Intro:

tl,dr: You're never going to win by Turn 3. This is a Tapout Control deck that leans heavily on Tokens to maintain truly constant board presense until you grind out the win.

So a couple weeks ago I saw a video featuring the nucleus of this deck and since then I've been tuning it in Best Of 3 Standard Ladder. It's not perfect, but the game plan is a style of play I really enjoy so here we are.

Main Deck:

Threats:

Planewalkers:

• 3x Kaya, Spirits' Justice: Despite only having 3 copies, she earns her place as the namesake card. We're not one of those combo versions where we get cheeky with Ghalta and Mavren. No, here's how her abilities read to me:
  • +2: Psuedo-Cling to Dust
  • +1: Flying body generation.
  • -2: Creature only Rite of Oblivion
• 4x The Wandering Emperor: She's defensive and slow, but she's far too pushed to not play. By golly, the Flash alone makes for a nice squeeze on opposing mana resources, then she sticks around an synergizes perfectly with the token half of our strategy.

"Body Producers"

• 2x Case of the Stashed Skeleton: Sure a derpy little 2/1 that can't block isn't going to set anyone's hair on fire, but this card is way more troublesome to deal with than it might first appear. The board WILL see a sweeper at some point and having Demonic Tutor just hanging out is cool, until you see the synergy with the next card. Then it turns into nightmare fuel for slower decks.
• 4x The Restoration of Eiganjo // Architect of Restoration: Mana smoothing early, solid threat/blocker midgame, reanimates our 2-mana Case lategame.
• 4x Wedding Announcement // Wedding Festivity: Yet another card that leaves behind material that snowballs.
• 2x Virtue of Loyalty: Having yet another Flash spell in our otherwise Sorcery speed deck turns out to be more useful than one can possibly imagine.

The Spell Suite:

Spot Removal:

• 3x Cut Down: Kills the little things.
• 2x Long Goodbye: Kills the Ward protected things.
• 3x Go for the Throat: Kills the bigger things.

Sweepers:

• 4x Deadly Cover-Up: This card is The Truth. It's great against Aggro, Midrange and Control. The floor is 5-mana Surgical Extraction which hurts a lot of decks more than you might think, the ceiling is a Wrath of God with a The End stapled on.
  • I never side any of these out, no matter the matchup.
  • I've literally exiled every. single. threat my UW Control oppenents had in their deck on more than one occassion.
• 1x Depopulate: Sunfall is too slow when you're already playing 4x 5-mana sweepers.
• 1x Farewell: I still hate this card. It's too agrecious. But, it's for that very reason that you need to play with at least a couple copies in the 75.

Discard:

• 2x Duress: Yes, in the main deck. It's almost never a dead card so I'm surprised how little play it sees.
  • As you see above, we're well protected against dying in creature combat, but in a UW rich environment having a dirt-cheap way to punch a hole in the opposing gameplan is well worth the slots.

The Mana Base:

I'm going to skip over most of the miscellaneous items here, save for two:

• 4x Mirrex: You want as many of these lands as you can get in the UW Control matchups.
• 2x Restless Fortress: Nice to have as a backup but you really don't need 3x. The lifegain is quite relevant though so maybe trade out a Surveil land if you're dying to Red/RW a lot.

The Sideboard:

You will notice I only have 13 cards listed. This is because I'm so unsure of what the last 2 slots should be. Just pick whatever you think shores up those matchups you hate lossing to.

• 2x Duress: Vs CreatureLess Control and Aatroxa Domain.
• 2x Extract the Truth: Vs Aatroxa Domain.
  • Picks at their hand and Leyline Bindings
• 1x Farewell: Vs Aatroxa Domain, Midrange, Graveyards.
• 2x Path of Peril: Vs RW Convoke or anything Aggro.
• 2x The End: Vs Aatroxa Domain, Midrange, Control.
  • You don't need to be particularly careful, just tag anything and use this as fuel for the follow-up Deadly Cover-Ups.
• 2x Unlicensed Hearse: Graveyards (ie. BUG Descend)
• 1x Archangel Elspeth / 1x Sorin the Mirthless: Always come in together vs Control.
• 2x ???: Your choice.