Locations
Welcome to the second week of the Great Ruhan Challenge! Bruce kicked it off two weeks ago, and we’ve already seen a bunch of interesting, innovative, and powerful decks. Now it’s my turn. How will my deck line up against the competition? Who knows—the only thing I know for sure is that all of the good Ruhan puns will have already been used up.1
As with all new decks, you need some inspiration—a Muse, if you will—to give you the initial direction for a deck. Enter my two new friends Yong Hee and Dong Hee. Yong Hee not only broke the ice and gave me my first game of Commander since I came to Korea, but he also taught me my first ever Korean swear word; his friend Dong Hee designed the deck that made the use of such language necessary. It were those two guys—and Dong Hee’s omma-sshibaling Oona, Queen of the Fae deck—that inspired my Ruhan build.
Lavaborn Muse
Control decks like that work by sculpting the environment of the whole game; they’re hostile to creatures, they make it tricky to get key spells off, and they put you racing uphill against the grinding inevitability of your opponent’s card advantage. We’ve all been there.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that any deck can shape the environment. If you ever loaded your decks with artifact hate in response to a Torrent of Sols in your metagame, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you ever played Root Maze or Urabrask to slow your opponents down, this shouldn’t be new to you. With a Commander as aggressive as Ruhan, do you want your opponents creating an environment where they can keep him in check or do you want to create an environment where control decks roll over and die to an enormous, minotaur-looking dude?
I thought so. Come with me . . .
Know Your Enemy
Control decks work in a variety of ways, but let’s look at some of the common themes that we’re going to have to deal with.
Creature Kill
A no-brainer: Control decks kill critters dead. Typically, this is what allows them to control the tempo of the game even as the aggro player tries to force it. If you allow the control deck to succeed, it will usually win, and in Commander, it’s easier to slow things down because of the 40 life. As we would prefer to win with our ridiculously powerful Commander, we need to do something to make creatures more powerful relative to the available removal—especially sweepers. And if we can’t keep our beaters alive, we should at least be able to punish opponents for killing our dudes. If we can maintain a breakneck pace for the game, we can break their necks.
Card-Draw
Decisive in a duel, and nothing to sneeze at in multiplayer, control decks seek card advantage at every turn so that over time, you just run out of questions while the control deck continues to stockpile answers. I remember playing against the original Weisman deck back in the day, and even something as simple as, “Jayemdae Tome for me, Disrupting Scepter for you,” can put your back up against the wall in two or three turns.
Card advantage is more complicated in multiplayer—the control deck may not be able to draw as many cards as its combined opponents, and if it does, it almost certainly can’t cast them all. But we live in an age of Consecrated Sphinx, Recurring Insight, and Blue Sun's Zenith, so it can be done. As I mentioned, the control deck I played against in Korea, which was a pretty generic U/B list, was able to just about lock two players out of the game with Forbid—buyback and all. Card advantage matters no matter how many players are in the game
Deck Manipulation
This classically involves tutoring—or simply filtering—Brainstorming, or playing off the top. There’s an Abundance of different ways to play to gain either card quantity or card quality, and we’ll have to put a stop to the worst of those shenanigans.
Permission
For some, counterspells are the best thing about playing blue, but for most of us, they are the worst thing about playing against it. Regardless, we have to be prepared for counterspells if we expect to beat a good control deck—even if that means beating them at their own game.
Engines, Game Changers, and Wincons
Similarly, game changers are permanents that can singlehandedly change the game (let me know if my use of jargon confuses you). Winter Orb and Stasis were the originals, Mirari's Wake and Debtors' Knell are favorites of mine, and Mimic Vat and Nim Deathmantle are ubiquitous examples of the type. The key feature is that they significantly and permanently alter the environment in which you must interact with the control player. These are similar to engines in form if not function, as they usually resolve around permanents and can be solved with the same cards.
Finally, some control decks have a very limited set of win cons that they lean on way too much. Hasty Blightsteel Colossuses, Kederekt or Inkwell Leviathans, Phage the Untouchable, and so on are all favorites. These challenges often require different classes of removal from simple engine cards, especially now that we have two variants of Lightning Greaves to contend with.
The bottom line is that against control decks, you’ll often find yourself in situations in which you must either disrupt the engine (or other key permanents) or die. We will choose the former.
