With the recent bannings of some exceptionally powerful control cards, there is now going to be a massive shakeup of the local environments before rotation. After rotation, I'm sure people will wonder what it will take to deal with Card X or Y. Already, there are grumbles about Rejection/Olcadan's Mentoring avoiding the ban hammer. Never fear, a plethora of answers abound to whatever ails you in the upcoming rotation, even with Addes gone. Sometimes, though, card -for-card answers aren't the best way to look at the situation. The big picture helps your understanding on a more general level, which in turn fuels development into specific ideas, answers, and deck theory. The general concepts of control are nebulous at best, ill-defined and difficult to put into practice for a novice and sometimes even a talented, experienced player. I thought I'd take the time to look at this a bit more closely, and see what basic parameters for control I could come up with.

Part 1: Definition and Basic Concepts

What is control? Why is it important? The idea of defensive play in the history of games was first applied in Backgammon, where anticipation of countermoves and hits, traps and stand-offs is critical to success. More significantly, Chess was the first game to introduce the concept of Proactive Control, that being a move that not only advances your pieces into a better position of attack but also protects another piece or closes an opening for one of your opponent's men to exploit. Richard Garfield designed Magic: The Gathering with Chess in mind, adding different layers of strategy; a multitude of ideas first established in MTG now apply to every collectible card game that has followed since.

Control, in terms of the CCG, is defined as "an ability that limits a resource of the opponent". That is the broadest, most widely applicable definition that I know. This was the explicit statement of Brian Weissman, the originator of the infamous Magic deck that was so absurdly powerful it was known simply as "The Deck". Mr. Weissman's methodology and significance to the way that Magic players thought about the game is not to be underestimated; he postulated numerous theories that still echo throughout CCGs and are central to competitive play. The Deck exploited card advantage, direct and indirect resource denial, resource acceleration, and ver few concentrated kill conditions with extreme amounts of protection in order to achieve victory and often flat-out demolish the opponent. Does this sound vaguely familiar, my UFS brethren? It should.

UFS has had, in it's short history, massive periods of control decks that were full of nasty denial abilities. There are far shorter true aggressive stretches amongst the mix, the peak of which so far has been shortly after the release of Blades Of Fury/The Dark Path. So many headaches! I'm sure I don't have to list them all, and as a control player it was my personal nightmare. It did have the side effect of sharpening my focus, really seeing what options were available to me and how best to avoid the painful first-turn Rolling Storn/Bird Of Prey and other nonsense, so I guess I can't be too angry. Some things I've learned since then have really stuck with me, and to this day I have a hard time playing with a deck that has no limiting factor - Fireball Kohls, for example. I'm just a control player at heart and always have been, back with Big Blue in MTG through my S.A.S. Athena build. So with our loose definition in mind, let's organize the different elements of control and go into each with a bit more detail; perhaps the next time you feel flustered on how to combat something particularly irritating, this will help you out a little. I will give examples for each concept but I'm not listing everything, so it's up to you to find what exists out there - but hey, that's part of the fun! Onwards...

Negation is the simplest, easiest, and most obvious form of control. Why was Addes banned? It was really, really good at saying NO to your opponent's responses with a very minimal cost (sometimes none at all). Yoga Mastery caused much grief for the same reason - keep calling those enhances, and I'll keep adding cards to my card pool and laughing. Naturally you got to play smart and not kill your ability to block in that example, but you see my point - two easily overpowered cards with a negligible cost for such a big effect exemplify the raw power of negation. Even though negation is simple, the skill factor comes in deciding the most appropriate time to use it. Should I use my Chester's Backing to negate that Adoration now, or is he/she baiting me for getting to use the Deceptive Look later? What is my opponent trying to do by forcing me to use my Red Lotus Of Sun? Elementary decisions such as that are the cornerstone of making control work correctly - it's harder than you think, especially when it's a one-shot negation effect like Kung-Fu Training.

