epser ctrl+slaughter games
Deck Help forum
Posted on March 16, 2014, 8:14 a.m. by Sagi007
Building an esper control deck. its generally made from the cards i have currently at hand(though missing 1 BW temple) and knowlage of what was/is running in others.
Since i copy/pasted one of my old manabases and forgot to remove all the red from it. it has turned into this: Esper can slaughter you to.
Generally questioning a couple of things:
Last Breath ive seen this card in practically all esper ctrl decks. does it only serve for the purpose of getting rid of Mutavault and aggro creatures or am i missing some other use of it?
only own 3 Sphinx's Revelation is a 4th realy needed? if so what should i remove for it and why?
Slycne says... #2
Last Breath kills a surprising number of creatures, even 3 power ones when they attack into a +1 Jace, Architect of Thought . It can also be used to burn a token for life when needed. It has however been on the decline as GR monsters decks have become a greater presence.
Sphinx's Revelation is the best card in the deck and we're in a format with lots of Thoughtseize and discard running around. If you can afford/trade for it, you want to be running all 4. You can likely cut the aforementioned Last Breath .
A couple other suggestions.
I would run the 27th land. Unless your on the Divination plan, you want to be hedging your bets towards making your first 4 land drops.
Your mana base is actually really shaky. You're trying to hit double blue, black and white by turn 3-4, and you're way under the comfortable levels of sources for each. Hitting a double color on Turn 3 90% of the time requires 19 sources. You're going to get colors screwed a lot.
To that end, I would pick one of the double colors to de-emphasizes and push the mana accordingly towards the others. Black is the most common since you can reasonably rely on say not needing a 2 of Hero's Downfall right exactly on T3.
Detention Sphere is much too necessary for answering planeswalkers and other problem permanents to not be a 4 of. It's your one catch-all.
Trim up on your win conditions. 6 is kind of pushing it, you don't need to find any of these cards all that early. Stabilize first and you'll eventually find a win-con.
Personally, I don't think you get enough out of the red splash. You're already loosing 2 sideboard slots to Steam Vents . Slaughter Games isn't actually that much of a hoser for the majority of decks in standard. The only decks you get to prey upon, opposing UWx control decks are already a strong match-up because of Thoughtseize . And Assemble the Legion was much better against Mono-Black when they didn't have Bile Blight to potentially steal a game out from under it. That's just not worth the less consistent 4 color mana base.
March 16, 2014 8:37 a.m.