This guide is created in respone to the "Is Aggro Dead?" thread, which is creating the idea that Aggro is no longer viable. In fact, Aggro can become viable if you wish to use "Counter-Control" in order to stop them from screwing up your kill. Yes, this could be seen as a Hybrid idea, but I'd prefer to call it and Aggro base with Hybrid elements.

What is "Counter-Control"?
"Counter-control" is basically an answer to those heavy foundation based decks you see grinding the game down to a halt, or just plain screwing you up when you go for a kill. Sure enough you're using their own medicine, and it requires a little more effort than flat-out aggro decks, but the end result is the same: Your opponent's vitality reaches zero and you score the victory. The difference is, you can assure that victory more often.

How do I use "Counter-Control"?
Think of a card that slows down or even stops you building your favorite character. Now think of answers. It sounds pretty simple, but this is what the bread-and-butter of "Counter-Control" is. If you can metagame so your deck can "Counter-Control" in every possible scenario, you know you're onto a solid deck there. Cards that are considered good for "Counter-Control" are those that have good stats that don't slow down your aggro deck.

Here's an example: You're playing an Air deck with a Natural Leader in play, but you don't want to attack because your opponent's Chester's Backing can negate Natural Leader's ability. So how do you get around it?

1) Commit/Destroy it.
Sure, you're going to have to fill your card pool, but a well timed Omni-Directional Clusterbomb (action side) before you attack is a perfect solution to Chester's Backing. You can put it down without your opponent gaining life or negating your abilties. Olcadan's Mentoring can replace Chester's Backing with something less harmful with an easy 90 degree turn, too.

2) Negate it.
Inhuman Perception is Air's little gem, as it can stop many an annoying response. This way your opponent is left with an extra committed foundation that they could have just used while blocking your attack. This is a little bit costly compared to the above, but this is the "no sacrifice no glory" approach you want to go for. Off Chaos, Death or Void, Preventing the Curse is much better as the opponent's doesn't usually see it coming.

3) Bait it out.
If you have said Inhuman Perception in play, your opponent might be scared out of using Chester's Backing since it will get negated by Inhuman Perception. This will put them in the situation you were in at first, when you were scared by that Chester's Backing. It's all a lot of mind games... Of course this leads onto the foundation wars you hear about, but in the early game you might be able to get the upper hand before them.
Another good example of baiting is to force the opponent to use the ability. Chinese Boxing is perfect for this as they have to negate it in order to get the Chester's Backing to ready next turn. You eliminate the gamble for them, therefore putting them in a lose-lose situation.

4) Stop them being able to use it.
This is the most difficult way to "Counter-Control", and I wouldn't recommend it unless your deck works with it. Basically you prevent R's being played in the first place. End it All, Lesser of Many Evils, and Bringing the Master to his Knees are good examples here. However, the first two of these can be stopped by Chester's Backing anyway, so it doesn't end up so productive in the end. If you can pull it off, make sure your deck can work without using R's.

Hopefully this short guide will help you beat those annoying control decks that bore the hell out of you. I wish everyone good luck in beating control in the future, and return the game to it's name of UNIVERSAL FIGHTING SYSTEM it once was!

If I as a Mod I would stamp the hell out of this one! Good article mate, clear and easy to read whilt being informative.

As fer the counter-control, M.Bison just got a load of new toys to that effect, destroying your opponents control pieces in a fiar and balanced way. Plus they share symbols with the aforementioned Preventing the Curse, a nice little shiny that goes "I destroy X with Y" " Chester's sez no" "PtC sez yes"

Preventing card drawing is also a great method of control as it locks out the better decks.

sir_shajir said:

Tough outer shell is win life gain and anti card draw all in one !!

I liked the bait it out subject really comes down not to the best cards but the player making the best plays I see it happen all the time in big events . I think hitting on how to bait out BRT forcing your opponent to hack your weaker cards first is always a test of your skill .

Thanks for the info, guys. Didn't think of Bison too, his foundations are great for control or counter-control!

Tough Outer Shell's probably one of my favorite cards in Block 3, especially in the Void patch. Only problem is it's high difficulty and that it's easy to stop.

As an additional note about BRT, something that baits a such a control piece isn't necessarily a weaker card, it can also be something that would commit/destroy it, i.e. ODCB would force the opponent to hack the check or risk committing their BRT. If I were the opponent, I'd rather get the card draw out of it, then again if the player goes all-out on sucessfully playing their ODCB, they could commit something else.

Destiny's also one that stops BRT/Forethought shenanigans, as it would prevent checks being reduced anyway. Same thing goes for Ayame's Scarf, if you have them. I could go on about examples, but the original post states the guidelines.

Any tips or required info on how to counter-control a specific card will be gratefully posted here.

i know many people consider death extremely weak in the block 3 enviroment, but the symbol has lesser of many evils, revanent's, no memories, inhuman perception, destiny, and orall dead. i realy think zi mei with a death/fire foundation base, and a fire kill turn is the best block 3 aggro outside of air.

trane said:

You are forgetting charasmatic .

Scubadude said:

yeah charismatic and bison's other suport.

1. (off-topic) Zi Mei + Tsurane Kiri = stupid.

2. On-topic - Trapped in a Nightmare is an absolutely fan-FREAKING-tastic piece of counter-control (I though I was the only one that used that term!), allowing you to commit any foundation with an R printed on it, be it Chester, Bert, Charistmatic, or ESPECIALLY Revenant's Calling, which is one of the bigger hindrances to aggro.

Yeah, I'm surprised not many people are running Revenant's Calling (or at least in my area anyway) - maybe it's the discard cost that puts them off.

Agreed, Trapped in a Nightmare is an awesome piece for counter-control.

