Destruction or Bust — Should You Play Control?

Hello, everyone. Recently, I played Control at the Orlando Regional Championships. I was excited to play this archetype after being stuck on Lost Box for a while. Control aggressively targets the top meta decks, which makes it appealing to play in established metagames. However, there is always an inherent risk in playing anti-meta decks, because there is the potential of unexpected or unpopular decks that will completely crush you. Unfortunately, it seems that we respected the player base a bit too much, as people were content to let Lugia VSTAR run wild and counter Control instead (a deck with around a 1% meta share). I’m totally not salty about it.

My tournament was interesting, as I was lucky enough to run into seven Lugia decks and crush them all. However, I lost to not one, not two, but three Lost Box decks that went completely overkill on the Control counters. Of course, none of them ended up even making Top 32, but, again, not salty. I went 1-1 against the two Hisuian Goodra VSTAR I faced, which is about a 50-50 matchup, so that wasn’t surprising. Overall, our group didn’t do great or terrible. I ended around 70th out of 1,500 players. Isaiah Williams bubbled out of Top 8 with the same 60, and we had a few others in Day 2.

Sander Wojcik made Top 8 at the recent Liverpool Regionals with an innovative Control build. Our group used that list for the inspiration, but we ended up changing 12 cards. The main change was focusing on Eiscue and Wash Water Energy. We felt that Eiscue was much more consistent. Flying Pikachu VMAX is extremely high-maintenance, vulnerable to hand disruption, and weaker against Echoing Horn. Of course, Pikachu has several benefits too, so it wasn’t an easy decision. (Also worth nothing is that Sander’s finish was in the Silver Tempest format, while Orlando was the first Crown Zenith tournament. Of course, Crown Zenith did absolutely nothing to affect the meta. The new cards did not perform well or have much of an impact.)

Overall, Control was not a great call for Orlando. However, this bodes well for the future of the archetype. Every time Control fails and seems to disappear, it adds to its power for the next event. You can bet that Sander will play Control at Australia and do well, and may well be laughing at our foolishness for attempting to ascend to his level. In any case, there’s almost no way that people are going to bother countering Control going forward. Lugia dominated Orlando, and Lost Box was quite popular as well. Mew VMAX maintains its middling position along with Regis and Duraludon VMAX. The only real development is Goodra’s surge in popularity after it took two Top 8 spots in Liverpool. People love the Goodra deck for some reason, but I maintain that the deck is just no good.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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