Grixis Control
When I saw Expansion / Explosion I knew I needed to make a control deck that took advantage of it. It reminds me a lot of Sphinx's Revelation back in Return to Ravnica block which saw the uprising of a truly powerful UW control deck. I'm building this like an old-school control deck that has very few ways to win but in return, has much more answers to my opponents' threats. Let's go through the cards.
Counter Magic
We have a variety of counter spells, mostly as I work out what exact mixture I want to end with. I have a feeling that Sinister Sabotage is going to end up being much better than Ionize but I want to try to see if the incremental damage makes Expansion / Explosion a viable win-con on its own.
Negate because I don't have good ways to deal with Artifacts or Enchantments once they hit the field
Essence Scatter because a T3 Goblin Electromancer means that one is all I need to counter whatever my opponenents do on their turn if I have a Negate and Essence Scatter in hand. We'll see through testing if this is viable.
Removal
This deck operates under two chief principles for winning the game; both of which are directly related to card advantage. The first is the embedded in the strategy around removal. At worst, I need to be matching my opponent one-for-one, card-for-card. My spot removal does this by killing one creature and my counterspells do a similar thing by countering one spell. How I get ahead with spot removal, is by using my mana more efficiently than them. This is accomplished by using kill spells like Lightning Strike on a 3 mana creature, or Cast Down on a 4 mana creature allowing me to chain more plays together at a time than my opponent and build tempo advantage.
Now, these are all forms of "virtual" advantage. I'm still using the same number of resources as my opponent and so not really getting ahead. To actually get ahead I have a few mass removal spells. Historically, WOTC is leery of printing too many cards that are intrinsically a two-for-one because those effects can warp the meta. Thus, this section is small.
This brings us nicely to the next and more obvious form of card advantage,
Card Draw
This is where we actually make up for responding one-for-one with our opponent and start to take the game. The Jump-Start on Chemister's Insight makes it kinda bonkers. Expansion / Explosion should almost always be cast as Explosion. It should be done EOT on turn 8 or 9 and it should essentially win you the game at that point. I've seen a lot of concern that it's too slow for the value it adds, and that might be fair. I need to do some extensive play-testing but my instinct is that this is gonna be good.
In the "Other" category, we have
Search for Azcanta
which I think speaks for itself and I'm testing out
Ral, Izzet Viceroy to see how well he performs, both as removal but also as card advantage engine. And, of course, his Emblem would basically allow you to win the game.
Goblin Electromancer helps let me chain together spells early on to catch up against aggro. A good tempo advantage.
Winning
It's almost antithetical to a true control deck to actually include a win-con in the deck but here was have Nightveil Predator. Flying and hexproof are the things we care about on this card. If something really weird happens, Ral, Izzet Viceroy's Emblem or a combination of Ionize damage and Expansion / Explosion damage may end the game, but that's not really the idea here.
I've seen a lot of people playing around with Mission Briefing but I'm not super high on it. Suggestions are appreciated as I work out exactly what I'm doing here.
