Welcome back to the second part of my Standard Deck Tech, where today I’m going to finish talking about Nicol Bolas, Grixis Control.
Yesterday I talked about the potential pool of cards for this deck and broke it down by card type to see which cards I wanted to move forward with. Here's a recap of which cards I chose after Phase 2 of deckbuilding:
In the next phase I want to look at which cards I’d like to have a playset of, and which cards can be cut from the deck.
When it comes to spells, the only two that I want to have a playset of are Harnessed Lightning and Glimmer of Genius. For creatures, the only one that I want is Wildfire Eternal. In terms of Planeswalkers, I’m going to cut Jace, Unraveler of Secrets and focus on the other two. Now, let’s look at what else we can remove or move to the sideboard.
Fatal Push will be good against certain decks, but I want to remove it from the main deck for now. Bontu’s Last Reckoning, Yahenni’s Expertise and Never // Return will be tough to cast now that we’ve decided to lean the deck more towards red and blue. I do want some amount of Bontu’s Last Reckoning in the sideboard though. I also want to remove Release the Gremlins from the sideboard as we already have Abrade to handle any pesky artifacts. There aren’t any artifact central decks now, so I’ll leave Disposses out of the sideboard. I also want to keep Negate, as my only counterspell, out of the sideboard.
Now that we’ve made some changes, let’s put one copy of each of the cards we didn’t talk about in the above paragraph, and punch in numbers for the ones we did mention.
This puts us at 27 cards in the main deck and eight in the sideboard. Let’s see what other changes we can make to the deck, and what other cards we want to add more of.
When it comes to creatures, I think having one of Baral, Chief of Compliance and The Locust God is where we want to be. I also think I want to have three copies of Champion of Wits and two copies of Torrential Gearhulk. I’m going to cut Cut // Ribbons in favour of a second copy of Abrade.
I’d like to have three copies of Unlicensed Disintegration for some extra removal in the deck. When it comes to the more expensive spells, it would be nice to have a second copy of Kefnet’s Last Word and Dark Intimations as well. Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh seems good at one copy, but two copies of Chandra, Torch of Defiance seems like a better fit. Let’s see what the deck looks like now.
Currently we have 35 cards in the main deck, but I’d like to have 26 lands in the deck, so I’m going to cut Hour of Devastation and move it to the sideboard for certain matchups.
Now that our main deck is complete, let’s talk about our mana base. We want to make sure that most of our lands are focused in red and blue mana, with enough black mana to make sure we don’t miss out on having it available. Aether Hub will help with getting some more Energy while also making sure that we get the colours of mana we need to cast all our spells.
Here is the final deck for Nicol Bolas Grixis Control!
There you have it folks, a Standard Grixis Control deck. Hope you have enjoyed the latest Standard Deck Tech. I can’t wait till next week to try this deck out at my local shop and bring forth the power of Grixis!
