**Under Construction**

Welcome to Standard 2022 Esper Control 

aka "I Skipped Church Days"

With the introduction of Standard 2022, it's it a time to start fresh with brews and for new cards to shine after being overshadowed by the pushed sets of previous...*cough* Eldraine *cough*. 

My friend and I started to mess around with cards we wanted to play with . We knew control was the way to go, as the initial meta presented to be heavy aggro/midrange based with the control decks looking at big bombs ala Izzet Dragons/Dimir Control and their poopy extra turn spells. So we wanted to go traditional control without relying too much on the obvious powerhouses. 

1st Edition: Dimir Control

After carefully looking into the card pool of the format, UB Control felt like a natural start going into 2022, with Black having ways to deal with on-board threats and Blue having ways to deal with incoming threats. It was both simple and difficult to pick and choose which ones to add to the deck. A factor was our experience in older formats like Modern and Legacy so transferring that mindset into Standard was a challenge. 

I. The Black 

The Black color pie provides our deck with versatile removal across the spectrum, from dealing with creatures and plansewalkers to going under indestructible and hexproof/ward. The latter holds much significance with cards like Goldspan Dragon, Iymrith, Desert Doom, and Toski, Bearer of Secrets which simple destroy effects are iffy against. 

II. The Blue

The Blue aspect provides us with a strong suite of countermagic and card advantage typical of your average control deck. Being able to foretell our cards is a great way to be mana efficient in each of our turns, in turn giving the upside of costing less and being presented with different options on what to do during our upcoming turns or our opponent's turns. With many of the cards in control and midrange shells going big, Disdainful Stroke is an effective counterspell against such strategies and Test of Talents' ability to not only strip out one of our opponent's strategies but also giving us information of their hand and deck is a major upside. 

We have a good start. Now we need to add in a bit more support to fill the gaps.

• Power Word Kill was an interesting initial pick up. But after playing with the card multiple times, it just cannot take care of the prime targets of this format. It is still fairly good but relegated to sideboard as additional ways to interact wit the board. 
• Shadows' Verdict's exile clause proves relevant and it hits much of the aggressive decks. In our games, though, our removal and countermagic proved to be reliable. We slept on this slot for some time. 
• Check for Traps is good. The thing is, this is Best of One. So we really don't want a do-nothing card in a possible top-of-deck scenario. 

A few more cards went into consideration. Professor Onyx, Mordenkainen, and Crippling Fear, to name a few. We went back to the initial idea of our deck - "Draw-Go". Then we went back to the initial positive of what control wants - lands. That's when it clicked. 

III. Landfall