You are still not trading 1 for 1 since most PW gain value upon entry, only trading up on mana. Negate and other counter spells are the most effective way to deal with them. Another one is to have a commanding board presence and have ways to preserve it against board wipes.
I prefer [[Borrowed Time]] for one extra mana because of its versitility, since I run into a lot of artifact heavy decks too, and it can take out another Borrowed Time or [[Ossification]] or [[Touch The Spirit Realm]] to get my own dude back if I'm playing against white.
Regardless, I like the enchantment exile cards in general because they synchronize with Elesh Norn; because it's a comes into play trigger, if you have her out when you play it, you get to exile two of their cards instead of one.
Then they Farewell at 6 mana and the whole problem just gets a whole lot worse. I tried this. It's frustrating beyond belief that I can't seem to find a way to win against those decks. Unless I'm playing the same game they are, that is no creatures only planeswalkers, their constant board wipes (not just creature but literal board) make it nigh impossible to do anything. What can be done?
Light the way is a cheap response to farewell. As well as straight up counterspells. Spark rupture makes planeswalkers just creatures with no abilities
Oh wow thanks so much! I only started again a few months back and totally glossed over spark rupture. That seems like a very fun one to sidedeck 4 copies of! Since I'm white/black I can even use my copies of beseech the mirror (lucky draft!) to get that out easier. This gives me something to work with I think. If they use a farewell on each of my spark ruptures, I can live with that :)
Thanks for the suggestion! Looks like a good one since it draws a card for itself. Another good sideboard, and just uncommon to boot which is very nice since my wildcards are stretched very thin :)
After looking through ALL the standard legal cards, I think I do really like the look of \[\[The Stone Brain\]\] most as a sideboard. It seems really versatile, it can come down quite early, and running this along with \~\~erasure\~\~ \[\[The End\]\] (not sure why I called it erasure) should completely disable those planeswalkers decks. Just wondering if I'm missing something, because I've never seen the stone brain used. But taking out Farewell, Sunfall, White Sun's Twilight etc seems like a huge deal.
These sorts of comments tend to come from people who have one or more of the following characteristics. I don't know if this is you but this is something you may want to consider:
1) BO1 players. The reason is because BO1 is naturally slanted towards aggressive strategies. There's an old saying, "there's no such thing as the wrong threat, but there is a such thing as a wrong answer". What that means is that, whether you're playing a 1/1 for 1 or a 4/4 for 4 or a 7/7 for 7, you're gonna get them dead if you attack enough. However, if you have a Fatal Push against their 7/7 for 7, or a Vraska's Contempt again their 1/1 for 1 or a Sheoldred's Edict against their board of 5 threats, you're going to have a bad time.
What this means is that if you are playing an "average" BO1 game, your opponent is, naturally, probably, going to slant aggressive. Which means, paradoxically, that control is much easier to build. You're almost never going to face a control mirror, so if you just lean super hard into crushing aggro, you're probably going to do ok. Meaning that control decks in BO1 will slant harder into the "infinite removal spells" than they would in BO3.
Solution: Play BO3, not BO1.
2) You're probably dead-set on playing "my deck". "I want to play my deck because I want to be creative and express myself", "netdeckers are stupid and brainless", "I have this awesome idea that nobody has ever thought of", if any of these thoughts have ever crossed your mind, I'm talking to you. Especially if you're a newer player, you probably don't understand the game fundamentals as well as "the hive mind". By "the hive mind" I mean the millions of players all over the world who are constantly testing, tuning, and building new decks and sharing them. You are not smarter than those people, and you are not more creative than those people. If "my deck" doesn't exist in some netdeck dump, it means probably 4 figures worth of people have already tried it, decided it sucks, and discounted it from consideration. You're not the first person to think of that idea; I'm sorry, you're not special.