MegaGeese said:

Maybe people this year can do something with her I surprised with her nonexistant showing at worlds this year. Although Vik did go undefeated in teams with her at the SAS.

We're talking about counter-control that helps enable which archetype, your own control, aggro, or "undefined?" I refer to such cards as anti-control and I make the clear distinctions that Control is defined by cards that commit or destroy cards only. Anti-control cards therefore generally feature negation. I place Discard and CC Hax cards in their own separate categories because their effects are also distinct. I guess cards that prevent or deter a situation can play on either side of fence (i.e., Control or not Control); perhaps we call refer to them as Utility cards? With the game's current outlook, a Control oriented deck can usually take greater advantage of Utility cards, which can become huge centerpieces of those Control decks, than other deck styles. I'd say that Aggo is a culmination of everything else plus "positive effect" cards (positive CC hax, damage boost, card recursion/draw etc., but those can be viewed as Utility to some extent...) Hmm... the latter Utility shall be referred to Positive Utility and the former shall be referred to as Negative Utility. XD

Whether you choose Option A or Option B (where A and B are sets of some options ... lol Math), everything should come back to a premeditated plan (redundant?) that you made when building your X Deck. If you draw up a good, streamlined plan, then your deck should use cards lending from a variety of archetypes, and the classification of your deck specific archetype should be a subjective distinction and an afterthought . To quote some song, "you're doing your **** thing and you're doing it well." I guess if you really wanted to identify a deck's major archetype, you could select the archetype that predominantly comprises this deck or you can key into whichever archetype this deck ultimately epitomizes when played properly (I think most players do this).

NOW ... as for actual cards that can help you kill control, we should consider cards that either help us fight (read: counter, contain, nullify in a trade-off, etc... ) or attack (read: tempo dominance) Control after our opponenr's Control position has been established.

Revenant's Calling and Dormant for Millions of Years fight Control by mitigating its potential advantage. Undercover Agent and US Air Base fight Control in a similar capacity. Incidentally, cards such as these affect gameplay differently in practice and theory: in theory, yes, they'll give you "that" (preconceived) edge against or answer to Control; but in practice, a seasoned (Control) player just won't use their Control cards unless they absolutely must at crucial intervals of a game (read: detterence) or unless they can afford to use them because they have more resources than you to safely do so. Thus, by fighting Control with this tactic, we lower Control's real efficiency but it's potential efficiency still, of course, remains (consider how electrical or monetary input doesn't typically equal output, there's usually a discrepency when something from a source is transferred to a destination, ergo " real" and " potential" efficiency).

That's all and good, but what does it mean for us? For one, we've created a mental hoop for Control to work through, but, keep in mind, we've also created a mental loop for ourselves to work within , which can result in misplays on both sides . Nonetheless, we can't rely on the possibility for a misplay if we won't to reliably win. So, moving on to lees-than-optomistic circumstances, we can examine what we've created and formulate a strategy to exploit whatever it is. Essentially, we must use our innate higher reasoning skills to analyze our opponent's less-than-ideal circumstances and find some weakness, some ***** in their armor that we can attack . I'll take this moment to illucidate that players who are hesitant to use a card will typically have two actions of recourse: either they are more willing to commit these foundations to pass or pay for other cards, usually when their normal "committable foundations" are committed, or they will "wall up" and refuse to commit them.

Something else that we must examine is each opponent's win condition during each new game, because a player doesn't necessarily need their Control pieces to pull off their win condition. So, how can our opponent kill us? Which cards are involved? Do they have multiple or flexible kill conditions? How do they execute their kill(s)? Finally, do these kills have any achilles tendons that we can target? Do so.

Now, this is the point in every Control game when I try to "snowball" conditions into my win condition with a high likelihood of success. The Big Q: What's holding us back from winning? 1) We usually have to get all of our win condition cards in their proper place for when we strike. 2) If we have accessibility to our kill but our opponent's set-up prevents us from going in for the kill, then we must target those specific cards that hinder us. If you made a gameplay when you built your deck that accomodates such Control situations, then you should have somewhat clear idea of how to topple your opponent's defenses. If you didn't plan for this specific scenario, then you will have to improvise and deviate from your typical gameplay to some extent. I can't be any more specific than that--every game, especially every Control game, takes shape with certain permutations that we didn't explicitly predict and can only be resolved with individual player skill influenced by some luck.

An excellent method of sidestepping the majority of these situations is by mapping out a clear and definite kill condition--and a kill condition is still a kill condition if it happens over multiple turns because our only requirement is a tangible plan. Ideally, our kill condition is as elegant or efficient as possible, so as to reduce strategic hiccoughs, and incorporates at least one "unusual" (read: unexpected) element, which we used our knowledge of the "meta" to qualify, so that our opponents can't easily predict and therefore set up counters for early on. With this planning and knowledge, we usually reduce the strategic pitfalls that prevent our deck from executing like clockwork. Account for the remaining offenders with backup plans and put some "secondary card choices" into your deck.

****... no time to spellcheck. The bus calls.

i think counter controll means anti order comital, cchax, discard, or other diruptive tactics.

Whoa, that's a hefty piece of reading for 11:30 at night... just kidding ctr2yellowbird, it was good stuff.

I never thought of Undercover Agent before, perhaps I could use it in matchups against Defender loops and the like. I could side it in Adon, and test it out (plus, it helps the OVER 9000! theme the deck originally had :-P )

I liked the part about "snowballing" conditions. This is what an aggro deck needs to consider before adding the counter-control cards (for example, why work against Ikari Warrior if your deck doesn't rely on momentum? However, it is likely you would need to work against Holding Ground). Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance, as they say.