So... there was a WMCQ coming up and while preparing for it, I tried out so. many. decks. For about 2 months, I was trying out about 1 deck every 2 weeks or so. If you're only interested in the UW Control deck list, skip ahead as i'll be writing about how I ended up playing the deck after my tour of many others before arriving at it.

• Bant Knightfall - awesome deck, but gosh the lines are tough and i'm not confident of my piloting of it.
• Abzan Evolution - basically, I took lsv's old pre-ban Pod deck and swapped out the Pods for Evolutions and put things in like Sigarda maindeck and such to battle the current meta. Also took out all the Chords to jam in more Rhinos and friends. Worked out well, sorta, but I felt like the power level is too low. Sure you can find your awesome hatebear for the matchup, but it closes the game too slowly when you need to race before he finds his outs.
• Queller Liege - my own brew. Take the GW Little Kid deck that Jacob Wilson played with at the Pro Tour post-ban of Pod and add 4 Spell Quellers to it. Funny enough, I arrived at almost the exact same deck post-Pod-ban before that Pro Tour. It's not too bad, and if anyone ever asks you to discard... :-D But it felt to me like a worse version of BantDrazi.
• Esper Oppression - my own brew, and this one had a long evolutionary journey. I was playing Esper Mentor pretty much since Yuuki Ichikawa won an event with it and it really rocked when Twin was around as it is a Twin killer. But after Twin got banned, the deck got on shakier and shakier legs and I tried out like maybe 6-7 different builds before ending up with a build that has Delvers, Anglers and... Leonin Arbiters. Yes, the color base works even with just 5 fetches. It's nice to be able to hate out the search decks running Rampant in the format and 4 Ghost Quarters are just awesome. I did okay in the previous WMCQ with this deck before getting dreamcrushed by Infect and I tilted. It's nice to be able to flip Delvers off Lingering Souls against Infect and Affinity. :-) But I started to move away from the deck when Dredge became a thing because 1) It can't for the life of it ever ever beat Dredge and 2) It also can't beat consistently race BantDrazi, even with the Quarters.
• Amulet Scout - This deck is the real deal, but just like Bant Knightfall, i'm not confident of my piloting of this deck.
• Infect - I used to play Infect for a little while and it felt awesome back then. But now with Suicide Zoo being huge on the radar, I felt like it was eating side hate. I tried Wild Defiance (and even Dromoka's Command - counter your Anger of the Gods, put a counter on my guy??) and it worked... but when you don't draw these against the decks where its relevant life can get pretty tough.

At this point, I was feeling a little desperate. WMCQ was 1 week away now and i've yet to settle on a deck I really wanted to play. So I went fugedaboutit and went to the Dark Side... Bant Eldrazi. It felt really good in testing and I thought that with 1 week of testing I should be able to get somewhat competent with the deck. I went with Ali Aintrazi's list, but playing 3 Drowner of Hopes instead of 4 in place of Tamiyo, Field Researcher maindeck. Tamiyo is the bomb. Draws you cards, taps down blockers twice, what else does one want in life??

So I took BantDrazi to a few events, and then I realized several problems with the deck. Awkward, awkward hands.

You mulled to 6, Cavern of Souls, Hallowed Fountain, Ancient Stirrings, Noble Hierarch, Thought Knot Seer, Reality Smasher... Keep or mull? If you chose to keep and name Human with Cavern to cast Hierach, welcome to my world where it gets bolted and then your entire hand is stuck. ;-D This is one of the more extreme cases, but there's plenty more like this and I had to mulligan to 3 once due to similar issues.

And like what BBD said in his recent article about BantDrazi sideboarding, BantDrazi is simultaneously the best and most mediocre deck in Modern, and I agree with his assessment. Not just the sideboarding angle, but from a consistency angle. All midrange decks suffer from the issue of drawing the wrong half of the deck, which I thought Ancient Stirrings should fix. But it didn't in my events and I got crushed in the SCG 1k IQ the day before the WMCQ. I spoke to several BantDrazi pilots about my issues with the deck and all of them concurred, but no one knew how to fix them.

