If you decided to read this thread you know what your in for so sit back and relax while I going into my typical mode. If you are new to my analysis get a cup of coffee and get ready to critically look at every piece of evidence I'm going to give you. With that said lets get started.

If one goes through some of my more recent excitement and ramblings I've spent a lot of time working on 2 characters. Yoshimitsu and Kisheri. Both characters revolve around discard. I thought I was going to bear witness to the strong return of control. I was really really wrong. I did a lot of playtesting against mid and top teir decks and characters. I found that discard could not go head to head with strong aggro decks. A discard deck could win game one but game 2 and 3 was up in the air and most likely the odds are against you. Over 60% of the second and third games ended in a loss. The main reason is that the opponent has learned how to pace a lot more conservatively thus they are less likely to over extend their hand. Just as much as not over extend one's foundation against stun the same applies to ones hand when it comes to discard. The results of my deck building made me very depressed because there isn't any hard control effort to battle the strong aggro decks that dominate the meta.

Recently I had a chance to talk to a player about making a Kisheri deck. In the middle of the conversation I realized that I was thinking like a minitures player. Even though I've played lots of card games, and did well at some of them, i always come back to my minatures foundation. In minitures all the info is out infront of you. Chance is only in the dice roll. Great plans succeded or failed due to the manipulation of dice rolls. I didn't think that control had to be sneaky on every level to win. In other words play dirty to miniture player. This hits the core of my title. The control player, not just discard, must make an effective deck that can transition back and forth from aggro to control. One may need to play 2-3 characters in a deck and the side board has a foundation/action/asset that is needed for a hard counter against an obscure weakness.

1. Play dirty and love it.

The best thing to do is start out playing aggro. In the case of Kisheri she can start off playing Mitsurigi, Cassandra promo, or Sophita Promo. After you win the first game switch into Kisheri. Your opponent won't think about packing anti-discard. They just might play anti-aggro cards instead against Mitsurigi. Against cassandra anti-speed tactics may appear if they haven't already. Against Sophita some mix of the previous is possible. But this will do no good against Kisheri. YOu pretty much increase your chances of winning because the pivitol game 2 is no longer going to go as planned. Your opponent is stuck with an even less optimized deck.

Other control like characters that the same rule can be applied are Kilik, Zhao, Lu Chen, and , Yoshimitsu, Dariya and White Crane. Each of these characters are quirky and abnormal and takes a bit of skill to play. THey are easy to counter or plan for on game 2 and 3 and are easy to shutdown. Each character has strong aggro characters that allow them to switch to aggro mode really easily. Even with control elements in an aggro deck the aggro character still can thrive and may even surprise the pure aggro deck.

2. Serving two masters and not getting torn apart.

The first thing people may look at me crazy at is the fact that putting an aggro character and a control character together is like night and day. Actually that is not true. THe new control characters depend more on attacking to get their effects off instead of their foundations. Most high control foundations destroy themselves. So bridging the two mindsets is more based on the player then on the mechanics of the game. The next thing one has to look at symbols like order, good, void, chaos, and death to make the change up almost apear seamless. These symbols have odd mix of aggro and control. Each of these symbols follow a general mechanic or serve as what I like to call bridge symbols. They are designed to be the happy medium of seperating 2 extremes from mixing. This is more the case of good and void then order and chaos.

This mindset will force the player to leave the main symobls and dual symboling behind for the surprise element of a control character win. This is hard when you are facing Hilde, Hata, and Astrid. Yes leaving the main symbols is going to be hard but it the risk/reward is worth it.

3. Kicking them in the groin

The attack setup has to be the starting point. You are avoiding character specfic attacks of course or you are side boarding them. Your attacks are going to determine what secondary character you are going to play. If you play a chaos control character like Zhao Daiyo you may consider running your mirror aggro character off of Steve Fox or Kazuya. This way you can focus on punches and have no problems worrying about attack line up between characters. ZD actually benifits more from gut drill then the other characters so she can get her rfg effects in play.

