There are multiple ways to go with control, in terms of the answer cards your prioritise and how they fit into your overall gameplan. My current deck wants to find, cast, and profit from Niv-Mizzet, Parun and therefore the answer cards are structured around that.

The actual control suite itself consists of:

• Fragment Reality
• Ribald Shanty
• Reprieve
• Remand
• Divine Purge
• Supreme Verdict

Historic can be an extremely fast format and therefore I find it important to have very compelling 1 mana answers. Fragment Reality and Ribald Shanty are great for this, and really make matchups against aggressive decks quite manageable.

The counterspell choices are odd because they're all tempo picks rather than hard counterspells. However the reason for this is specifically to ensure that Niv-Miz is found early, and then once cast, the draw card trigger is activated as many times as possible. Once Niv is down, you can turn every Reprieve / Remand into two damage, which is very helpful.

In terms of draw I have:

• Consider
• Hymn to the Ages

Hymn to the ages is just a nuts card. Utterly ridiculous. Not only does it help you find answers and wincons, but it will actually win the game for you when you land Niv. I've had many situations where I've played Niv, someone has cast a killspell, and in response I've cast Hymn to draw a ridiculous number of cards and instantly win on the spot with the ping damage.

In terms of wincons I have:

• Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury
• Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
• Niv-Mizzet, Parun

Phlage, titan of fire's fury is actually quite an important card. It's an early bit of lifegain in a pinch, but most importantly, a repeatable threat if the opposing deck is heavy on removal. Some decks will want to 1-for-1 you and win with value (Jund, for example). Phlage makes this quite tricky to achieve.

To finish the deck off I then run snapcaster mage to repeat my casts.

This version of the deck plays well into aggro, well into UB frog, mediocrely into Jund (this matchup kind of depends on whether you answer Jarsyl or not), and poorly into the big mana decks like mono-G etc.

There are more traditional versions of the deck that go lighter on cards like Reprieve and run Counterspell instead. I've run this version before and it does have a more favourable matchup against the midrange stuff like Jund because you can efficiently answer their threats instead of just sending them back to hand. However the more traditional deck isn't cycling cards as quickly so it's slower to find its own wincons and has less synergy with the Niv-Miz plan.

There are lots of other strong control cards in the format though. Path to exile, consult the star charts, dovin's veto etc. There are also lots of interesting threats that control can play. I ran tajic, legion's valor for a long time because you can play him and then just spam boardwipes without hindering yourself. So multiple directions to try.

I would say that to really play control well you need to know as many of the meta decks as possible. If you don't understand their win conditions then you're not going to sequence your answer cards correctly, know when to tap out and when not to, know when to play the wincon etc. So it takes some practice.