After three crucial cards unexpectedly left the format last Monday, Standard has been in turmoil. Many players quickly went back to old Standard mainstays, but some are continuing to brew. Tablet of Discovery, in particular, is causing a lot of slower experiments to appear, and the most annoying of them is a new land-destruction control deck.
Grixis Land Destruction Control
At its core, this is a control deck that aims to slow down the game and take advantage of Standard’s surprisingly powerful land destruction suite. While Price of Freedom can punish greedy manabases and replace itself, Avengers Disassembled is the main attraction, wiping entire boards from aggressive strategies.
This, backed with tons of cheap interaction like Requiting Hex and Bitter Triumph can completely stamp out your opponent’s aggressive starts. Then, once your opponent’s onslaught starts to slow down, Stock Up and Consult the Star Charts can help you find your win conditions, pulling you far ahead.
To truly take over the game, this deck relies on Fin Fang Foom, a growing, Flying threat that doubles up on your land destruction. If that wasn’t enough, Thor, God of Thunder both recurs your land destruction and can remove additional creatures when they are cast. Both of these do require a ton of mana to work, but Tablet of Discovery can set that up easily, allowing blowouts as early as turn four.
Dodge Dimir!
While post-ban Standard is still developing, there are quite a few aggressive multicolor decks right now, and Grixis Control destroys them. With tons of creature hate and a fragile mana base to take advantage of, Mardu Discard seems like the ideal opponent for Grixis Control. The same is true for the newer five-color Legends decks that are being experimented with.
On top of beating up these aggressive strategies, Grixis Control also excels against other Tablet of Discovery decks, which commonly have greedy manabases of their own. While these decks can easily take care of your smaller win condition suite, Outrageous Robbery and Great Hall of the Biblioplex can help close longer games reliably.
In exchange, this deck struggles against some previously established creatureless decks that have a lot of basic lands, like Dimir Excrutiator. Tempo creature decks with lots of basic lands, like Dimir Midrange and Mono-Green Landfall can also be tricky, but a grand total of eight boardwipes post-board can easily steal games.
With this in mind, Grixis Control is a deck primed to beat up on a specific metagame, meaning that it’s more of a counter-strategy than a defining format pillar. Thanks to this, the deck’s viability will be heavily dependent on how Standard develops. After all, while the decks mentioned here are rather popular at the time of writing, things are hardly set in stone.
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