One has to be careful that an attack edge for the control character is shared by the aggro character or the aggro character can use the tactic. The golden rule for this setup would be which ever character needs specfics build the aggro for that character then pair the second or more characters based off of that unique element. If you are playing Kilik as your control character and Christie as your aggro character then putting punches in the deck is a bad idea. But if you play Kilik and you play Paul as your offensive character your better off.

4. Setting the stage for trickery.

I'm going to assets before foundations for one big reason. Assets are tricky and can screw over a character and helps another. Recently I played Hall of the Warrior god. I played this card to give my Kisheri a speed pump so I could playful a kill. The card helps my opponent and is still in effect even while tapped. So the card backfired hard on me because my opponnet was getting +2 or more speed on their attacks. Hall of the Warrior God would do little good paired up with a throw character. What do you do? Assets have to focus not so much on control but on damage and non-symbol specfic draw. Paul's Gi is awesome but man if you don't have the all symbol it doens't do you much. Remember not all of us have POTM. Dependence on generic POTM is becoming more and more risky. Look at Defeated the Rifle, (Ragnar attack that destroys assets) and Yimfang. The days of POTM are numbered. Stick to foundations that give you a generic boost all your characters can use. If at all possible avoid terrains they never play out the same across characters.

5. Fiends and Foundations.

Foundations are there to do 2 things. Support the control character. Give enough aggro to make the aggro character effective. This means that you need to not go control heavy in the deck. You are going a bit light on defense. But that is fine. You are using your control elements to stall your opponents kill turns. Generic damage pumps are better. If a you see that some cards would go better for both characters then play it of course. But you want avoid symbol specfic skills as much as possible.

6. Plans, Plans, and Plans.

Action cards is both the icing on the cake and the glue between pages. They both hold everything together and finish everything off. Go for action cards that fill in your weak point or help you defensively. Action cards are mainly focused on damage and stat manipulation. Look more at cards that manipulate checks, and gives you draw. If your symbol can't play those cards go for defense.

Ok lets wrap this all up. The future of control is in aggro. The future of control is not fronting a control character but stabbing your opponent with it from the sideboard. Control Characters are dead. Long live control characters. We are facing the forced evolution of the control player. The control player MUST play aggro. But the contorl player MUST change in and out of control characters to make pure aggro an unsure investment.

Once again, well thought out and well said arguments.

True, control might have evolved into the tricky fighter, that switches style in the middle of a fight.

Also the thing you said about a control char having to pack alot of aggro pieces is true. A control char has to attack now, which is a Good thing, since nobody wants to have b3 graywars back? or a booring mill deck, running nothing but foundations/assets/actions

Imo, amy could be played as a pseudo control char, since of water she can use know when to talk+herself+ to the ends of the earth in order to end an opponents turn.. just by blocking Oo the only problem with this is heavy barrage of throws.. but we do have strange fashion for that

You have not tested the premier, IMO, current control deck, Lizardman. All the things that scare yoshi and kisheri are no sweat for the lizard (he does have some problems they do not however).

Lizardman can hold his own against anti-discard. The most common ones will be gut drill and soul wave i think, and those are no big deal. Iron Thunder of course hurts a bit more, but that is when you side in Nina and don't let them draw it.

I love my kisheri deck and she is a lot of fun to play. But she is way too squishy for a control character and the main problem with her is that she does everything one card at a time and she can't really go off until her turn.

I like this article; it helps me keep a couple of things in mind for when I'm whaling away against a control deck.

I personally don't agree with the "sandbagging is control's only way to survive". Considering I've been playing aggressive control with Padma (kills on 4-5, sets up on 2 and controls to survive)...

