Sometimes, it’s really hard to pick up a friend’s deck and take it for a spin. You’re not familiar with the control values, for instance, and your friend is one of those guys that will play eight 2’s. You’ll find yourself failing control checks pretty often, just because you’re not familiar with the possibility of what you can flip.

1. Good players with good decks (mostly) never fail control checks.

The ideal game is one where you never fail a control check. You play every card you know you can play, and pass your turn, with most of your foundations ready. The obvious advantage to this is that it is very difficult to attack an opponent that is checking flawlessly and consistently keeping his staging area ready. This is a concept Mill decks have been using for quite some time now, as those decks run very few attacks if any at all. They can expect a five every time.

It takes a bit of skill to apply this concept to non-Mill decks, but control decks can apply this concept more easily than aggro decks. The skilled player knows the numbers of his deck and knows what he can expect to flip with a fairly certain amount of accuracy.

Let me use an example:

It’s eight turns into a game, both staging areas are fairly developed, and your discard pile is about twice as large as your deck. A look at your discard pile indicates that you have six attacks in it, and you have four in hand, which is every attack in your deck. For the sake of argument, let’s say all your non-attack cards check for five. You can expect that last section of your deck to check nothing but fives until it runs out of cards. You can also predict the likelihood of you drawing into a certain card, but that’s for another section. The point is, knowing what is left in your deck is very powerful, and can be used to gain a great advantage. The only way you will fail a control check in this scenario is because you are not paying attention and you play too many cards or your opponent hacks you.

Let’s say it’s the beginning of the game, however, and your hand has an attack that checks for 1. Let’s say you run exactly two attacks that check for 1, the rest all check for 3. That opening hand should tell you that you are now 50% less likely to flip a 1 first turn. You can still flip it, mind you the possibility should be factored it, but you know that the odds are so low that you can afford to play a string of cards at 3 difficulty and expect them all to pass.

You want to know what’s in your deck at all times. Knowing this information will help you win. One of my personal theories as to why aggro is so marginalized in UFS is because the very nature of UFS is against it. A typical aggro deck needs to make several high-difficulty control checks in succession fairly early on in the game, whereas control decks only need to make a couple later on in the game. That’s why Talim excels, however, she only needs to make one or two checks because she relies on her multiples, and they don’t add to her progressive difficulty. Future aggro decks will need ways to get around progressive difficulty, or they will need more inexpensive attacks that deal acceptable amounts of damage, or else they will not exist. A good friend of mine once told me, “I don’t know if you noticed, but if you’re committing foundations on your turn, you’re losing.”

Control is the way

You may have noticed that aggro is fairly dead outside of Talim. This fact led to the recent outbreak of bannings. My old basketball coach used to say, “Offense wins games, defense wins championships.” Pretty wise, I would say.

2. If you are not impeding your opponent in some way or another, he has an equal chance to win as you do.

The flip side to this, of course is that your opponent has a greater chance to win if he’s impeding you and you are not impeding him. There’s something romantic and fun about your first memories as a UFS player, when you were just stringing out attacks and playing Ground Fighter just because it checked for 6 and winning against other new players in glorious fashion. Most of us have been there in the past, where the only interaction between decks was blocking. These days, if you list that as your only interaction, you’re losing.

You want to be doing something to your opponent, whether it’s mitigating damage or negating enhances.

The more you impede your opponent’s chances of winning, the less chance you have of losing to him.

This may seem fairly obvious, but it’s easy to take this concept to the extreme. For example, you build a solid rock of control but your win conditions are average at best, which means that you can’t win against a decent opponent. Until Defender was released, this was the story of just about every Order deck that didn’t branch out into other symbols, so you may be quite familiar with the experience. The best way to avoid this is to build your deck around a kill condition first, and then add the requisite control pieces, but this leads to another topic, which is really what I was building up to all along.