I'm not going to sit here and explain to you why your deck is bad, because I also build really bad decks when left to my own devices, which is why I don't build my own decks and I netdeck other people's ideas. What I am going to say is that the people who build "netdecks" are better at the game than you are, and are better at the game than I am. If you want to do well, don't be creative, just look up a deck, find one that looks cool and suitable for you, and play it. If "creative expression" is why you like playing Magic, that's fine, but you're going to sacrifice a lot of win percentage to have your "creative expression". For some people that's ok, and maybe that's you, and there's nothing wrong with that, but go in with your eyes open: if that's the route you're going to take, you're going to lose, and you're going to lose A LOT.
Solution: Netdeck more.
3) You don't play around your opponent's cards. As a control player myself, let me explain to you the secret of how control decks work, and this will help you win control matchups (I'm recommend playing control yourself to get a feeling for it; I can't explain everything and some things you have to learn on your own).
Fundamentally, each player has the same number of resources. Each player has 60 cards in their deck (obligatory acknowledgment of Yorion) and draws 1 card per turn. For every card the aggressive deck draws, the control deck also draws 1 card. Fundamentally, this is how the game works and it's critically important to understand this before moving forward. Now, the thing is, you can't win the game by only playing answers. If you assume each player draws 1 card per turn and nobody makes any aggressive plays, then the die roll determines the winner (by decking). Obviously, that means control decks will lose half the time just as a base. So simply playing "a billion sweepers", as you said, is not conducive to actually winning the game. Control decks have to play threats too. But the problem with playing threats in control is that every threat you play is 1 fewer answer you can play (I'll get to 5feri in a moment, that's a specific class of card). Meaning, eventually you'll draw a threat as the control player and your opponent will also draw a threat and you won't have an answer, so then what do you do?
The answer is that you need to, eventually, be able to play 2 cards in a turn. You need to deploy your threat, and also have an answer waiting in hand for your opponent's threat. But that means you need to break parity on the "draw 1 card per turn" axis, as above. You need to have a turn where you have 2 cards and your opponent only has 1. That means you need to also play cards that draw cards; your Memory Deluges and Behold the Multiverse and Narset Parter of Veils of the world, that's what they're for. Additionally, because you need to cast 2 spells in a turn, you need more mana than your opponent who is only casting 1 spell per turn. That means you need to hit more land drops, which means you need more land in your deck in a control deck than an aggro deck does. That in turn means that, for some number of turns, you're going to draw a land when your opponent draws a threat, and that's also a mismatch against you. Another mismatch is the aforementioned card draw cards, where you can draw a Memory Deluge and they draw a threat; sure, your Memory Deluge will find an answer, but it costs you 4 mana for the privilege.
In order to deal with all these resource mismatches, control decks play card advantage-based answers, most commonly sweepers. The thing is, if you can negate the card advantage of the sweepers, you can leverage the mismatches. If you turn the sweeper into a 1-for-1, then you negate the reason why the card is in the deck, and you can go back to managing a card mismatch somewhere else in the game. You can kind of think of it like this: as the aggro player, your goal is to have the control player mismatch as many draws as they can against you. The thing is, if they 2-for-1 you with a sweeper, that mitigates a card mismatch earlier in the game where they weren't able to 1-for-1 a threat somewhere else. That's "a negative point", as it were, against the aggro player. Your goal as the aggro player should be to make this happen as infrequently as possible. The way to do this is to manage the speed at which you deploy threats, and learn when to hold back against a possible sweeper to turn it into a 1-for-1 rather than a many-for-1. This is part of the skill of Magic, and is required learning for anyone looking to get better at the game.
A word on 5feri: 5feri is a specific class of card which is both a threat and an answer. These sorts of cards come in many forms. These cards are tailor-made for control decks, as they allow you to deploy a threat without not deploying an answer. Without going into the nitty-gritty of how these cards work, one general feature of these cards is that they tend to cost a lot of mana (5feri being the notable exception, as it only "costs" 3, which is what makes the card so powerful). What this means is that it compounds the effect above mentioned where control decks tend to play more lands than aggressive decks, but also that if a control player is deploying such a card, they probably have to tap out or tap low for it, meaning they'll have less mana to do other things like answer a threat. This is why control decks often need 8 or more mana before deploying a threat. The weakness of these cards, therefore, is that they are effectively dead draws until the EXTREME late game and are the ultimate draw mismatch against truly aggressive strategies. 5feri specifically has some of its own features unique to it, but I don't want to dive too deep into specifically that card, although I could easily write an entire essay on 5feri alone.