Tools and Toys
So, we understand the nature of the threat, and our goal is to create an environment that will make it impossible for control decks to succeed. Let me clarify that this is different than locking everyone out of the game—as R/W/U are basically the colors of mass land destruction, I’m sure we could have a great deal of success with turn-one Adamaro, turn-two Ruhan, turn-three Sunder, but that means beating the control by becoming the control player. I’m not interested in building Ruhanation.dec; Rather, I want to liberate the entire table from the oppressive yoke of the control deck’s tyranny so that whether I win or lose, the control deck doesn’t stand a chance.2
Next, let’s consider how Ruhan plays in a vacuum. A lot of people have said that Ruhan offers a political edge by allowing you to avoid the repercussions of your attacks by saying, “Hey, I didn’t want to attack you; it was purely random!” This isn’t quite right; what Ruhan allows you to do is show that your intentions aren’t negative even if your actions hurt someone. The scariest thing about a strong opponent is usually his intentions—Is he going to direct all of that strength against me?—but with Ruhan, it is clear that an attack from your commander really doesn’t mean that you’re out to get that person. Moreover, it reduces your opponent’s concern that you will attack him again next turn; he knows that he has the same chance of being smashed next turn as anyone else at the table.
However, once an opponent has been hit twice by a 7/7 commander, no amount of sweet talking or patient explanation is going to change the fact that you are merely a roll of the dice away from killing him. I’ve been the guy who randomly received Ruhan’s first two attacks, and despite the protestations of Ruhan's controller, I had to spend the rest of the game looking sideways at him, and I always held a piece of Ruh-moval back for his next appearance. The biggest problem that this creates for this deck is that we don’t want to randomly oust the weakest or most “honest” player at the table while the control mage rubs his hands together and cackles in glee.
Meet the Candidates
Like Robby Rothe, I ultimately find it most useful to divide cards into functionally similar piles. Here are some of the cards I most want to use. Be warned: Some of them might be a tad unorthodox, but then, so is the purpose of the deck.
Anti-Removal
These cards make it harder to remove your creatures, make creatures more powerful, or make the control deck pay for killing your stuff.
Anti-Control
These cards hobble typical control strategies such as card-draw, deck manipulation, and counterspells.
Rally the Rabble
These cards protect the non-control players, encourage them to focus on the control players, and get everyone swinging.
Anti-Engine
These cards destroy stuff; simple, right?
More Aggro
These cards set the pace of the game so that it’s over before the control player can set up his impenetrable wall of boring.
Sunforger Package
Because you’d be silly not to!
The Final List
That’s a hell of a lot of good cards right there—if you see any you aren’t playing, it might be time to build a new deck or two. Unfortunately, that is the end of the fun part of the deck-building process for me; now comes the grind of actually putting the best fifty to sixty of these cards (plus whatever I didn’t mention or just plain forgot—like mana fixers) into a deck and telling the rest of them to go home. I guess I could never be a judge on American Idol—I hate to see the hurt look on their little card-faces when I tell them they didn’t make the cut. Still, that’s why they pay me the big bucks . . . or something. Here are the results of my careful deliberations, tough choices, and coin flips.
"Ruhan on Your Parade"
- Commander (0)
- Creatures (0)
- Artifacts (0)
- Instants (0)
- Other Spells (0)
If you have trouble assembling or protecting the combo, there are a lot of options—such as Fabricate and Remember the Fallen—but your focus has to be on smashing face with Ruhan; if your opponents focus on the ’Forger shenanigans, so much the better. All of your spells work just fine on their own; I don’t play a lot of R/W, but the chance to combine Return to Dust and Into the Core is just good times. Also, you don’t need this combo to get value out of Stonehewer or Leonin Shikari; Lightning Greaves and Swiftfoot Boots are Ruhan’s best friends, and Shikari combined with either of them makes any opposing spot removal useless.
When I first saw Ruhan, I noticed the same thing I noticed with Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund: This is a red creature with 7 toughness! Do you know how many red cards can do 6 damage to everything? I put Crater Hellion and Bloodfire Colossus in here to clear the way for Ruhan; Inferno Titan can sit this one out while the real big boys take care of business!
There’re a bunch of different ways to make things easier on your non-control opponents, including the Vows and using Mass Hysteria rather than Fervor. I’m particularly proud of the idea of using Ninjas to spare your hapless allies too much damage; if you don’t want to smash the wrong guy twice, just ninja Ruhan away and recast him . . . provided the coast is clear in terms of counterspells and so on.
On the whole, your control-loving opponents will have their hands well and truly full with this one, and if you don’t kill them, you’ve made it a hell of a lot easier for someone else to. Try it out—if there’s a need for it in your meta—or at least take a good look at the cards in both lists. I've been playing Numot for years, but while I was researching this deck, I still found a bunch of surprisingly strong cards that I’d overlooked. Knowledge is power my friends . . . but so is a huge, spikey thing swung at your opponent’s face!
1 Assuming there are any.
2 Let’s be honest, though; if you kill the control deck and then one of the last two decks standing, that drawback disappears and he becomes a huge, cheap, all-upside beater who probably only needs two more hits to win the game.
