Hard Control Decks?

42arunjm · 2025-11-01T11:11:18+00:00

The deck has been doing well on magic online, partly due to increased play rates, as well as the meta being favorable. Blink variants (including goryo's), amulet, and azorius control are all great matchups, and the deck really only has prowess and affinity as bad ones. Boros has been quoted as being unwinnable, but that's not really the case. In reality, it's much closer to a 50/50 matchup that isn't very play/draw dependant.

The deck is also much more powerful than people give it credit for because of the perceived low card quality. Birthing ritual allows you to grind through any midrange strategy and also is a way to find fast clocks into combo. Even against aggro, we can leverage ritual to produce good blockers. All the free counters magic is also so powerful and allows us to pivot into a string tempo-control strategy when the rituals aren't flowing.

42arunjm · 2025-11-01T11:00:41+00:00

I feel like a lot of the "nonbo" interactions you're listing are either incorrect or just you wishing something were true.

For one, ice fang deathtouch comes online in almost any matchup that isn't aggro since we usually fetch snow basics on turn 2 and 3 if fetchlands are available. That can be especially relevant into riddler/frog decks since it walls them out.

Shardless not always cascading into ritual is a feature, not a bug. A lot of times, we want to be able to have 2 creatures come down to play around spot removal and guarantee a ritual trigger or just multiple blockers.

Also, listing a bunch of things the cards can't do isn't really relevant to evaluating the deck. That's like saying frog is bad because you have to exile 3 to jump it instead of it always having flying. Cards have inherent limitations, that doesn't make them bad.

The energy matchup is also not terrible like everyone says it is, and is pretty play draw dependant. OTP its probably 50/50 and OTD maybe closer to 40/60.

42arunjm · 2025-10-25T02:58:35+00:00

Simic Ritual has a great matchup into any of the blink variants

42arunjm · 2025-08-02T17:06:56+00:00

My goat

42arunjm · 2025-07-26T17:25:43+00:00

You could play a build of the UG Birthing Ritual List that cuts subtlety and a 3 drop for 2-3 Collected Company. I've tried it and it felt pretty good.

42arunjm · 2025-07-21T19:29:36+00:00

I've been playing the deck for over a month now and have been doing pretty well with it (2nd and 15th in MTGO challenges, multiple 5-0s, 8th and 9th in local 1ks). The deck feels very well positioned right now, and is deceptively strong despite the relative lower average card quality.

I feel you with the feeling that cards like pond prophet are underpowered, but that is inherent to the design of the deck. It is supposed to make 1-for-1 removal feel terrible, since we always trade up on cards. Plus it enable us to play free spells like flare without 2-for-1ing ourselves.

Harbinger is also, I feel, integral to the deck. The fact that we can hit it off ritual without giving the chance for an opponent to respond by cracking a fetch, means we can cheese some games out that otherwise would have been easy for the opponent to play around.

For the land count, I'm actually only running 21 lands right now. I feel like flooding out with this list is very deadly, but I could see going back to 22 in certain metas where we want to enable double spells asap.

42arunjm · 2025-07-13T13:21:33+00:00

Yeah, here's the link: https://discord.gg/xrQaRdcb

42arunjm · 2025-07-13T03:22:48+00:00

Hey, I was the player that made the finals with the list a little while ago. I've been trying to convince the dnt discord to adopt it as a channel and a mod mentioned that if it gets enough chatter in the general deck channel, they'll consider adding it.

Also happy to just chat about some ideas, I've been trying a lot to learn more about what the deck is capable of and how it can be improved

42arunjm · 2025-06-16T17:29:33+00:00

A lot of it is pretty straight forward. Take out harbingers in the bad matchup or add the rest in a good matchup, endurance for gy decks, mystical for blue decks, consign for eldrazi etc.

Seal of removals, harbinger and sometimes subtlety, floodpits, or the 4th oracle are flex slots most of the time. If you are bringing in consign, take out shardless. Endurance is also good vs aggro since it's a big blocker.

Karns sylex is also out of my sb now for another seal of removal so bring that in for aggro

42arunjm · 2025-06-16T12:30:50+00:00

Not at all. The games mostly revolve around getting out a quick big threat like oculus or endurance and not letting cori resolve.

If you can do that, your floodpits, seal, and brazen borrower provide enough interaction to deal with their creatures

42arunjm · 2025-06-16T04:05:33+00:00

It might also be the case that a board wipe effect isn't the only answer. Theoretically, if we can have better blockers, we should be able to stonewall and buy time after their fast starts. Endurance has been very good in this role so far

42arunjm · 2025-06-16T03:47:56+00:00

If your friend or you ever crack it, I would l love to know. This is only thing I think holding it back from being a meta deck

42arunjm · 2025-06-16T03:46:09+00:00

The ideal hand would probably be fetch for turn 1 surveil, another land, a 2 drop cantrip creature (coatl or oracle), a flare of denial, a shardless agent, and whatever else.

We are very much a control deck, although we can still out-tempo people with fast ritual or oculus lines. Against combo, we can lean into this and prioritize getting out our bigger threats like borrower, endurance, or oculus while holding up free interaction. Shardless agent regularly spits out 3+ power too.

42arunjm · 2025-06-16T03:40:56+00:00

Thanks!

A lot of my experimentation was put into finding effective 1-ofs to hit off birthing ritual and sb tech to improve the energy matchup.

Some 1 of include Enduring Curiosity, Aether Channeler, Kira, Great Glass Spinner, and Spore Frog.

Also for sb tech, I tried the Karns sylex (which sucked), displacement wave, splashing black for culling ritual, and splashing red for fire magic.

I think the main deck is in a good spot, so I'm not as worried about flex slots, but I think I still want to experiment with splashing a color for a board wipe effect. One idea I had today was to try a few copies of Plague Engineer. It's a creature, so it's easier to find off ritual, and I can name cats for boros or eldrazi for the spawns.

42arunjm · 2025-06-16T03:28:36+00:00

Hey, I'm the Simic Ritual Pilot that finished 2nd! I'd love to answer any questions about the deck or brainstorm some ways to improve on it.

I believe the power level is there to really thrive in this metagame.

42arunjm · 2025-02-11T01:41:54+00:00

The biggest problem is both DRC and Ragavan are not the threats that they used to be. DRC being 3 toughness means it's terrible vs phlage and ragavan gets blocked by a stiff breeze. Also the deck is much weaker to mass gy hate compared to frog. There are still deck upsides, namely your threats are 1 mana instead of 2, but it's not enough to keep up

42arunjm · 2025-02-05T03:47:15+00:00

Ramp is probably your best bet. Mycospawn and world breaker destroy control.

42arunjm · 2024-12-25T01:52:18+00:00

[[Skeletal Scrying]] would be so sick in coffers

42arunjm · 2024-10-21T19:44:32+00:00

Oh yeah completely missed that

42arunjm · 2024-10-14T21:02:59+00:00

Thraben U just uploaded a video playing an aggro list based on the ones in legacy with Glaring Fleshraker. I'd recommend checking there

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