I think of skill as one thing: making the best decision available at every decision point. It’s easy to say, hard to do, and harder still because not every deck has the same decision tree. Some give you a real choice every game action, and some only give you a few a turn. To compound, you're choosing your opponent's count at the same time you're choosing yours.

Talion's piece is about the players who want as many decisions as they can get, and how they build for it. Moe's is the other side: how to leave a control deck with almost none. Same matchup, opposite jobs.

Let's get into it.

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The relationship between skilled players, weird control decks, and your tournament results.

By Talion

This deck just won 2nd in an MTGO Pioneer challenge. This alone isn’t really strange - weirdo decks luck into top finishes all the time. But if you click on the profile of user VFS, the pilot of the deck, you’ll notice they seem to keep consistently topping challenges with these weirdo control decks, playing cards that nobody else is playing; Out of Air, Yorion with no real payoffs, Memory Deluge and Plunder the Trollshaws over the (usually) far more powerful and flexible Stock Up and Consult the Star Charts, the conspicuous absence of The Wandering Emperor, and his signature move - jamming 3 or sometimes even 4 Spell Pierces into a control shell.

I am not going to sit here and try to evaluate these specific card choices. VFS is undoubtedly a better player and deckbuilder than me. I also have no desire to discuss “brewer’s advantage”. It’s a thing, but I think it contributes far less to results at a high level than people think it does - very good players simply don’t get blindsided like that. What I can talk to you about is why their decks are overall filled with seemingly baffling decisions.

Memory Deluge. Spell Pierce. Yorion. What do these cards have in common? 

You see, the brewer isn’t just adding random cards they like for the love of the game - they are building decks in a very specific, targeted way. Including more efficient, less powerful cards leads to an above-average number of decision points in a game. Spell Pierce is a much more flexible card than Negate, for example, despite having undeniably worse text. If you play very well and very tightly, it makes it much easier to find windows to cast a Trollshaws or stall the game to the point that Deluge outstrips Consult.

Simply put, VFS lists are built to maximise agency. Almost every turn with a VFS control deck will have at least one meaningful choice that impacts the outcome of the game. This is in contrast to many other decks, which will present you with “choices” that really aren’t choices at all when you understand your fundamentals well enough. A situation with a delineated “correct play” isn’t a decision point, it’s just a test of your raw mechanics.

This is a player who has correctly identified that they are likely going to be more skilled than their opponent, and they deckbuild in a way that allows them to press that advantage - by giving themselves as many of these meaningful choices as possible, they ensure that they have every opportunity to outskill their opponent, rather than playing a more stock list with overall more powerful cards but less agency.

Indeed, if you examine control decks built by a variety of pros, you’ll notice this same trend developing.

Wafo-Tapa is famous for chaining card selection, tutors and draw spells to ensure he always has access to the cards he needs. He has gone as far as registering a playset of Quick Study as his instant-speed draw spell of choice, understanding that what he needs above all else are options to allow him to win games against most opponents - the ways he puts cards in his hand actually aren’t that important, as long as you have plenty of them. Gabriel Nassif builds similarly - his signature move being a slew of techy one-ofs, “options” of a different sort.

So what if you aren’t going to reliably be more skilled than your opponent? Where does that leave you? After all, most of the people reading this probably aren’t Hall of Famers.

Well, it follows that if good players do well on decks with more agency, then closer to average players will do better with a little less. And the data does seem to support this - the average control player will not do well with one of VFS’s lists (evidenced by the lack of other top finishes using his lists), but will happily drink tears all day playing stock UW control. Generally more average players are inclined toward midrange, aggro, or linear combo - correctly, I would argue. 

This isn’t any attempt to say that those decks are bad, or that people who play them at a high level are any less skilled - Hall of Famer Reid Duke’s soul famously belongs to Jund, and we’ve all seen what Frank Karsten can do with a couple of burn spells and an overtuned 1-drop. All pro players are highly skilled at their chosen archetypes, but the way they attain such consistent performance is through the recognition and abuse of those key decision points where they can skill-gap their opponents through deckbuilding, matchup knowledge, or sheer intellectual superiority. For them, perfect gameplay fundamentals are a baseline to build from, rather than a goal to be reached.

For the rest of us, deck selection at a competitive level should largely be a question of finding a deck which allows you enough agency and skill expression to reliably beat players worse than you, but crucially not enough that you get skill-gapped by players better than you - modesty and hubris are both equally damaging to a correct self-evaluation, and you don’t want to get it wrong and bring a deck that leaves you either hopelessly out-skilled or not playing to your full potential.