The end goal of every control deck is to reach a point in the game where your opponent can do nothing to stop you from winning. Anything less, and you’ll end up getting a bunch of draws and missing your top 8’s. It can be as simple as stripping an opponent’s hand with Ways of Punishment and playing triple Absurd Strength while you have more enhance negation than enhances your opponent can use, or committing their staging area then throwing fatal attacks that are too fast to block. To use a particular example:

In block 3, as it stands, an Order Defender loop deck can simply take a glance at his opponent’s staging area and decide whether or not he has won the game. Experienced Combatant, Program Malfunction and Chinese Boxing can commit any foundations that are a problem, and gone are the methods of stopping Defender loops from the hand, like Pull of the Tides and Broken Leg. The win here is inevitable.

One of the best ways to achieve inevitability is with “unsolvable” attacks. The term is applied in Magic to deal with creatures that are hard to kill. In UFS, an unsolvable attack would be one that does what it’s designed to do, and your opponent can’t really stop it, or it would be very difficult for him to do so. Widow Maker would be one such card, as is Mega Spike and Chain Throw. Notice that these are all throws, and that the developers have caught on and stopped printing God-Tier throws, except for Ira-Spinta. Another set of non-throw unsolvable attacks would be Burning Knuckle, Feline Spike, Rolling Storm, and Senkyutai. These are the kinds of attacks you want to look for, as they do much more than come across the board for damage.

A kill card is nothing too hard to spot. Anyone can take a look at 125 Rapids of Rage and Yuri’s Super Upper and figure out which can deal more damage. Of course, cost is always an issue. Why play an 8 difficulty kill card when you can find a 6 diff? For the effect of course, which is pretty much the whole point of the last couple paragraphs.

Deck Spotlight: Promo Dan by Chris Kovaz

Chris Kovaz posted a top 8 with his control powerhouse at the SAS. The deck finished second in the Swiss rounds. Essentially, it’s “just” a pile of good cards.

Dan 1 by Chris Kovaz

4 Ichi no Tachi

3 Feline Spike

4 Olcadan’s Mentoring

4 Addes Syndicate

3 Lynette’s Shop

3 Seal of Cessation

3 Family Heirloom

3 Tag Along

2 Revitalize

4 Chester’s Backing

4 Blood Runs True

4 The Red Lotus of the Sun

4 Oral Dead

4 Roam the World

4 Military Rank

4 The Curse Broken

3 Fight or Flight

3 Cursed Blood

3 Vast Resources

3 Saikyo Ryu

2 Fortune and Glory

2 Lord of the Makai

2 Spiritual Center

2 Pieces of Eight

Sideboard

3 Destiny

3 Mortal Strike

2 Kung-Fu Training

I wanted to find a deck that illustrated the concepts I discussed today, and this deck does a great job of meeting that criteria. Not only does it reach that critical mass of inevitability, but it also every modern concept for advanced deck building I can think of. EVERY card in this deck creates some sort of an advantage over the opponent. Every card, the combination of which leads to locked-out, overwhelmed opponents.

The kill mechanism is handily provided by Feline Spike, an attack with more abilities than most character cards. I’m fairly certain that this is a peek at block 3 control decks that will have similar goals: lockout + Feline Spike kills.

Fortune and Glory goes a long way to achieving this lockout, as it then becomes impossible to defend against successive Feline Spikes.

Trial and error is often the best way to perfect a deck. It often takes me weeks of trial and error to create what I consider to be a playable deck. There’s no room for you to be “nice” to yourself, because your opponents will not be. You can’t sit back comfortably and say ‘I like my chances, just not against Order decks,’ and expect to dodge Order matchups all day. You have to be a tough judge, but you have to have a good reference point. If your friend is killing everyone with his Order Donovan you also have to be killing everyone, including your friend with whatever you build. If you don’t have a friend, use the internet, there are plenty of tournament reports to fill you in on how games are played. If you have a bad memory and tend to gloss over losses, keep track of them in a journal, noting exactly why you lost, and don’t you dare blame it all on bad luck. What I’ve done today is illustrate that good players and decks are not at the mercy of luck. They don’t flip their kill cards with no way of picking them back up. It would be lucky if you didn’t play these guys, but if you’re going to the big tourneys you may as well play like them and better. Good luck with those decks!

-ceejaybee