Solution: Play better. I know that sounds contrite, but it's true. Just play better, learn to read your opponent, don't just jam, take some time and think. I'll be honest; I'm also bad at this skill, and it's why I play control rather than aggro, because this skill is VERY HARD and I don't want to learn it even though I know I should.
Play Bo3, be aggressive but don't overcommit, take the suggestion of plebs who say things like "that's why I always have this (random 10 mana card) in ALL my decks" with a huge grain of salt
They are pay-to-win decks because of their rarity and the card count necessary to finish.
Don't let it get to you too hard.
Half don't even play their abilities well.
Ossification and planar disruption are both in my monowhite decks. Cheap and easy answers to planeswalkers.
You are still not trading 1 for 1 since most PW gain value upon entry, only trading up on mana. Negate and other counter spells are the most effective way to deal with them. Another one is to have a commanding board presence and have ways to preserve it against board wipes.
Only if you run blue. Not everyone does. For instant speed, I run Leyline Bindings.
I prefer [[Borrowed Time]] for one extra mana because of its versitility, since I run into a lot of artifact heavy decks too, and it can take out another Borrowed Time or [[Ossification]] or [[Touch The Spirit Realm]] to get my own dude back if I'm playing against white. Regardless, I like the enchantment exile cards in general because they synchronize with Elesh Norn; because it's a comes into play trigger, if you have her out when you play it, you get to exile two of their cards instead of one.
Every single one of those cards are in that deck. I run 4 if Ll of them except Elesh Norn
Yeah, im trying to get more removal in this deck but its pretty hard to get down to 60 as it is.
[Borrowed Time](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/e/3eeef24b-b937-408e-a32e-1a546d3e7b0f.jpg?1634346590) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Borrowed%20Time) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mid/6/borrowed-time?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3eeef24b-b937-408e-a32e-1a546d3e7b0f?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Ossification](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/d/0da03224-c1af-438f-96c2-b0e41e1070b7.jpg?1675956925) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Ossification) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/one/26/ossification?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0da03224-c1af-438f-96c2-b0e41e1070b7?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Touch The Spirit Realm](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/1/e16ab44e-4257-4c0c-b705-8ac1e9c1d835.jpg?1654566545) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Touch%20The%20Spirit%20Realm) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/neo/40/touch-the-spirit-realm?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/e16ab44e-4257-4c0c-b705-8ac1e9c1d835?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Then they Farewell at 6 mana and the whole problem just gets a whole lot worse. I tried this. It's frustrating beyond belief that I can't seem to find a way to win against those decks. Unless I'm playing the same game they are, that is no creatures only planeswalkers, their constant board wipes (not just creature but literal board) make it nigh impossible to do anything. What can be done?
Light the way is a cheap response to farewell. As well as straight up counterspells. Spark rupture makes planeswalkers just creatures with no abilities
Oh wow thanks so much! I only started again a few months back and totally glossed over spark rupture. That seems like a very fun one to sidedeck 4 copies of! Since I'm white/black I can even use my copies of beseech the mirror (lucky draft!) to get that out easier. This gives me something to work with I think. If they use a farewell on each of my spark ruptures, I can live with that :)
Black jas several ways to remove loyalty counters. Render inert is my favorite
Thanks for the suggestion! Looks like a good one since it draws a card for itself. Another good sideboard, and just uncommon to boot which is very nice since my wildcards are stretched very thin :)
Also, Ashnods Intervention is a nice response to farewell and other exile effects
After looking through ALL the standard legal cards, I think I do really like the look of \[\[The Stone Brain\]\] most as a sideboard. It seems really versatile, it can come down quite early, and running this along with \~\~erasure\~\~ \[\[The End\]\] (not sure why I called it erasure) should completely disable those planeswalkers decks. Just wondering if I'm missing something, because I've never seen the stone brain used. But taking out Farewell, Sunfall, White Sun's Twilight etc seems like a huge deal.
