A common criticism levied at Magic’s burgeoning Premodern format is that it’s pretty much fully solved. There is, admittedly, some truth to these claims. Since cards from new sets never enter Premodern, the card pool doesn’t change over time. New strategies are much less likely to emerge here than in other formats for that reason.
That said, you’d be wise not to write Premodern off as a static format just yet. In a genuinely innovative move, Esqpoe took a 112-card Mono-White Control deck to a 5-0 finish in the latest MTG Online Premodern League. While it sounds like a gimmick, this deck’s unusual size is actually critical to its success. With this great result under its belt, it could inspire broader change, in Premodern and beyond, too.
112-Card Mono-White Control In MTG Premodern
Esqpoe’s Mono-White Control is a truly comprehensive Control list. The plan here is to outlast your opponent on every conceivable axis, eventually winning through sheer attrition. Removal, like Swords to Plowshares, Cursed Scroll, and Ray of Revelation is here to keep things in line early. Later on, the deck packs a ton of board wipes, like Rout and Wrath of God, to stop any creature-based gameplans your opponents may attempt.
With your opponent’s threat suite depleted, Mono-White Control can win in a number of different ways. The first is a traditional combat victory via Eternal Dragon, a Flier you can recur endlessly. You can also use the tokens from Decree of Justice here, if you have no more need for board wipes. Cursed Scroll can actually be a finisher here too, since the deck can easily keep its hand size in check via Grafted Skullcap or Peace of Mind.
Alternatively, Esqpoe’s Mono-White Control can easily pursue a mill victory. With 112 cards in the deck, simply stalling things out will result in a win in most cases. The combination of Ensnaring Bridge and Grafted Skullcap, for instance, is phenomenal here, preventing your opponent from attacking you at all. The deck’s land disruption package, featuring cards like Icy Manipulator and Dust Bowl, can also prevent the opponent from doing much of anything in the late game.
Method To The Madness
Even with the mill plan in mind, running 112 cards in a deck is odd for any MTG format, not just Premodern. Players tend to stick to 60 cards for consistency reasons, so to nearly double that is incredibly bold. Excitingly, MTG content creator Phil Nguyen has shared, via X, some insights on this decision from Esqpoe themselves.
Esqpoe cited five reasons for their huge deck size, each related to a different aspect of the list. For starters, it opens up the stall-out mill plan, which we discussed earlier. It also makes the deck’s value engines, Eternal Dragon, Grafted Skullcap, and Thawing Glaciers, much more effective. Dragon and Glaciers give you repeatable ways to tutor up lands, which in turn give you the mana to keep your opponent tapped out later on. Running a normal number of lands would exhaust these engines quickly, however, which makes expanding to 112 cards an advantage.
Nearly doubling the deck size also greatly increases Mono-White Control’s redundancy. With 52 extra slots to work with, Esqpoe is able to run more versions of each of their key effects than most decks. This means the deck can keep going after others would’ve folded due to pressure. It also allows for a wider Enlightened Tutor package without risking drawing duds, since the silver bullet cards will show up less often as natural draws.
Running so many extra cards could definitely introduce consistency issues, but Esqpoe has considered that problem as well. By keeping the ratios of key pieces, lands, finishers, and wraths, roughly the same even at the scaled-up size, Esqpoe’s deck is able to function more or less as normal.
A New Metabreaker?
Clever as Esqpoe’s Mono-White Control deck is, its continued success in MTG Premodern is far from guaranteed. The current metagame is dominated by multiple long-standing strategies, like Mono-Blue Stiflenought, Azorius Standstill, and Mono-Red Sligh. Against this elite lineup, Mono-White Control’s prospects are mixed.
Sligh is by far the worst matchup for Mono-White Control. This is a straightforward red Burn deck, capable of killing you long before your value engines come online. It doesn’t need to attack on board to win, either, which makes all the deck’s wraths and Ensnaring Bridges useless.
Fortunately, Stiflenought is a much more balanced matchup. The deck can definitely win early, if they hit their titular Stifle/Phyrexian Dreadnought combo. That said, they also only run four total threats. This lets Mono-White Control push through their deep countermagic suite and outlast them with ease in most cases.
Standstill is probably the deck’s best match up overall. It’s another go-long Control deck, but since it sports a more traditional deck size it loses out to Mono-White in the long run. The deck’s only real threat, Faerie Conclave, is easily dealt with using Mono-White’s land disruption package, too, which means protecting a post-sideboard Morphling is really the deck’s only chance.
Overall, Esqpoe’s Mono-White Control deck isn’t just a welcome bit of innovation, but a genuinely exciting deck in its own right. Whether it breaks out in Premodern or not, the lessons learned about the benefits of running bigger decks here could ripple through multiple formats.
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