The Command Tech: The Enforcer Strategy - Control and Stax

Written by Christian Gil Portugalisa

        Season Two of the Play2Learn Commander League has already begun and the player turnout has been amazing. We are now seeing games of 3 pods that are firing at the same time. Varied strategies are being employed from Voltron decks to Combo decks. But looking at the rankings, most of the players in the leaderboard are those that are sporting combo finishers. So as the good old Professor from Tolarian Community College would say “Many Magic the Gathering Players ask the question, how do you beat combo or at the very least, slow them down?”

        Now this is a very good question to ask. Combo decks tend to sport specific combination of cards that once assembled, can win them the game right there and then. So how do we beat it? We can do that through a Control or Stax strategy.

What is a Control strategy?

        From MTG Wiki. A control deck is a term for a deck of cards that aims to control the opponent's cards and progression with, ideally, the end result where one has full control of everything that is done during the game. This is normally done using cards like the following.

  

        A deck with those cards is basically a permission deck. They are awesome in a 1 vs 1 setting since the permission player gets to decide what cards are played and what cards are not. However, this type of strategy is not very good in Commander since you have three opponents instead of one and you only have a finite amount of counter magic that you can use. Remember, in an ideal setting you only have seven cards at hand while your opponents have 21.

        You might ask, so we should not be playing these cards then? This really depends on your strategy. These are still good cards in Commander if you use them properly such as when you are playing a combination of cards to win the game. Your opponents won’t just sit around and do nothing. They will try to interact and stop you from winning. At this point, counter magic is your way of protecting your combo.

        A better way to approach the control strategy is using cards that affect everyone in the table. If you can find cards that only affect your opponentsm that's even better.

What is a Stax Strategy?

        Stax is a term that originated from a card know as Smokestack. Basically, it is a term used to describe a deck strategy that mostly relies on resource denial, taxing effects, disruption, and sacrifice enablers to potentially lock down opponents and make it difficult to cast spells, play creatures, attack, breath, sleep, and/or have any kind of reliable board state. The goal is to build your Rube Goldberg contraption of denial as fast and efficiently as possible thus allowing you to set up your win cons unopposed. Stax decks use an inefficient = efficient mentality when it comes to the game of Magic the Gathering. What this means is you're turning cards that normally would hinder everyone’s work and use it to your advantage.

 
 

        Static Orb and Winter Orb can control the use of lands. Null Rod can stop activated abilities of artifacts while Trinisphere places a tax on spell casting. These are great cards that can slow down the game and since these are artifacts, they can go in a lot of different color combination not just blue.

Here is the Universal Stax Package if you are interested in playing them:

        Smokestack, Tangle Wire, Static Orb, Winter Orb, Trinisphere, Lodestone Golem, Sphere of Resistance, The Tabernacle of Pendrell Vale, Torpor Orb, Strip Mine, Wasteland, Tectonic Edge, Dust Bowl and Rishidan Port.

The Strategy

We can sum up the stax strategy into 3 different parts:

        1. Sac: Creating mandatory loss of resources, threats and effects.

        2. Tap: By forcing resources and threats to either tap or not untap renders them close to useless to the player controlling them. It also restricts what that player can accomplish during their turn and yours.

        3. Tax: By making spells, attacks, basically anything cost more, you again are restricting what a player can do on their turn and yours. Combined with sac and tap effects, you are severely limiting what your opponents can accomplish. And then you can hear the sweet, sweet words "play a land... Done" *sign*

Other Control and Stax Strategies:

        There are other strategies that we can use aside from Sac, Tap and Tax.

  
 

        Some of these types of effects are one sided while others are universal. The one sided effects are usually more beneficial and easy to build around since they don't affect your board state. These should be greatly considered when brewing. The universal effects require a bit more tweaking to the deck so they become advantage rather than Disadvantage.

Discard

  
  

        Discard is another potent way of controlling cards in hand. Some can even give you valuable information on what your opponents currently have and disrupt their strategy.

Wraths and Land Screw

        This is generally frowned upon since according to Mel from Wizards of the Coast, “Lands are sacred.” This strategy can really mess with people specially those decks that can ramp fast or those decks that can generate a lot of creatures and other permanents.

  
  

        These are just some of the examples you can use to control the board. There are many other wrath effects that have been printed by Magic the Gathering. Depending on the color combination you are using, I always suggest to have a variety of wraths in your deck that can affect creatures, enchantments, artifacts lands and even graveyard./p>

Graveyard Removal

  

        All decks should have a way to remove the opponent’s graveyard or prevent opponents from using theirs. In Season Two, I used two different graveyard strategies to win most of my games. The reason this works is because, people don’t normally play graveyard denial. I make it a point that all my decks have at least three cards dedicated against graveyard strategies.

Tax

  

        Great ways in protecting yourself when the board is full of creatures. Opponents will need to pay 2 mana just to attack you for each creature that is attacking you. And if you have both Propaganda and Ghostly prison, that’s going to be a total of 4. That alone can deter them and they will just attack other players instead. If you see a lot of big stompy creatures with special effects, Humility will make these creatures into puny 1/1s. I guess the Hulk said it best “Pfft, Puny God!”

  

        Make all spells cost more to play. This is one way to slow down those pesky combo decks. If your opponent is playing Isochron Scepter with Dramatic Reversal, play a Damping Sphere. This will make them pay 1 for each Dramatic Reversal they have played for that turn.

Hate Bears

  
  

        Magic through the years have printed a horde of creatures that can help us with our control strategy. This is a good thing for us since Commander/EDH rules only allow us to use one of each card, we can basically use these creatures as redundant effects of the aforementioned cards.

In Conclusion

        Control and specially Stax strategies aren’t a fun deck to play against but it is still a necessary strategy in the overall game play. Control and Stax decks are the police force in a game. Sometimes you can even call them the military force since they sometimes pack a big punch at the end. You have been having issues with combo decks in your meta, then why don’t you give Stax a try and make your opponents squirm as you slowly extinguish their hopes and dreams of every winning a Commander Game.

        I will be posting a few control and stax deck techs in the next few weeks so watch out for those exciting articles. Till next time.