This one is a little trickier. There are different kinds of restriction; the first is when a card or effect specifically prevents you from doing something before it actually occurs. Happy Holidays is the poster child for this one. "I'm real sorry to do this, but I really don't dig this whole attack thing for a while." A strong recent example is The Lesser Of Many Evils, which is so good that it single-handidly rescued an obsolete character (Talim) to elite status overnight. My personal favorite is Bringing The Master To His Knees, sure to be a staple sideboard/maindeck option for the next year. No Absurd Strength responses, no Pieces of Eight negation. See the difference? As a counter-example, Mortal Strike is a good restriction-based method of dealing with said Talim decks. The second kind of restriction is when an effect results in limiting or denying a specific card or a part of the game. You Will Not Escape, anyone? The first Donovan's response is another one. Arrogance, of late, is the number one card on my hate list for this very reason. Perhaps the greatest static restriction this game will ever see was Emptiness, a vicious card that made children weep and killed hundreds (well okay, maybe not THAT bad).

Now that that damn Arrogance is in play, what do I do about it? Blow it up, baby! Family Heirloom to the rescue. Olcadan's Mentoring is in EVERY competitive deck, with good reason - selective destruction is key to dealing with otherwise insurmountable problems (or foundations, as it were). Lost Memories was a hallmark of the halcyon Void, Death, and Evil decks. The newer attacks like Charlie's Fierce Punch, Tsuji Hayate, Shadow Blade, Thunderbolt and even Ira Spinta - though not technically destroying - are great examples. Night Terror likes to eat foundations, too, both yours and your opponent. And hey, when things get really bad, there's always Armaged...I mean Infiltrating, right?

If you can't blow it up, 90% of the time locking it down somehow is just as effective. Experienced Combatant is a beastly way to go about this, as well all now by now. I expect Chinese Boxing to be just as useful in the days ahead, if not more so. Part of what has made Chain Throw the best attack ever printed is it's ability to completely nullify three foundations at no cost whatsoever. From Ring Veteran to Trade Your Passion to today, commit effects form an integral part of the game. If you can manage to do it on your opponent's turn, it's that much better - I can't tell you how many turns end due to Manifest Destiny/Megalomania tapping down everything in sight off of a block or something worse like The Anti-K'.

The Anti-K' features again here, and probably in the metagame for some time to come. Along with Forethought and Bood Runs True, the other two current egregious offenders, they clearly illustrate the value of modifying control checks to zero or in the negatives. Akuma likes to do this too, so I hear. Because of the unique progressive difficulty system, there is no incentive to play lower difficulty cards first, and one of the functions of good CC Hax is to throw a serious wrench into those plans. Turns have to be plotted out with more planning and...wait for it...forethought...while you are trying to bait out hacks. They work as indirect commit effects as well, since your opponent will have to expend more foundations to make the check if they want to keep it, thereby limiting their options for the remainder of their turn - or ending their turn immediately due to failing. This is happening with more and more frequency these days, so be careful!

With Broken Leg and Bleeding Internally gone for good, people might actually have to do some legwork to reduce damage if they can't run Rejection. No big deal - there's plenty of reduction available and always has been. It's another seemingly basic concept - you can't win the game without some form of survival. I guess you could say blocking itself is the purest form of damage reduction, heh. On top of that, cards like Battle Disc System have always been in vogue for their ability to stave off large amounts of damage. Morrigan eats attacks for breakfast, lunch, AND dinner. One of the hottest promos as of this month is going to be Strife's Patronage, as it mocks speed increases hardcore. Effects that return status to printed would count as redux, not negation or restriction.

