Not happy with straight UW Control and finding Jeskai Control to be just a little too boring for my taste, I decided to splash in some black and brew up Esper Control for Modern instead!
Modern is rife with plenty of great black discard spells and spot removal such as Thoughtseize and Fatal Push respectively. That sounded like a pretty sweet package to me, so I was very curious when I noticed that most popular control decks opted for either a red splash (Jeskai) or simply no splash at all. I aim to fix this by taking a fairly standard UW control skeleton and putting in some black interaction.
Our gameplan is similar to most other control decks: sit back, gain card advantage, and counter stuff until we're ready to fire up Celestial Colonnade or stick a Geist of Saint Traft to clock our opponent. The primary difference for us is that we've taken out some of the sweepers (Supreme Verdict) and spot removal (Lightning Helix) typical of the other big control decks and slipped in some black disruption spells instead. The black splash also gives us access to Lingering Souls, an absolutely fantastic card that gives us chump blockers and, once the opponent is burnt out, another clock once it's time to start beating them down. We also get a very interesting tech card in the form of Esper Charm, which works in a similar vein to cards like Vendilion Clique in Jeskai and UW, that being instant speed hand disruption. In exchange for a 3/1 creature, we get either a +1 on cards or a parity trade for some disruptive enchantments like Eidolon of the Great Revel and Leyline of the Void. The damage lost is easily made up for with a Lingering Souls clock, thus making Charm an almost perfect fit in this deck.
Other than that, the basic control package is still here: seven counterspells including three Cryptic Command plus three Snapcaster Mage to reuse whatever we need. Seven cantrips spread out across Opt and Serum Visions let us keep our hand full of the spells we need, and the singleton
Search for azcanta
works to filter our deck and get us to our action cards faster.
The mana base is nothing too special: a good variety of fetches, shocks, basics and manlands. Alongside Celestial Colonnade is a copy of Shambling Vent as an expendable blocker and a source of lifegain since we don't have access to Lightning Helix. The mana base gravitates a bit more towards the UW side of things, mostly due to our choice in clock and sideboard options.
The sideboard is one of the most uncertain things I've put together so far, because there are so many things I want to put into this deck that I simply don't have room for. There are a few cards such as Dispel and Supreme Verdict that simply go in every control sideboard. As an Ad Nauseam player who lost a few too many games to BGx picking my hand apart, I put in a couple copies of Leyline of Sanctity out of habit for just about every white deck I build now. Collective Brutality is a card that I personally believe belongs in the main because Lingering Souls is designed to be discarded, but I'm not sure what to cut for it.
My maybeboard has a ton of cards that are just really good in my colors that I would like to play because I think they'd work really well, but totally get if they don't make the cut. Most of this would be for the sideboard, although I'd personally be really happy if I managed to slip in some Inquisition of Kozilek in addition to the three Thoughtseize main.
I'm legitimately interested in making this deck competitive on some level, so please give me whatever feedback you think is applicable. I'm very open to suggestions and if you think I overlooked something in brewing this up, please let me know what I missed and how I can fix it!
Thanks in advance,
GreatKitsune