And now, about UW Control

A friend showed me a UW Control list that Alan Brietman got 5th in a Modern Open. The list immediately intrigued me because of the 4 Ghost Quarters because my testing with my Esper deck tells me that if you can fit this in your deck, it solves a ton of problems with opposing manlands and when you meet decks like Burn, Suicide Zoo and sometimes even Infect, it becomes Strip Mines. And then I tested the deck against RG Valakut/Breach and BantDrazi and fell in love. This deck felt so smooth and well put together. The hands were consistent, mulligans were good. And it has no lacking in power... if you survive. And survive it does. And then your heroes, Elspeth or Gideon arrives. Or sometimes you are just so far ahead that there's just no way the opponent can ever get back that even your lands or little mages and Faeries start killing them.

So I sleeved up Zac Elsik's UW Control deck with a few changes and set forth to the WMCQ. Changes I made were:

• Swap the Crucible of Worlds and Blessed Alliance from main and side.
• Minus 1 Surgical Extraction in the sideboard for Hallowed Burial.

And... I promptly got crushed at the WMCQ, lol. Not due to the deck's inherent problems but by my poor piloting. Oh well, I counted that as my warmup as there was a really great side event that has the winner getting a plane ticket to Japan to play at the Big Magic Invitationals. So now properly warmed up, I signed up to battle the BMIQ.

This deck is a monster against monster decks. If you're on some kind of midrange strategy hoping to win the game via big creatures... you don't want to sit against this one. Even Thrun won't save you. The diciest games (literally) were against Burn. Who goes first is a big deal as it's the difference between your Mana Leaks working or not. I won against burn at the WMCQ, but I lost to burn at the BMIQ. Thankfully, my breakers were good enough that I made top 8.

In the top 8, I meet none other than Kelvin Chew, the Bant Knightfall master himself who recently top 4'd a GP with it. And he showed me his incredible mastery of the deck game 1 when I tried to Gideon away his Spell Queller while he had Retreat on the board. What could possibly go wrong?? Oops, I didn't notice he had a Ghost Quarter, and he GQ's his own land to search for a Forest and untapped his Queller to save it from Gideon. Oops. Gideon died the turn after and the game spiralled downhill from there.

Game 2, it was a super back and forth grindy match and thankfully it was untimed as we easily took half an hour to play it. I won when he Spell Quellered my Ancestral Vision and I let it resolve. I then cast Supreme Verdict, which he then also Spell Quellered. And for the finale, I Path to Exile'd the Spell Queller exiling the Verdict and I cleared the board, cleared his hand and drew 3 cards.

Game 3. A funky hand that needed to top deck. Lands, Wrath of God, Hallowed Burial (the BEST card against the deck), Jace Beleren. I chose to keep and pray I top decked enough Paths and Condemns to stay alive long enough. Sadly, I didn't, and he killed me with regular damage from a real fat Knight before I could cast my Hallowed Burial the next turn.

This deck is sweet and I think I should be playing it a lot more in the future. Surprisingly, the deck in itself isn't hard to play, after all, it's my first outing with it! The hard part of the deck is knowing all the interactions of your opponent's deck, knowing their lines, knowing all their cards. This deck rewards knowledge of the format, so if you're a Modern veteran that can work out Amulet's lines from the opposing side of the table and play around them, this deck is for you. You need practice and the ability to play at a good pace or you will go to time.

Moving forward, I want a Blessed Alliance in the sideboard together with the one in the main. I'm also looking at trying out an additional finisher, although I can't figure one out yet. The closest one i'm thinking of is actually Linvala, Keeper of Silence. Dovin Baan from Kaladesh is probably also good in this deck, and can probably take the place of the second Jace Beleren in the main. The Wrath of God can also become Supreme Verdict as its uncounterable clause comes up against BantDrazi and Merfolk, whereas the benefits of Wrath only really comes in against Elves, which isn't big in the meta. Blessed Alliance and Hallowed Burial means you aren't dead to Thrun either.

Control is back baby!