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Fish Five-0: Azorius Control (Standard, Magic Arena)


Thanks for watching another episode of Fish Five-O and this episode is one that means even more because I'm playing through a cold. You know what though? No cold can stop this one from casting Teferi, Time Raveler!

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Gameplan

You know what time it is? New meta? New attempt at seeing if Control works! The gameplan is one that you're familiar with where we try our best to survive the early game and then use one of our board sweeps to reset the board after our opponents have exhausted all their resources. 

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Time Wipe is great in this deck as the ability to return cards like Brazen Borrower and Gadwick, the Wizened is a disgusting interaction as our opponents lose a ton of cards only to see you return your big value engine back to hand to cast again next turn! Another card that seems amazing with all of these artifacts and enchantments running around thanks to the cat decks is Planar Cleansing as this card hard resets the board. It is unfortunate that we lose our own things but it's usually worth it. Another thing to keep in mind is that Nissa, Who Shakes the World creates an army of 3/3s that ignore this sweeper but that is just the way things go. 

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These may not look like much but these cards are often how we win. Its either these or our opponents concede from the value train that is Gadwick the Wizened. With the rise in flash decks, its great to have cards like Brazen Borrower that can allow us to interact in a cheap way while also deploying a threat. Castle Ardenvale also helps us end board stalls as I often with by just beating opponents with a 1/1 human token over and over. The flashy finish is Finale of Glory but don't be afraid to deploy this early for a few 2/2s as they're great for both offensive and defensive means.

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The deck has a few sweet singletons that were mostly in there for fun. The Wanderer just serves as a way for us to exile cards like Cavalier of Thorns and deal with Shifting Ceratops.  Just a reminder that a loss of life from cards like Cauldron Familiar aren't prevented by The Wanderer. Also, Bonecrusher Giant has the ability to stop us from preventing damage. Cool thing is that we can force our opponent's Mayhem Devil to redirect a few points of damage just to The Wanderer to do damage to us. Lastly, another singleton is Mystic Sanctuary! I do enjoy this as a singleton as its nice to be able to put something like a counterspell or a board wipe back on top and then draw it with Opt or Teferi, Time Raveler.  The reason I don't run more than one is that it's a requirement to have three islands which can be steep so I strongly recommend to never go above one. 

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This card has been absurdly powerful out of the sideboard against all the Gruul and Simic Flash as they have juicy targets like Nightpack Ambusher and most importantly, Shifting Ceratops. If you couldn't tell, this deck really struggles with a Shifting Ceratops and Questing Beast unless we have a Teferi + a board wipe in hand. This card is such an amazing return target for Time Wipe and Teferi, Time Raveler when we're against the green decks. 

Matchups

The deck really struggles with dealing with Nissa, Who Shakes the World outside of countering it. That is just the nature of the Azorius Control deck though as we don't have anything like a Murderous Rider to deal with planeswalkers. We rely on a Planar Cleansing and bouncing with Brazen Borrower and then counter the spell again on it's way back down. The issue with this is that the Ramp decks have so much mana to play with and have Hydroid Krasis so any of the UGx ramp decks are rough on us. The Sultai variant has hand disruption while the Bant variant has Teferi, Time Raveler to shut off a chunk of our decks. The match ups aren't unwinnable but must be navigated carefully so use your spells wisely and be careful when deploying your Gadwick! An experienced ramp player will most likely try to bait you early and will usually wait until they have ramped to the point of casting two to three spells in a turn. 

Conclusion

Even though our ending record was 3-2, I like the deck a lot and was able to easily climb to Mythic the other night. 

Some things the deck really needs are more ways to draw cards at instant speed instead of just Gadwick the Wizened. Maybe a few Chemister's Insights can help but I feel like the list is mostly perfect the way it is. Maybe adding one more Giant Killer could be worth it. If you're looking to play this at any paper events coming up, make sure you get a ton of practice in as this deck is a grindy one and will require you to play fast!

If you ever have a deck you want to be made into a video feel free to leave a like, comment, Email, and subscribe to the MTGGoldfish Youtube Channel 

-Your Friendly Neighborhood AsianAvenger

Twitter: @TheAsianAvenger || Twitch: twitch.tv/TheAsianAvenger || Email: theasianavenger@mtggoldfish.com

 



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