I am not a fan of control decks, majorly because they are slow, responsive and I am an impatient player. There are times, however, that the team demands someone to pilot the decks built. Last Wednesday, my pool mate Ace suggested that I should play the Grixis Control deck he just completed to assemble. While I had my doubts, I decided to just go for it.

I checked the decklist and saw that it won a huge MCQ event got my confidence on the deck archetype. Ace’s version, however, has a few faults. It was lacking one Enter the God Eternals due to card conflict with Dean’s (another poolmate) deck. That slot was replaced by a third copy of Ritual of Soot. I had to replace it again with a second copy of Cry of Carnarium for an earlier chance to cast it against aggro. I also made small changes in the sideboard.

Here below is the decklist that I played:

Maindeck
4 Blood Crypt
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Drowned Catacomb
3 Steam Vents
3 Sulfur Falls
3 Swamp
4 Watery Grave

4 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager

2 Angrath’s Rampage
2 Bedeck / Bedazzle
4 Bedevil
2 Cry of the Carnarium
4 Discovery / Dispersal
1 Enter the God-Eternals
2 Moment of Craving
2 Ritual of Soot
4 Thought Erasure
3 Disinformation Campaign

4 Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God
1 Ugin, the Ineffable

Sideboard
1 Cry of the Carnarium
3 Duress
3 Legion Warboss
2 Moment of Craving
1 Narset
2 Negate
2 Unmoored Ego
1 Vraska’s Contempt

Wednesday night was the Standard Showdown schedule for Nth Dimension and last night we had a whooping 20 players in attendance. That would mean a long night of five rounds of gameplay.

Here is the short recap of the matchups:

Round 1 vs Mono-White Aggro – Won 2-1
Round 2 vs Mono Blue Tempo – Won 2-1
Round 3 vs Grixis Superfriends – Won 2-0
Round 4 vs Jeskai Superfriends – Won 2-1
Round 5 vs Mardu Aggro – Drew 1-1-1

Almost all of the matchups were pretty close though having a resolved Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God in play is just unstoppable. The plus 1 ability proved to more than just card draw advantage as it slowly get rid of the opponents’ resources. I would suggest people to start boarding in Sorcerous Spyglass to stop its activation.

Overall, I am quite happy with the deck performance and it has gained its rank to be one of the current Tier 1 decks in the Standard format.

That is the wrap. Until the next blog post.