Magic the Gathering

Theory

Magic the Classroom – Rule of Nine Refined part II

By Dan Eckstein ⋅ January 6, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Before Christ­mas break I gave you all a more refined view of the Rule of Nine. I feel like I’m repeat­ing myself but you can read my pre­vi­ous pieces on the Rule of Nine.

I real­ize that a few of my stu­dents are new to the Class­room this semes­ter so I’ll do a quick rehash. The Rule of Nine is a deck build­ing skele­ton where we force our­selves to use just nine dif­fer­ent cards. Each is played at the full play­set with 24 lands. From there we can then refine our­selves into num­bers that either fit the mana curve bet­ter or min­i­mize issues like hav­ing 3 of the same Planeswalker in our hand.

My most recent Rule of Nine les­son looked at refined skele­tons for var­i­ous agro builds with a deck list for each. If you didn’t read it already, I strongly sug­gest you do. That’s espe­cially true of stu­dents who love the Red Zone. Today I want to cover the rest of the decks with Con­trol and Combo style builds.

But first I need to make sure that we all under­stand how to eval­u­ate what type of deck we have. First let’s look at agro. It’s the eas­i­est to pick out of a line up. To make it sim­ple if you have more than 16 crea­tures in your deck then you’re prob­a­bly agro. You might be agro-control, agro-combo, or even control-agro but you have strong agro ten­den­cies. To decide which type of agro you are you look at the rest of your card selec­tions. If they are more crea­tures or they are cards ded­i­cated to remov­ing block­ers you’re full agro. If they are meant to hold the line until your big dogs start to hunt then you are agro con­trol. And finally if they are cards that inter­act with your crea­tures abil­i­ties in a way to dom­i­nate the game by a creature’s skill and not just its power then you are agro-combo.

But what if you have less than 16 crea­tures or what if you never plan on push­ing a crit­ter into bat­tle. That’s when you have either combo or con­trol builds.

The main idea of Con­trol is just what the name says. I want to exert my con­trol of the game state when­ever pos­si­ble. The Con­trol deck wants to dic­tate and decide what the bat­tle­field looks like at any given moment. Depend­ing on the meta and for­mat the con­trol deck does this by a mix of per­mis­sion spells and removal spells. Per­mis­sion spells are cards that deny our oppo­nent from play­ing any­thing by coun­ter­ing them. Removal spells are for those pesky cards that sneak through our per­mis­sion net. Sim­ply point, click, and pull and their lit­tle Gob­lin Guide is no more.

A Basic Con­trol build would go some­thing like this

• 4 slots for 1cc to 3cc spells
• 2.5 slots for 3cc to 6 cc spells
• 1.5 slots for 6cc plus Bombs
• 1 slot for total free for all – with con­trol builds you often need to add lands or a “sil­ver bul­let” so this slot is open for sin­gle­tons and extra land.

With true con­trol builds it is almost impos­si­ble to give a direct list but if I were to build one it would go some­thing like this.

For the cheap­ies I would look for cards the remove and deny a major­ity of my early meta game. For my local that would include Light­ning Bolt. Very rarely do I see an early drop with more than three tough­ness. Often the only real debate is weather you should Bolt a Noble Hier­arch or let them keep the mana rush. With the assump­tion that our mana fix­ing will allow for three col­ors I would then include a Ter­mi­nate. With the exclu­sion of Shroud abil­ity crea­tures Ter­mi­nate can eighty-six any poten­tial threat so use it wisely. The next two would be per­mis­sion spells of Flash­freeze and Essence Scat­ter. Hon­estly those two cards can counter about 85% of the cards I see any given Friday.

I feel I need to explain the 2.5 slots for medium sized spells. You see, with Con­trol, you rarely get to see play­sets of every card. These decks have to be fine tuned from the begin­ning. Because of that you need to make the Rule of Nine a lit­tle flex­i­ble. I notice that I have no card draw in my cheap cast­ings so I’ll take care of that right away. Many play­ers use Courier’s Cap­sule and I’m no dif­fer­ent. I’m sure that your hov­er­ing your mouse over the link just make sure you remem­ber the card right. (I love that func­tion by the way). It is a 2cc spell but I include its acti­va­tion cost for this curve. The cool part is that I can chose not to acti­vate it right away. Allow­ing me to sit with two counter mana open and the choice to draw dur­ing my oppo­nents End of Turn. The other slot also kinda vio­lates the Mana Cost rule. I’m using 4 Earth­quakes in my build. There are a few token mak­ing decks in my meta so the need for mass removal is very vital. I do put Earth­quake in the 4 plus mana cost slots because spend­ing less than that is really a waste. Earth­quake also allows me to let a smaller crit­ter sur­vive a cou­ple of turns and that way I can save my Ter­mi­nates for Buffy the Wal­let­slayer. In the last half a slot I’ll drop Sphinx of Lost Truths. Play­ing him straight is rea­son­able in many games but if I can kick him it’s even bet­ter. He does the one thing that every con­trol deck loves. Gen­er­ates cards.