Smazzurco said:

I agree that Lizardman is control with his E. One can use stoic assasin to do what Nina does by rigging the anti-discard card in their check. But that doesn't solve the issue if the anti-discard card is in their hand. I have not tested Lizardman because I have been focused on Yoshi, Kisheri, and Mitsiruigi. The problem i see with Lizardman is that you commit 1 foundation for his ability. Yes it is a cheap cost for reversal that could do crazy damage. But there are times where most reversals don't cost foundations when they are played if the check is right. Lizardman is sadly focused on void and evil. His cards don't really feed water at all. I think Lizardman has the same problems every other discard focused characters have even if he can hit back hard. The issue is that he has to reduce damage to keep doing what he is doing. That is not as resusable as it was before.

The anti-discard cards hurt any discard focused deck. Any of the cards that have you loose life based on your handsize or printed handsize. There is no way to reduce that damage. But with that said, I didn't post it in this thread but in my Yoshi deck thread, your opponent needs 8 anti-discard cards in their deck to hurt an anti-discard deck. This means that your opponents sideboard is either dedicated to anti-discard or they have at least 4 cards in their deck that is anti-discard. Without 8 or more cards in the deck the effects of anti-discard are small. Kisheri off of life does a better job instead of off of death or void. I solved most of her problems with my new life build. I can't post it right now because I have some shared information with another player who is going to play a competetive deck. I will give you a few general points if found building life Kisheri. Go aggro. You don't need a bunch of cards that reveal hand. You want them to block. If you can play the deck without using her R then your better off. She doesn't need her R even though that can be her focus. There 2 damage methods that work. You either A. go cheap and hard. Or B use a serious of cards that average about 5 difficulity to hit for 17 or more damage a turn.

I'm sorry that the information given is vauge. I have a personal policy when I work with people on decks. The first everything we discuss propritary. In other words they own the deck design. I do not give out deck lists even if it is a masterpiece of a deck. The next thing is that any and all tech developments are mine for me to reference and use in the future how I see fit. I have rights to speak about mechanics of the deck independent of each other but I won't leave bread crumbs for people to reconstruct the deck or reverse engeneer the deck. If the person I talked with wants to reveal the deck then that's on them and not me. This makes it so both parties respect one another and there no concern for betrayal if I talk about independent elements of the deck. This has served me well in many other games. I have an eye for tech and anti-tech decks. I've worked with champions in other games to make teams and keep everything on the low because records/prizes are at stake. Since I worked with this specfic person last night I want to make sure everything I'm saying is laid out clear. If anyone ever wants to work on a deck add me to friends and we will talk on the phone about the deck since I don't use IM. If your international I'm willing to create or find my aim id. But i'm more of a vocal person then text. You only get half off my thoughts out of my text. I do have ventrillo, and x-fire. I'm willing to use those as well.

Padma is not a control deck. She is an alt-aggro deck. In other words she does damage in unique ways. She makes sure that each turn she does damage she does a minimum 3 damage per hitting attack. THis can be a big thing when you add in Tira's card because she can add on additional secondary effect damage. It is all unreduceable. Built right Padma can do 8 unreducable damage from combined effects. With that her biggest problem is draw in my opinion. A 7 handsizer needs lots of draw ability. Without the draw ability the person is setup to fail. Padma gaining Yoshi's draw, i feel, is not enough to put her over. She needs to add 3-4 cards in her hand without exhausting out her foundations. I've been looking at the Snake Bling throw thread. I must say it made me build a Padma deck. I haven't had a chance to test it yet. But man a lot of the elements look like fun. I would still say a card like Padma isn't control but consistent damage.

If you consider hard control to be the only form of control, then yeah, you're setting yourself up for a disappointment in this block, so far. Then again I've always enjoyed flipping definitions over themselves so what's control to me would probably be aggro for a lot of people.

I'd say it's a sliding scale. If a deck is a 6 on the aggro scale, it's considered "control" by me as I'm used to deal with decks that go up to 10 (11 if Target X's piloting it), whereas most would call this aggro.