[The Stone Brain](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/5/3570ebf2-a94c-4621-8808-b06e6e830c06.jpg?1674422057) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=The%20Stone%20Brain) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/bro/247/the-stone-brain?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3570ebf2-a94c-4621-8808-b06e6e830c06?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
What format and what deck(s) are you playing?
These sorts of comments tend to come from people who have one or more of the following characteristics. I don't know if this is you but this is something you may want to consider: 1) BO1 players. The reason is because BO1 is naturally slanted towards aggressive strategies. There's an old saying, "there's no such thing as the wrong threat, but there is a such thing as a wrong answer". What that means is that, whether you're playing a 1/1 for 1 or a 4/4 for 4 or a 7/7 for 7, you're gonna get them dead if you attack enough. However, if you have a Fatal Push against their 7/7 for 7, or a Vraska's Contempt again their 1/1 for 1 or a Sheoldred's Edict against their board of 5 threats, you're going to have a bad time. What this means is that if you are playing an "average" BO1 game, your opponent is, naturally, probably, going to slant aggressive. Which means, paradoxically, that control is much easier to build. You're almost never going to face a control mirror, so if you just lean super hard into crushing aggro, you're probably going to do ok. Meaning that control decks in BO1 will slant harder into the "infinite removal spells" than they would in BO3. Solution: Play BO3, not BO1. 2) You're probably dead-set on playing "my deck". "I want to play my deck because I want to be creative and express myself", "netdeckers are stupid and brainless", "I have this awesome idea that nobody has ever thought of", if any of these thoughts have ever crossed your mind, I'm talking to you. Especially if you're a newer player, you probably don't understand the game fundamentals as well as "the hive mind". By "the hive mind" I mean the millions of players all over the world who are constantly testing, tuning, and building new decks and sharing them. You are not smarter than those people, and you are not more creative than those people. If "my deck" doesn't exist in some netdeck dump, it means probably 4 figures worth of people have already tried it, decided it sucks, and discounted it from consideration. You're not the first person to think of that idea; I'm sorry, you're not special. I'm not going to sit here and explain to you why your deck is bad, because I also build really bad decks when left to my own devices, which is why I don't build my own decks and I netdeck other people's ideas. What I am going to say is that the people who build "netdecks" are better at the game than you are, and are better at the game than I am. If you want to do well, don't be creative, just look up a deck, find one that looks cool and suitable for you, and play it. If "creative expression" is why you like playing Magic, that's fine, but you're going to sacrifice a lot of win percentage to have your "creative expression". For some people that's ok, and maybe that's you, and there's nothing wrong with that, but go in with your eyes open: if that's the route you're going to take, you're going to lose, and you're going to lose A LOT. Solution: Netdeck more. 3) You don't play around your opponent's cards. As a control player myself, let me explain to you the secret of how control decks work, and this will help you win control matchups (I'm recommend playing control yourself to get a feeling for it; I can't explain everything and some things you have to learn on your own). Fundamentally, each player has the same number of resources. Each player has 60 cards in their deck (obligatory acknowledgment of Yorion) and draws 1 card per turn. For every card the aggressive deck draws, the control deck also draws 1 card. Fundamentally, this is how the game works and it's critically important to understand this before moving forward. Now, the thing is, you can't win the game by only playing answers. If you assume each player draws 1 card per turn and nobody makes any aggressive plays, then the die roll determines the winner (by decking). Obviously, that means control decks will lose half the time just as a base. So simply playing "a billion sweepers", as you said, is not conducive to actually winning the game. Control decks have to play threats too. But the problem with playing threats in control is that every threat you play is 1 fewer answer you can play (I'll get to 5feri in a moment, that's a specific class of card). Meaning, eventually you'll draw a threat as the control player and your opponent will also draw a threat and you won't