Have you ever felt like your opponent was having too much fun, casting spells and drawing cards? Ever wanted to reduce people to tears until they quit? Now you can, with my new patented "I Hate Fun" decklist! Annoy your friends! Annoy your enemies! Annoy everybody!
Our primary win condition is our opponent conceding out of frustration, but I have included a real win condition as well in case that doesn't pan out.
Decklist:
Fun is a Zero Sum Game 
(Control)ThreatsWhat's a threat? Do people play those?
Removal1x
Compelling Deterrence1x
Reave Soul4x
Complete Disregard2x
LanguishCounterspells3x
Horribly Awry2x
Scatter to the Winds3x
Broken Concentration3x
Spell Shrivel4x
Bone to Ash2x
Confirm SuspicionsEverything Else2x
Brain in a Jar3x
Pore Over the Pages3x
Rise from the TidesLands (27)7x
Island6x
Swamp4x
Evolving Wilds4x
Submerged Boneyard2x
Sunken Hollow2x
Drowned Catacomb2x
Westvale Abbey/
Ormendahl, Profane PrinceMana SourcesEnough
and
to cast our spells on curve. Westvale Abbey is a win condition by itself, though a very slow one. It gives inevitability, though, so our opponents have to act first. It's the only land in our colors that gives recurring value, and the best answer to an opponent's Westvale Abbey. We can flip it at instant speed during the combat step to blow people out on an empty board - see strategy. Also, we're running a full 27 lands here - the main bottleneck on our gameplay is mana available in a single turn. We can fairly easily get to the point where we're holding a hand of 7 relevant cards - every time we do that and don't have a land, that's a wasted opportunity. We can reasonably use 20+ mana in a turn if our opponent tries to dump their hand, so it's not like that 15th land is bad.
StrategyWe don't have life gain, and there's minimal removal. What we do have are counterspells. The goal is to counter literally everything that could threaten us. Never tap mana on our own turn except for
Brain in a Jar - ideally with one counterspell still up - or
Pore Over the Pages when you can untap lands to still hold up counters. Now, most of this deck is fairly obvious - the interesting card is the aforementioned
Brain in a Jar. When your entire deck is instants and sorceries, this card is amazing. It's not
Aether Vial - but it's very close. This card lets you hold up hard counterspells for 1 mana, which means that people can't overwhelm you in a flurry of spells - you can counter four times in a turn if you need to. It also gives you the breathing room to crack clues and activate Abbey. And if the game's going long, you can use it to scry with spare mana. This card gives you access to instant speed
Languish.
The removal is primarily for whatever they manage to cast before our third turn. Basically everything in that category is three power or less, and won't kill us before we get to six lands, or they decline to cast a threat one turn. It also hits all the manlands of the format, which can be troublesome for us. Later on, once we stockpile some removal, we can use them as "creature counterspells" for things without ETB triggers.
Languish is almost exclusively to make the aggro match-up better; everywhere else it's probably a 1-for-1 at best. If you want to get more value from it, set a
Brain in a Jar on three counters (alongside tapping low to draw cards if you have clues), then let them resolve a threat without even bothering to pause to see what you want to do about it. A lot of people will assume you've "run out of counterspells" and try to dump their hand and you can grab a 2 or 3-for-1. Poor fools, we never run out of counterspells. All we have are counterspells. The one
Compelling Deterrence gives us an out to any single problematic permanent that entered the battlefield when we were low on counter-magic, and lets us counter it again on the way down. This is card disadvantage, though, so we don't want very much of it. Unless we've cast
Rise from the Tides...
Rise from the Tides is an interesting choice of win conditions. It's sorcery speed, expensive, and our opponents can interact with it. Right? Wrong. We're playing two
Brain in a Jars. Just tick one of those little guys up to five and hold him there. Then, whenever you feel like winning with 10+ spells in your graveyard, cast Rise in their endstep for 1 mana and untap into lethal. Hello
Secure the Wastes, didn't even see you there! This also lets you Rise into
Westvale Abbey at instant speed for seven mana, which should blow out any combat (and game) that you're in. Lastly, using this as a win condition gives us an out to our biggest weakness,
Gaea's Revenge. Just block him with three Zombies and kill him in combat. If they don't want to attack, flip Ormendahl and race them. Easy game. The fact that this can "counter" three or four creature spells - the most common threat against us - means we can tap low for it and still feel safe only holding up one or two counterspells for Walkers, because a resolved creature doesn't matter any more.
Match-upsThe fewer relevant cards the opponent has, the better the match-up. We are playing precisely 0 creatures, 0 enchantments, and 0 planeswalkers - so most opponents will have a number of dead spells against us. Our cards aim to 1-for-1 with cards in our opponent's hand as reliably as possible - and then let the few extra cards off
Pore Over the Pages or
Confirm Suspicions or
Bone to Ash pull us ahead, alongside the massive value of a resolved
Rise from the Tides. The more removal our opponents bring, the worse a day they will have. We also love to see enchantments that don't do anything without creatures -
Stensia Masquerade,
Retreat to Valakut,
Always Watching, etc. Let them resolve, counter all the creatures. Whether or not card draw spells are worth countering depends on the match-up, and what the odds are that it draws them into more than one relevant threat.
You might think we'd have trouble against other control decks like mill where our own removal and creature-counters are dead - but as long as you can keep them off an early
Sphinx's Tutelage, they have just as many dead cards as you. And thanks to
Brain in a Jar, your counterspells can be cheaper in the final counter-war.
ImprovementsMost of the improvements are probably in the removal suite - it's even possible
isn't the right color to splash.
Gets us two (arguably better) wraths and similar unconditional removal. I think
Complete Disregard is better than
Gideon's Reproach because we can cast it on endstep and it hits baby walkers, but maybe there's some other removal spell I haven't considered.
Gives four
Fiery Impulse, but little else of relevance.
gets us
Thought-Knot Seer, the most justifiable removal magnet, along with
Spatial Contortion (and would let us play more threats in our land base). I could be convinced by any of them, but black seemed like the most reasonable starting place. I've also dropped one counterspell which may or may not be right - but if we're playing for a 20-land game,
Spell Shrivel gets dead relatively quickly. All the rest are hard counters.
And that's a wrap...Go out and ruin some poor soul's day, while sucking an hour out of their life that they'll never get back!
Login
Register
Card Search
NGAWiki
Search
