Deck Spotlight -

Indomitable Creativity

Intended Audience - Beginner

Written By Filip Skornicki

Check out the deck!

While planeswalker-heavy control builds have found plenty of success in Modern, some people still like to take a spin on the core archetype. The biggest drawback of classic control is taking forever to actually close out games. Some people add more walkers, some mandlands. And some like to add a new dimension to the control deck, essentially dipping their toes into another archetype - Combo Control.

This deck is a textbook of such a deck. Let’s explore the control part. The deck plays 11 planeswalkers - Wrenn and Six; Teferi, Time Raveler; Jace, the Mind Sculptor; Nahiri, the Harbinger. Clearly, we’ve got the value engines we need to be provided with cards. Jace and Wrenn double up as additional win conditions and Teferi just stomps other control decks and Cascade.

Furthermore, we play 3 Remand as on-stack interaction and 5 one-mana point removal in Prismatic Ending and Lightning Bolt. It’s accompanied by 3 Prismari Command and 4 Fire // Ice. All in all, the deck plays 16 interaction spells. Clearly, the deck enjoys a game where it is the control. 

Let’s get to the combo part. In short, Indomitable Creativity allows us to pay RRRX where X is the number of things we want to target, destroy them and flip cards off the top of our deck until we find a creature. This is why we only play 2 creatures in the entire deck to make sure we hit exactly them. The creatures are Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and Serra’s Emissary. Emrakul is a creature whose first attack very few survive. Not only does it attack for 15 in the entire but also makes the opponent sacrifice 6 permanents. Serra’s Emissary gives us full protection from a card type - usually creatures or Instants. When we choose Creature then our opponent will not be able to kill us via combat until the Emissary is removed.

Now, to enable the Creativity we need something to destroy. First, Hard Evidence creates two permanents which are our destroy targets. Second, we play full 4 copies of Dwarven Mire which creates a token on entry. In order to fulfill its Mountain requirement, our manabase consists mainly of this land type.

The easiest way to stop the combo is to hold up removal and kill whatever Creativity is targeting. However, sometimes it’ll target a Clue token which cannot be removed via traditional means. And if we tunnel vision too much on their combo plan, we will be outground by their control plan. We need to stay focused, have our own proactive plan, while being able to interact through permission like Force of Negation, removal like Fatal Push or generic answers such as Echoing Truth.