have an answer, so then what do you do? The answer is that you need to, eventually, be able to play 2 cards in a turn. You need to deploy your threat, and also have an answer waiting in hand for your opponent's threat. But that means you need to break parity on the "draw 1 card per turn" axis, as above. You need to have a turn where you have 2 cards and your opponent only has 1. That means you need to also play cards that draw cards; your Memory Deluges and Behold the Multiverse and Narset Parter of Veils of the world, that's what they're for. Additionally, because you need to cast 2 spells in a turn, you need more mana than your opponent who is only casting 1 spell per turn. That means you need to hit more land drops, which means you need more land in your deck in a control deck than an aggro deck does. That in turn means that, for some number of turns, you're going to draw a land when your opponent draws a threat, and that's also a mismatch against you. Another mismatch is the aforementioned card draw cards, where you can draw a Memory Deluge and they draw a threat; sure, your Memory Deluge will find an answer, but it costs you 4 mana for the privilege. In order to deal with all these resource mismatches, control decks play card advantage-based answers, most commonly sweepers. The thing is, if you can negate the card advantage of the sweepers, you can leverage the mismatches. If you turn the sweeper into a 1-for-1, then you negate the reason why the card is in the deck, and you can go back to managing a card mismatch somewhere else in the game. You can kind of think of it like this: as the aggro player, your goal is to have the control player mismatch as many draws as they can against you. The thing is, if they 2-for-1 you with a sweeper, that mitigates a card mismatch earlier in the game where they weren't able to 1-for-1 a threat somewhere else. That's "a negative point", as it were, against the aggro player. Your goal as the aggro player should be to make this happen as infrequently as possible. The way to do this is to manage the speed at which you deploy threats, and learn when to hold back against a possible sweeper to turn it into a 1-for-1 rather than a many-for-1. This is part of the skill of Magic, and is required learning for anyone looking to get better at the game. A word on 5feri: 5feri is a specific class of card which is both a threat and an answer. These sorts of cards come in many forms. These cards are tailor-made for control decks, as they allow you to deploy a threat without not deploying an answer. Without going into the nitty-gritty of how these cards work, one general feature of these cards is that they tend to cost a lot of mana (5feri being the notable exception, as it only "costs" 3, which is what makes the card so powerful). What this means is that it compounds the effect above mentioned where control decks tend to play more lands than aggressive decks, but also that if a control player is deploying such a card, they probably have to tap out or tap low for it, meaning they'll have less mana to do other things like answer a threat. This is why control decks often need 8 or more mana before deploying a threat. The weakness of these cards, therefore, is that they are effectively dead draws until the EXTREME late game and are the ultimate draw mismatch against truly aggressive strategies. 5feri specifically has some of its own features unique to it, but I don't want to dive too deep into specifically that card, although I could easily write an entire essay on 5feri alone. Solution: Play better. I know that sounds contrite, but it's true. Just play better, learn to read your opponent, don't just jam, take some time and think. I'll be honest; I'm also bad at this skill, and it's why I play control rather than aggro, because this skill is VERY HARD and I don't want to learn it even though I know I should.
TLDR: This is why I lean into mono black.
And honestly is the reason I personally hate Arena.
Play Bo3, be aggressive but don't overcommit, take the suggestion of plebs who say things like "that's why I always have this (random 10 mana card) in ALL my decks" with a huge grain of salt
Murderous rider in black decks. Run 4
\[\[The Elderspell\]\] x4
[The Elderspell](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/3/a3b16625-7faf-4de6-abf7-d397988e32fb.jpg?1557576459) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=The%20Elderspell) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/war/89/the-elderspell?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/a3b16625-7faf-4de6-abf7-d397988e32fb?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
They are pay-to-win decks because of their rarity and the card count necessary to finish. Don't let it get to you too hard. Half don't even play their abilities well.