With Pro Tour Hour of Devastation in the books and the standard format seemingly almost resolved, there is still room for spicy brews. My selection this week comes from the Control master Gerard Fabiano who has brought us this heavy control deck reliant on its sole win condition: the sorcery Approach of the Second Sun.

The deck’s primary plan is to trade cards with your opponent, whilst at the same time ensuring we hit our land drops and start to generate some form of card advantage. It is ideal to end up casting Approach as soon as we can, and then we only need to buy time untill we can cast it for the second time and consequently win the the game. For this reason all the cycling cards are important so that we can dig down through the top 7 cards of our library to reach the buried Approach.

Lands

Since we don’t have too many double costs we can afford to play a lot of basics, and only 4 tapped lands which give us a lot of consistency when attempting to curve out with our spells.

Counter Magic

Since this is both a control deck and a combo (similar to modern Scapeshift) we want to answer our opponents threats, but overall we want to buy time, and ensure we hit our land drops in the midgame. As such most of the counter spells we play have the ability to cycle or even better double up as an Impulse.

Removal

We have to be able to answer our opponents creatures so that we don’t die! So the deck has access to 12 spot removal (counting the Essence Scatter) of which 3 have the ability to cycle in situations where removal is less useful. The  4 Fumigates will help us to stabilise the board and gaining 3-5 life will be essential to staying alive in some match ups.

Sideboard

As Ramunap Red is the most popular deck in the format, and it is faster than we are, we need extra help to resolve our expensive sorcery! Authority of the Consuls will stop all the red haste creatures and if we start with it on turn 1 it will gain us an average of 6 life per game which can easily equate to enough time for us to enact our plan. The Regal Carcal and  Linvala, the Preserver act as heavy impact cards that can also win the game all by themselves.

In summary this deck can be a very good option to fight back against the metagame, having only 3 win conditions in our control deck makes it really solid and the deck is super fun to play. For the future, if Ramunap sees less play we should make space in the sideboard for the control match ups, and add some Dispels. I hope you like the idea behind the deck, and see you on the tables.