Momentum plays such a large role in UFS games that effects that reduce or greatly hamper momentum gain and those that discard momentum deserve their own subset. We all know about the evils of The Hammer, and I have seen at least one championship match come down to Elementalist preventing the opposing player from keeping their momentum. There are a metric ton of cards and characters right now that really hurt heavy momentum decks, but that is the tradeoff for being able to Multiple/Powerful an opponent into oblivion. A generic ability such as Leave At Dawn can have a devastating effect if timed properly - for a Feline Spike coming at your head, it would mean the difference of facing 8 more damage without it, no small number. For every card like Midnight Pleasure, there is a card like Ken's Shotokan waiting in the wings. Keep that in mind next time a Tsunami Sabre cleaves you in half.

Most methods of controlling your opponent's hand are discard, but not all. N-Type Human and The Sword That Protects are good examples of easy ways to mess with your opponent's hand, without actually discarding anything. Red Gi, until it was made Unique, was insane in Legacy with more than one copy out. I vividly remember one match where I had 4 on the board and my opponent had 3! Yikes. Hand control is important because it often allows you to see what your opponent has in store, or eliminate all their options very efficiently and force through attacks, or in some cases like the Ways Of Punishment + reversals allowing you to completely decimate their hand on their turn and leave to free to do as you please on your next turn and beyond. Discard has always been a staple since the early Void days and now thanks to Jivatma's support and Saikyo-Ryu it is back in a big way. With a lot of speed pumps leaving the format in Block 3, it's probably going to be the most common way to push stuff through.

Messing with your card pool or (more likely) your opponent's usually operates as a form of control. Cards like Yoga Adept and Cursed Blood embody this, and are not classified as destruction, as the resource you are trying to deny isn't in your staging area yet. Make A Difference is an elite example of how clearing the card pool of certain card types (in this case, attacks) is just as effective as outright cancellation effects. The flipside, adding cards to the card pool, also appears as a small subset of the overall card mix in characters like Promo/Starter Yoshitora and his support, as well as the very underrated/underused Won't Settle For Second Best. These effects are terrific in altering your opponent's progressive difficulty just enough that it dramatically affects their turn. Jon Herr, one of the best players in the world, used this application to great effect with his Yoshitora deck that was Top 8 at Worlds this year.

Mill decks and mill cards are a type of control. If you follow the definition explicity, what better way to limit your opponent's resources than by erasing their deck from existence? The archetype has been around from early Order decks exploiting the potential of Order And Law past Yun-Seong to Voldomar (OMG Voldo is driving cah!) up to today's Enlightenment Seong Mi-Na and Victor Re-Animated jank. Usually, exhaustion victory conditions have few if any alternate routes to victory, and therefore must runs tons of the above control concepts to reach a break-even point or get ahead of aggro and hybrid decks in order to survive. Omar Chavez's Nationals-winning Voldo deck is the best possible expression of this strategy; nearly every card in the deck is a control piece and all of them have synergy with the exhaustion strategy. Your entire deck doesn't have to be based around it, but the ability of something like Contemplation to fill your opponent's discard pile definitely works toward an overall theme of establishing control.

Having covered the direct paths to control, it should be noted that sometimes there are indirect measures that don't strictly follow from the definition but achieve the same goals. Recursion is one; it allows you the potential to re-use/abuse some key elements perpetually whch can devastate an opponent (ex. Military Rank with Addes Syndicate, both now thankfully gone). Lifegain is another; not quite as effective as just reducing the damage - with one glaring, now illegal exception - it can work almost exactly the same way provided the damage your take isn't lethal. Battle Prowess from KOF2006 is the perfect illustration of effective but not overpowered vitality replenishment. "Bounce" effects like Great Gerdenheim's enhance basically work the same way as destruction but are not quite as permanent, since your opponent can replay those cards the following turn. All of these abilities are pseudo-control but not quite as direct, and there are many individual cards with narrow uses that fall into this particular branch of control, so keep you eye out.

That's pretty much all that I wanted to cover in this installment, and I intend to cover utilizing control and methodology in the next part. Until then, have fun and enjoy limiting your opponent's resources as much as possible; I know I always have! - Vik