MTG Salvation

Circu is one hell of a sleeper for me. I've dismissed him as utter trash ever since I started playing commander, until I heard about the lantern control archetype in modern and had to find a way to make it work in EDH. If you're not familar, Lantern Control uses the seemingly worthless card lantern on insight to selectively mill opponents so that they never draw relevant cards.

Oona or Phenax is the more obvious option, however I like circu more for a few reasons:
-he doesn't put a big target on himself
-he lets me play the things I want to play anyway

Oona is big, fat, and sucks up a ton of mana, and puts a huge target on her own head. Phenax forces you to play a bunch of creatures, and then they have to survive a turn unless they've got haste, plus he doesn't exile which is a lot weaker. Circu just wants you to play a bunch of random stuff that cycles through your deck.

A few notes:
-As getting the topdeck revealing cards, of which only 3 exist, is of utmost importance, every tutor can fetch them (or, in the case of mystical, chain into them with demonic tutor).
-in desperate situations, moonring island and one of the milling lands can do a weak lantern control impersonation.
-to get any card back, you can use academy ruins and codex shredder
-fetchlands are great with topdeck revealing! also for your opponent, which is part of why psychic surgery is in there.
-volrath's stronghold and academy ruins are your ways to avoid decking, should it come to that.
-cavern harpy or shrieking drake are your endgame plans to fully control topdecks
-future sight is even better here, since circu lets you exile stuff you don't want
-whim of volrath can be used to set circu's abilities to both trigger on the same color - usually blue - so you can double-mill off whim, or double-mill of shrieking drake for ultimate value
-yes, all the hand revealing is necessary because I said so
-submerge is doubly sweet here since you can just exile the creature if you want to
-vengeful pharaoh combos with codex shredder
-intuition packages are tricky. codex shredder + lantern + ruins guarantees eventual lantern, but if they just pick lantern then you might have a hard time getting back your recursion pieces.

Anyway, here's the deck:

here is a link to my version of this deck! what i have found is that while the deck does work. nobody would play with me more than once. i still love the deck a lot and you are a beautiful human for trying it also



http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/circus-fateseal-control/

number one card i can reccoment is hair-strung koto

Quote from AgrajagZZ9 »

number one card i can reccoment is hair-strung koto

koto never made enough sense for this list since it's only got a handful of creatures. it is pretty sweet with shrieking drake, but still I don't think it's reliable enough to consider. Drake is a card I don't think I'd even want to play until I feel like I can take on the table, once people know I can deny every topdeck they're likely to get violent.

My biggest question looking at your list is, how reliably do you get lantern/field/snitches? I only see a few tutors for them.

I think you need a way to prevent card drawing. If they have a commander with some form of inherent card advantage (like Azami for instance) then they can just spam draws until you can't cope with them anymore. Notion Thief seems like the perfect answer. Alternatively, Omen Machine seems good. Mill anything relevant from your opponents top deck and you can even mill yourself for some great value.

The other issue is opening hands. It's not like modern where you can pick them apart with Thoughtseizes and often weather out the storm, sometimes they just have the card to destroy you in their hand. Myojin of Night's Reach and Cabal Conditioning offer mass discard that hits all of your opponents to get them empty handed, at which point you can control their draws. I've even had success with Mind Twist just to put a control player out of the game.

I'm mostly looking at your actual version and not the budgetless one so sorry for some redundant suggestions.

I run a UB goodstuff Circu deck, and have always been meaning to upgrade to a Lantern Control deck. Circu is decent with Oblivion Sower.

Quote from Guild McCommunist »

I think you need a way to prevent card drawing. If they have a commander with some form of inherent card advantage (like Azami for instance) then they can just spam draws until you can't cope with them anymore. Notion Thief seems like the perfect answer. Alternatively, Omen Machine seems good. Mill anything relevant from your opponents top deck and you can even mill yourself for some great value.

The other issue is opening hands. It's not like modern where you can pick them apart with Thoughtseizes and often weather out the storm, sometimes they just have the card to destroy you in their hand. Myojin of Night's Reach and Cabal Conditioning offer mass discard that hits all of your opponents to get them empty handed, at which point you can control their draws. I've even had success with Mind Twist just to put a control player out of the game.

I'm mostly looking at your actual version and not the budgetless one so sorry for some redundant suggestions.

Well I do already have notion thief in there. Omen machine seems too hard to control and too slow imo, and giving me a free cast is mostly worthless. Plus circu hates artifacts.

I'm relying more on counters to deal with anything powerful in my opponents hands or that they manage to draw or tutor for. Part of the goal of the deck is to be able to keep tabs on what everyone has, while only dealing with the huge problems and focusing most of the mill on the players who are getting too far ahead, to rein them back in by totally negating their topdecks. All that to say, playing an early myojin probably makes me the enemy of the table, which I probably can't handle (and also don't want to handle - if I wanted to play a control deck that can fight the entire table at once from an early turn, I'd play child of alara instead). Playing one late shouldn't be necessary, since I should be paying attention to what everyone has and keeping up counters for anything I know I'll need to counter as I head into the endgame. Maybe I should be playing forbid though. Also conditioning is going to be unreliable in a deck with this low of a curve, especially if opponents have targeted removal in response.

I've only got the one version, which has no budget.