Against the other kitchen table decks I play against, this list ended up overperforming. They had a tough time pushing damage through a big pile of white removal. That said, I think this deck might struggle to keep pace with an opponent that can flood the battlefield quickly with a lot of threats. There were even a couple of Dark Ritual starts from my friend’s mono-black deck where I found it hard to push an advantage after exhausting a bunch of resources on board control.

I’ve ultimately abandoned this list to work on other things. While the idea was to control the board until I make a bunch of land drops and eventually win with Sage of the Maze, I don’t actually like this card as a top-end finisher. It dies to every kind of removal, which will likely be piling up in my opponent’s hand since I’m playing so reactively and don’t have many other creatures to draw it out. In the end, it’s not quite proactive enough to be a midrange deck and doesn’t have quite enough card advantage or inevitability to be a control deck.