The New Face of Control — Managing Resources Without Oranguru

Hello everyone! Some of you may not be too happy with me for attempting to bring Control back even with our dear friend Oranguru gone to the rotation, but I couldn’t help myself. Last season, Pidgeotto Control was a moderately popular archetype that was quite polarizing. Although it was a legitimate deck, it was rather degenerate as it limited interactivity between players. The deck focused on locking the opponent out of the game and prevented them from doing anything at all. I played this deck to a couple of decent Regionals finishes, and the deck was very strong for the beginning half of the season. However, it was more or less replaced by Mill variants once powerful cards like Bellelba and Brycen-Man and Cinccino were released. Additionally, Zacian V‘s Intrepid Sword was a foil to the hand control strategy, and Marnie‘s disruption wasn’t all that fun to deal with either. Now that the Standard format no longer has Oranguru or Bellelba and Brycen-Man, disruptive decks have become a distant memory… but not for long.

Excadrill Control Deck List

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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