For most of us, competitive deck selection should be more of a soul-search. If you honestly expect to be one of the best players in the room, a deck that consistently creates longer games or a higher density of meaningful choices for you and your opponent gives you more opportunities to express that skill. If you don’t, a linear deck aiming to play shorter games is likely to pick you up more wins, even against players more skilled than you - the less choices they make, the less opportunity they have to make the ones that will eventually lead to you losing.

Beware both modesty and hubris - neither will lead you to victory, and knowing your own capabilities will prove far more useful to you in deck selection than knowing which decks have won the most MTGO challenges in the past month. 

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Officially licensed with the Frazetta Art Museum, each set is built around a single painting from Frazetta's catalog, engraved on dice. Kickstarter backers get first access. Follow the campaign to be notified when it launches.

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Control decks are inevitable. Your job is to make them run out of turns before they run out of answers.

By eMOEtional

Control decks like Pack Ezreal and Mel are some of the most frustrating games in Riftbound. There’s few things that feel worse than feeling so close to beating these control decks, just to get your entire board wiped, leaving you with no units, no cards in hand and you look at the opponent and your opponent is sitting on 10 cards and 12 runes. This article’s goal is to help you learn the fundamentals of applying pressure in order to beat these control decks while not overextending your units and losing everything to a single turn of Thousand-Tailed Watcher + Bellows Breath.

Aggression is the easiest part to practice and understand. You want to play enough units to smother your opponent in pressure and present more threats than they have answers to. The hard part is balancing your pressure and units you play while not overextending your board and playing right into the opponent’s board wipes. So what’s the best way to play enough units to apply pressure, but not play too many units to where you’re overextending and losing to a single board wipe? There are a couple main ways decks approach this question, but the main ways are to either draw enough units to apply pressure but not run out of resources, or to play units that are hard to kill and require more resources from the opponent so they can’t kill everything.

This approach is done by decks that can draw a lot of cards so they don't run out of units easily, or they play cards that put multiple units into play so you’re getting tons of pressure while only spending 1 card. Rek’Sai is a great example of this approach. Thanks to Rek’Sai’s legend ability, she’s able to swarm out more units than decks can remove: as soon as she conquers,, she reveals the top 2 cards of the deck and can play 1 of them, meaning she gets to play more units and apply more pressure without actually using cards from hand. Viktor is another legend that uses this approach thanks to his legend ability of making a 1 might unit for 1 energy, he can always play a unit every turn without using a card from hand. Against control decks that are slower, you don’t necessarily need the largest units while conquering, you just need to conquer. The yellow domain (Order) has several cards that help with this approach to slower matchups. Cards like Spectral Matron, Glasc Mixologist, and Vanguard Captain are examples of cards that put multiple units in play while using only 1 card out of your hand letting you apply more pressure and presenting multiple threats while only using 1 resource from your hand.

Not every deck or domain has access to loads of draw or cards that play multiple units. For these decks the best gameplan is to play high quality units and units with large stats that beat specific breakpoints against the opponent. A great example is a Noxus Hopeful. Noxus Hopeful is a 4 might unit that oftentimes only costs 2 energy. Four might is a great breakpoint for a unit in the early game since most removal spells from control decks typically only deal 3 damage, so in order for them to remove a 4 might unit, they have to use multiple cards and usually more energy than what you spent on the unit itself. Larger units that aren’t as easy to remove but can get value immediately are great cards into control decks since they get you value immediately and then require the opponent to use multiple cards to answer it. Accelerate is an example of a high quality keyword against control decks since it allows you to apply pressure scoring instantly. If the opponent uses their energy and cards to remove the units you have in play, they likely won’t have enough resources to then answer an accelerating unit that’s threatening an instant score. This starts a cycle where now the opponent has to use resources and cards to answer the new unit to stop it from holding, but by doing so means they aren’t removing the units in your base or leaves them unable to remove new accelerate units on your next turn. This is why cards like Sprite Fountain are amazing into slower decks. Sprite Fountain is a cheap gear that threatens 2 points by having accelerate units the turn you play Sprite Fountain and the following turn. If the opponent commits resources to prevent both of these points, then the units you played with your energy from turn 2 onward are more likely to score and apply more pressure.

Now that you know the main ways different decks apply pressure while not overextending, the last thing to learn is you need to apply pressure early. If the game goes long enough, the slow control deck will win. They are the inevitable deck in most matchups so you don’t have the option to take turns off and play for the late game. Starting as early as turn 1, start mapping out how you’re going to score as many points as possible and apply as much pressure as possible with your units and cards. In other TCGs, decks can try to scale your board until they set up for a very big attack or lethal turn, but due to Riftbound limiting how many points you can normally score in a turn, any turn you aren’t scoring points are turns you can’t get back. 

So, to recap what we learned;

I hope this article helps you deal with the most annoying archetypes in Riftbound and leads to easier wins at your next event!

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