Bombs are crit­i­cal in a Con­trol deck. With­out a way to win even­tu­ally you just run out of answers. Once again we need to use the half slot cat­e­gory though I do want to point out that some bombs are big enough that you only need 1 slot ded­i­cated to them. I would hope that many of you already know my first bomb because of the col­ors I’ve gen­er­ated in the pre­vi­ous cards. That’s right. Cruel Ulti­ma­tum is my big full slot bomb. For the half slot I alter­nate between Sorin Markov and Sphinx of Jwar Isle. Right now I’m play­ing the Jar-jar.

For the Vari­able slot I’m putting in two Div­ina­tion and adding 2 lands. Prob­a­bly the hard­est part of build­ing con­trol is choos­ing the proper num­ber of lands. You want enough to be able to cast all of your spells when you need them but you also want to have enough answers for your deck and every land card becomes one less sleeve avail­able for those answers.

Next let’s look at Combo. The main Idea of Combo is very sim­i­lar to the Con­trol model above. We want to con­trol the field until we can cast a game win­ner. The only dif­fer­ence is instead of depend­ing on a “bomb” card we instead try to estab­lish a combo of cards that lead to the win. Basi­cally our deck build will begin with some pieces of a combo puz­zle. Then the rest of the slots will be ded­i­cated let­ting us live long enough to cast the needed parts. Here is where combo decks vary from each other. Some try to rush out the parts, oth­ers seek to dis­rupt their oppo­nents until the parts come to fruiti­tion, and oth­ers pro­tect their life points and extend the game until the parts fall into place. Since there are so many options there really isn’t a per­fect shell.

In gen­eral a good shell would fit the following.

• 3 (Max) slots for combo parts
• 3 slots for Draw and/or Tutor spells
• 2 slots for Disruption/Control
• 1 plus slots for added utility

It is impor­tant to note that some combo require less than three slots and oth­ers require more. A combo that takes more than 3 cards is UNPLAYABLE so should not be con­sid­ered. A combo that requires less than 3 is prefer­able since it allows us to add more util­ity slots.

My favorite deck Combo deck right now has actu­ally no slots for combo pieces. Its core combo comes from the lands it plays. Valakut and Moun­tains are all it takes to win the day. This deck allows for much greater reach in the tutor and util­ity por­tions of the deck.

In the Draw / Tutor spells I will bring in ways to accel­er­ate my land count. Get­ting to 5 Moun­tains is a huge part of our game plan. Har­row, Ram­pant Growth, and Khalni Heart Expe­di­tion all serve the job of fetch Moun­tains but we also need a tutor for Valakut, The Molten Pin­na­cle. Expe­di­tion Map takes care of this issue. Notice I’ve already vio­lated my orig­i­nal shell but I am able to since this deck has an all land combo. I’ve only used 4 real slots so far.

I’m also using an extra slot for dis­rup­tion cards. With Green and Red as my color base dis­rup­tion in the form of coun­ters or dis­card is unavail­able. So I’ll use dam­age gen­er­a­tors to avoid that pesky com­bat dam­age. Earth­quake, Light­ning Bolt, and Vol­canic Fall­out quickly fill 3 slots instead of the 2 I assigned in the combo shell.

That leaves us with 2 slots for util­ity pur­poses. I want cards that would add to either the mana devel­op­ment or add to the burn com­po­nent of the deck. I’m using one of each. To help gen­er­ate more lands in the bat­tle­field faster than nor­mal I use the Ora­cle of Mul Daya. While it’s not a guar­an­tee accel­er­ant it has the poten­tial of an every turn bonus. The burn options can also be added to with crea­tures. I went with Siege Gang Com­man­der for both the extra chump blocks as well as the burn poten­tial. There are many games where just sac­ing gobos fin­ishes off the game.

That con­cludes today’s class. Real­ize that each of these exam­ples are some of the harder decks to build and design. Because of their dif­fi­culty the skele­tal sketches are more flexible.

Next week I’ll hope­fully be shar­ing with you a Eureka moment which I had recently. I think I have made a deck that is very ROGUE and actu­ally works. Early test­ing shows some promise (even the Jund matchup). Of course if it fails I’ll still share it with you any­ways. There’s the bell.

Dan is a High School Teacher who does everything he can to squeeze Magic into his schedule. Between being a Father, Husband, and Coach it’s pretty hard. Articles by Dan focus on tips and lessons for beginners that he has learned while teaching his students how to play their best. As a player Dan has a propensity to go Crazy For Combos so occasionally these articles happen as well.

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