midrange have a "hidden weakness" of having almost no card advantage outside 1-2 playsets of 2-for-1s. A card like Lead the Stampede can bury them, but Esper Draw-Go can basically goldfish all that with sweepers.
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Biggest problem is suddenly having all those mostly-dead graveyard hate cards people bring in against you actually matter. It feels nice to be able to punish those draw, normally.
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