Just a side note. Do you guys like articles like these or would you all like articles about specfic characters?

Homme Chapeau said:

I personally see control as cards that stop, punish, or remove a card or cards in the game. Padma doesn't punish the other player for playing lots of foundations or having to big of a hand for example. She does alt damage. I would define aggro as a deck or character focused on the attacking and do max damage per turn and has no other focus then that.

I agree that lizardman fails on water. And imo the best build is void. There is not reusable damage, but, if all goes right, your opponent attacks once and then you empty their hand. If they play Iron Thunder you lose 6 life...the catch is now they have an empty hand and you get to have your way with them.

Kisheri is definately best off life. 18VIT is just tough in todays format, unless you are super aggro (cassandra) which IMO is still hit or miss.

I haven't typed it up but maybe we should exchange lizardman/yoshi decklists and maybe we can see where one character has problems how the other character deals with it.

i am gonna test more with lizardman, but everything i foresaw to be a problem ended up not being a big deal. Really pumped damage attacks were the only problem. The opponent would realize i just ate everything and attacked back, so they would throw one giant attack...but then i just block it.

I am a huge fan of (tekken) yoshi and really wanted to build him. I also am a fan of algol, no matter how terrible he may be, and as i was building him i got an idea for lizardman and ran with it.

as far was "what is control"...

do you recommend disruption/discard as control? How about Nightmare aggro/blowurshitup build? A MtG land destruction deck?

To me control is anything that makes the opponent not able to do what their deck is built to do. This can be in the form of negation, disruption (a la lu chen), discard, CC hax, etc.

Hard control is B3 order or any deck that doesn't let your opponent do ANYTHING. there is a huge difference between not letting your opponent do what he WANTS to do...and not letting him do ANYTHING....

Even though i am a control player...i dont want to see "hard" control...although a bit more control could be released into the meta. Right now the only real control is discard and Nina.

@darklogos...hey man, love reading your articles. I guess my answer to your question about whether to continue in this vein, or start doing write-ups on characters is...YES! Do them both (as you have time, of course).

@ Smazzurco...Lizardman looks to be a beast, for certain. Discard is back, no question, and i think decks have to be aware that they will run into a deck that focuses on this style of Control. That said, i'm not sure how prevalent Discard is in other Metas. Since you belong in mine, i will certainly be, at the very least, side-boarding Anti-Discard tech from now on. Also, I think it's safe to say that Reversal decks are a very aggressive kind of Control/Tempo play-style: Reversals now have Control elements printed on them that mess with Breaker and Control checks. They also deal damage on their opponent's turn, which presents the Attacking Player an interesting quandary to either take the damage and suffer the Effects, or they have to clog up their cardpool, and potentially spend resources to pass a block-check.

I guess this would be the Disruption control you are talking about, Sal, and i think this is one of the more effective Control styles in the Meta right now. Both Lu Chen and Amy's support, and Lizardman's are quite good at what they do.

darklogos said:

The second option sounds like it'd be better suited for the meta right now, since over-arching styles are few and far between.

Quick question. Does anyone here have ventrillo and a working headset. I got a vent server I visit that is a bit dead right now. I could send out the info on a one on one basis. That way I can get some stuff hashed out a bit.

darklogos said:

i used to use vent when i played FFXI....but im at work during "normal hours"..i leave at like 4am and get home at like 6pm pst.

So i guess thats no help...lol

Ive recently built a one attack controll deck that is pretty amazing and has only lost twice.I dont agree that sandbagging is the only option and we will see when the new season comes around how well it does.

otakuV said:

Sad to say but decklist or it didn't happen. It is easy to sideboard into anti-discard because it doesn't even require you to have the symbols to play the effect. How are you controling? Are you using foundation destruction, stun, high defense, or some combonation of them all and then some? How ware you building off of one attack? How are you forcing it through. How are you surviving against stacked Astrid, Hilde, Hata, King, and recently Mitsirugi and Taki. I'm sorry I don't believe you at all on this. Even running Kilik there is no way you are going to be able to win serious games with only 1 attack.

darklogos said:

I'll answer that question. Not even knowing who he is or what he's talking about.

