Blue is icky. Blue is disgusting. Blue players are always holding up mana and trying to not let anyone have fun. But that shouldn’t be a Blue only thing, Now often, you’ll hear about one of the most “entertaining” archetypes and colours in Blue and White, Azorius Control. Now we have the penultimate definition of fun with constant board wipes and denial. But we want to be different here. We want our luck with something that’s less common, and that would be as the title of the deck implies: Mono-White Control.
The leader of our camp is Phelia, the good boy. Phelia is a good dog. It’s absolutely true and a part of rulings. Now Phelia serves a few purposes for this deck. First of all, if our opponent kills the dog, they’re absolute evil and will be frowned upon by us and the rest of the table, giving Phelia extra protection through societal connotations. Secondly, Phelia can blink our value pieces and also either permanently get rid of our opponents’ threats (tokens) or temporarily (permanents) while growing larger if we target our own things. Phelia then becomes a sizable body that’s ready to crush some skulls. Furthermore, we can flash Phelia in at the end step of our opponent’s turn or to serve as an emergency blocker if need be. What a good boy!
As you may or may not expect, we are leaning into one of White’s specialties, stax. We are not a fast deck, and we do not have the ramping power that is in Green or the draw power that is in Blue. We need to slow down the table and avoid being killed immediately. Classic stax pieces like the above can slow down our opponents and make it so we can build into our mid-to-late game.
We may not have ramp, but we have ways to discount the costs of our spells. Both The Wind Crystal and Oketra’s Monument give us ways to close out the game. The Wind Crystal can eventually use its last ability to push for game by giving all our creatures flying and lifelink. Oketra’s Monument spawns many bodies overtime.
For card draw, we use the power of white weenies, making our low-powered creatures into hand advantage. While we do run a number of creatures, we can also generate our own small little tokens overtime to keep up on that advantage. While not mentioned here, you can also consider putting Tocasia’s Welcome as just another version of the above two but in enchantment form.
These cards above generate tokens that will help us with getting our card draw with free or cheapened weenies. Skrelv’s Hive doubles up as both a win condition by generating us little mites with toxic. The added bonus of Corrupted gives our creatures lifelink as well. Feel free to consider Wedding Announcement as another token generator and anthem effect.
We are the colour of wraths, so wrath away at the board if need be. We can rebuild quick with our massive token army. Furthermore, choose wraths that mitigate the impact on our side of the board. Dusk/Dawn is such a great card since it provides an eventual return that basically refills our hand for nothing. You’d also want a plethora of different wrath effects since modern Magic creatures nowadays have so many evasive abilities. Definitely take a look and also consider the meta around you with your pod. Some of my favourites include instant wraths like Final Showdown which no one ever expects.
You best believe we are also packing a bunch of protection spells for our cards. We’ll be swinging and protecting our cards, making it tricky for our opponent to pop our things.
Now onto the spice. Our win-con is usually creature beatdown, but in secret, we’re a sort of pseudo-combo deck. Now if you know the card above, you should know that we aren’t playing this card fairly by any measure. In addition, it doubles up as a means to slow down our opponents and especially those accursed +1/+1 counter decks.
These are just some samples of some two card combos that cheat by preventing counters from being played. There are many alternatives to Delaying Shield such as Nine Lives and Phyrexian Unlife, but I prefer Delaying Shield because it can be removed before your upkeep, making the damage completely nullified, and Delaying Shield can be used as more of a fail-safe.
Okay, I’m going to be real with you. This is a horrible win-con because it’s a land-win con that takes several steps.
It is absolute jank, and I learned about it from a video years ago from SaffronOlive with against the odds. So we are looking to do some funny things. White doesn’t have the most flashy ways to win beyond the generic board beatdown, so we are going in a different direction. White is very good at staying alive. It is the colour of protection and lifegain after all. So, we will be borrowing this old standard trick by exiling The Book of Exalted Deeds and placing it on “Mutavault” which counts as an Angel when activated. The key thing here is that we aren’t actually going to put it on Mutavault. We are going to begin by transforming Thespian’s Stage into Mutavault. That “Mutavault” will then activate and get the enlightened counter. Following that, we will reuse the Thespian’s Stage’s ability to transform the land into Cascading Cataracts.
Now, we have assembled a very difficult lock to beat. The Thespian’s Stage carries the enlightened counter while also being indestructible from Cascading Cataracts. The only ways to beat this combo is to either bounce it to hand or to exile the land itself. Most cards nowadays are incapable of actually targeting lands, and since we’ll never activate it again into Mutavault or turn it into a creature, we’ll never have to worry about that.
But there are workarounds. Beast Within, Generous Gift, and Chaos Warp are all common means of removing any permanent. We can’t attempt this again since The Book of Exalted Deeds exiles itself. So we need to stay clear of those types of removal. We can get around them if we were to be able to give our land hexproof. We are in pure White, so our options are very limited. That also adds another layer of nonsense that we have to go through. Valgavoth’s Lair would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that it was an enchantment. Enchantment sweeps, particularly Farewell, are quite common, so Valgavoth’s Lair, despite being a land, will go with it. The only other option is Lotus Field, but Lotus Field is very slow and we are looking to unfortunately play it fairly (if only we had Strict Proctor, but it negates too many of our own effects).
Now, we’ll have some ways to prevent our opponents from touching our combo, but we still need to assemble the combo to begin with. Silence and Orim’s Chant are two of White’s best ways of silencing the turn and letting only us play. This is important because Silence will prevent any reprisal to our effects while Orim’s Chant can selectively tell the Blue player to go away. Now both can also be used in other capacities as well which is one of this deck’s strengths. All our pieces are relatively flexible to some extent.
Adding onto the nonsense pile, we also have the classic Deification + Gideon of the Trials combo. Simply just choose Gideon and then emblem him and now we cannot die. We also have to make sure that Gideon doesn’t get removed. In that case, we will always try to keep him as a planeswalker. There are too many creature removal cards running around ready to snipe even indestructible and hexproof Gideon (I’m looking at you, edicts).
We also have the classic Worship as an option. Since we make so many tiny creatures, as long as we don’t run out, we’ll live. And that is the goal of our deck: to not lose. We don’t have to win; we just have to not lose because eventually our opponents will lose and thus, we will win.
It is important that we vary our “cannot lose” tools since the addition of three other players makes it difficult to just maintain one. I don’t trust my opponents, and they’ll conspire together.
And as we move to the end of this post, I just want to share my favourite card from the deck besides the lovely dog. False Prophet over here is such a wonderful diplomacy card (if he doesn’t get countered). You just have to have a single copy of him on the field and then a bunch of kill triggers. I like holding the nuke if you know what I mean.
The key to making him more powerful is by having the kill switch. Cards that sacrifice as a cost make it very hard for your opponents to interact with, since they can’t exactly counter the sacrifice effect outside of a few key scenarios. So granted, if we have False Prophet and any of these in hand, we can truly have a party.
So what other interactions do we run; well, we have a plethora to choose from. But you need to localize these interactions based upon what you think and know are ran in your opponent’s decks. What type of strategy is popular? Maybe you need Calamity’s Wake for graveyards. Maybe you need to stop the creature deck from popping off, and if so, Cease-Fire can be your best friend. Perhaps you’re a friend of the devil and want to restore all order and peace: Balancing Act (Balance is banned unfortunately). Cater your deck to the match-ups you predict and have a blast.
I’m sorry, Buckland, but I just want you to know that I’ll always have Mana Tithe in hand for your first play.