Mono-White Control | M21 Standard Deck Guide
Intro: 0:00
Bo3: 6:06
Outro: 29:38
Hi, friends! Today we're playing a janky brew: Mono-White Control! We've seen black control decks, we've seen green planeswalker decks, and we've even seen red planeswalker decks (including on this channel), but I never thought to give white a shot to go full-control mode, with no support from other colors. Many believe it can't be done, but here we are! I present to you a brand new archetype for Standard--is it powerful? Well, as you'll see in the video, it's powerful enough to hold its own against Mono-Green Monsters, at least with a little bit of luck. The main thing is that we tried it, right?
I start to discuss my playtesting philosophy in the video before I get distracted by gameplay, so I thought I'd expound on that here. Regarding whether you should take your crazy-ass brews to ranked matches as opposed to play mode, my advice is go for the ranked matches every time. Personally, I never queue anything up for play mode, no matter my confidence level or tier-estimation. And the higher up you are in ranked, the better.
In my opinion, it's really important to have the experience (many, many times) of brewing a deck, thinking it's actually pretty good, thinking you've discovered a great new archetype, and then queueing up a match against a top-tier pilot of a top-tier deck and getting absolutely, mercilessly handled. I've been beaten with random brews so badly and so often, and I know it's made me a better deckbuilder. Don't shelter yourself! Losing with an original deck is the best way to lose in Magic. Also, each and every loss will teach you invaluable lessons, both about changes you need to make to your deck and about why tier-1 decks are tier-1. There's really no better way to understand how good an established archetype is than to play against it with a significantly less powerful deck.
Take Mono-White Control as one example. I spent about half an hour brewing a first draft, played a ranked Bo3 (Diamond tier 2), lost to Radkos Sacrifice, then fixed some problems I noticed, queued up another Bo3, lost to Sultai Ramp, then queued up a third Bo3 (the match recorded in this video, actually), and actually won. The key is to be persistent and figure out why you're losing while paying attention to the combos/starts/spells that make your deck competitive. Now, obviously it's doubtful that something like mono-white control will ever be as strong, in any configuration, as the archetypes at the top of the format. That said, it's my unshakeable belief that there are many, many more competitive archetypes out there than whatever group of decks become popular and replayed constantly.
Anyway, thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe if you like my content. Until next time!
Decklist: https://aetherhub.com/Deck/mono-white...
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