Fury of the Ancients.

Fire has Paid to Protect, The Ultimate Team and Stand Off. It also has Memories that Stain its Armor and All Life is Prey. She may be 20 squishy vitality, but when she will only pack foundations with blocks and damage reduction, speed reduction to deal with sped up things and Stand Off to shorten opponent's turns at minimal cost to her, yes, she can pull it off. Annoyingly well at that.

With 5 foundations out, she can fully multiple a Fury of the Ancients into 6 attacks. With an All Life is Prey out, all you need is 5 more foundations to pump them all by 5 damage, coming at you for 5M8 multiple:5. And with the speed ups and zone changing available in Fire, the first one IS going through regardless of Acrobatics or Mark of the Beasts.

Of course, even then, Taki eats this deck alive. But that's Taki.

I still need to see a decklist. Are they using Tira or Zi Mei?

I'm assuming it's a Fire Zi Mei. With only 4 attacks in the deck, she will build faster than everyone can, and will be able to out-Stand Off you whenever.

What stops your oppnent from playing cards that get rid of face down cards from both players card pool. That would kill the multiple element. How are you going to deal with a death or fire foundation destruction deck. I'm sorry it there are to many things that jack it up. Hell Nightmare kills the deck. This doesn't work against the high amount of stun that rules the meta. If i can stun 6 a Zi Mei Wheel kick and one other attack getting stun 3+ the risk of taking a big hit almost guranteed. Its not going to stop Astrid, Hata or Hilde.

The next thing I would say that this isn't control its stall. Your just stalling for your kill card and nothing else. The only thing I wonder is how do you deal with sisters of battle and p2p. Any fire character can run both. P2P first then Sisters of battle to make the speed a joke. I would have to proxy a game against it with a deck list. But this is what the game is moving away from and its bull that a deck like that exists.

Proficient Sniper. You just lost games 2 and 3 (if it wasn't maindecked)

darklogos said:

I have Skype. Do you? It's free...

otakuV said:

hehe, you are gonna have to tell me about that one Nick. One attack?!?

I also agree that sandbagging isn't necessary, but I more or less believe control doesn't exactly exist as it used to. What we have is mitigating control pieces that lengthen games perhaps but that can't withstand truly agressive decks. There just isn't enough universal answers to the quick and decisive death that a lot of high tier characters bring. (not that there should be universal answers, just that most answers are very particular, one-use only, or are difficult to integrate into a deck that 'itself' still needs to kill the opponent).

The closest thing to a low attack deck is likely King, or maybe a deck that grabs a combo card or something from the discard pile using Temujin stuff. The recursion in this game is severely watered down at the moment, and unless you have broken Omar before he has ^^ I can't see a deck that uses just a 'few' attacks doing well consistently, especially now with cards like PotE, Acrobatics, Faithful Bodygaurd, Paid to Protect, Valued but Not Trusted, Flexible Body etc. now more than prevalent in the meta to stop one hit kills.

- dut

edit: obviously I am taking it as '1' attack card in a the deck, and not a playset of one attack. 4 attack card Zi Mei has been built months ago, is very consistent, and quite deadly if the attack is drawn turn 2 and played after path is already out.

dutpotd said:

I would like to issue a polite challenge. I want you to play a control dependent character for the next 2 weeks. No sandbanging you go all rounds with that build and no sideboard. Publish your deck and then post your findings. I'm willing to say that I don't know it all but at the same time I don't think that playing a control character out front without sandbagging is going to be easy let alone viable. I think that you would find the reality a lot harsher. The first week you win because it is you. The second week I don't think the wins will be as easy if possible. In the end I think everyone would gain a lot from this.