I usually have a one of anger of the gods in my main deck to sweep up anything that might get through my early counter magic. I also use electrolyze to hit finks before I have to use Damnation which leaves them almost nothing which can't be taken care of by Liliana of the veil. I also have Inquisition of Kozilek against them which helps because it can take anything but Collected Company
out of their hand.
hm, yeah but like, what if you don't draw the 1 anger. Also it seems like when u damnation they can rebuild with collected company.
Have you guys really not had that much trouble v. the podless pod deck? I mean they seem to have an excellent possible start against us, How are we handling a start of voice of resurgence kitchen finks. Unless you counter both of those it seems pretty hard to remove them. Eternal witness is also a nightmare. Also Collected Company being an instant and the potential to loop it with eternal witness seems strong against any control deck. How have you guys not had more trouble with it, I guess I'm just a bit surprised it seems like a real deck that puts up a decent amount of results. Also v. infect I've seen plenty of players play night v. them so no its not too slow since if it ever resolves none of their creatures can live through it since they all instantly die.
Hey guys, I highly recommend y'all try out night of souls' betrayal. Recently I was playing v. a collected company deck and that card was pretty great v. them. If you ever get that card plus a relic of progenitus going it feels pretty easy.
Mainly it stops their combo with infinite lifegain via saccing finks and resetting through both exiling the finks when it's temporarily in the GY, or through finks just dying as a 2/1 that gets shrunk to a 1/0 from night while the bolster trigger is on the stack. It also just kills a lot of creatures, voice of resurgence token instantly dies so if you ever manage to get it by itself which shouldn't be hard, then even the voice isn't really an issue. Of course eternal witness just flat out dies too. Basically it "normalizes" a lot of their creatures so that they end up playing incredibly mediocre to useless spells. Perfect for our control deck to do its job against =p.
Also night just makes electrolyzes really insane vs. them and is great v. infect and decent against affinity as well. I know a lot of people here prefer rakdos charm instead of relic, but really I think if you test the matchup v. collected company you'll see that rakdos charm just doesn't do enough, we need to be able to kill kitchen finks with just 1 card, and also stop eternal witness loops. Rakdos charm exiling once just isn't enough most of the time. Also in grindy matchups the fact that it doesn't cycle is a decent knock against it.
I think the night works well particularly with my version of the deck because I try to win with 2 mainboard Jace AoT a lot of the time and Night has excellent synergy with his +1. Also the fact that he's not a creature, and therefore unaffected by Night, helps a lot too.
for me personally, I've not been a big fan of anticipate so far or condescend. scry 2 is actually pretty nice but the card itself is fairly weak. If it ends up doing nothing, id rather it be an actual card and scry nothing. If it scry'd for like 5 + now we're talking. It is best in tron of course because they actually can make it work more reliably as a counter. It also seems like think twice's card advantage might be better than anticipate. I just don't know if anticipate digs you deep enough, like 3 is ok, but 4 would be a lot better and 5 would seem a ton better. I think if its not providing card advantage it seems to me that it has to be digging suuper deep to be worth it. I just don't know if those dig deep enough.
problem I have with blue suns is that the turn u cast it for something meaningful you often die from life loss / something similar. Theres a decent amount of games where you cast it and it is gameover for the opponent, but also theres a lot of games where you just die from having to leave that much mana open in the later game. There does seem to be a big power gap between BSZ and Sphinx's rev.
if u need land destruct btw, ghost quarter isnt the worst.
Wait what? they just reprinted stormscape familiar? Link please? lol. I am not aware of this and after doing a little searching I couldn't find what you're talking about.
well it draws you two cards, adding 2/3 of an ancestral recall is a far cry from just being mind rot. It seems like this card confuses a lot of people though, even me at first. The way its worded anyway is tricky.
Bribery is another mana added on :/. slow. Doesn't deal with a threat on the board either (although it snags a really big fatty).
sower dies to almost everything, but I mean it is still really good.
the draw 2 on it is the only reason i gave this card any consideration. That and its added resilience above sower.
I kinda like it since its a 4 cmc blue card =p. I like to time it as a last resort when they are low on cards in hand :). Sb material tho for sure. Seems better vs decks like jund that play abrupt decay since it doesn't die to that.
Great post MagicVanory. Deck looks solid, now you can just play with number and test oddball cards like Soul Ransom.
I always like playing the fourth Creeping Tar Pit, but sometimes I feel like too many lands coming into play tapped is a problem.
Keep being a coolCruel kid.
Wait wtf? Soul ransom? thats a card? How did I never hear about that lol. Actually seems alrite, though I never played with it. I would've definitely played it in the last standard cycle if I knew it was a card :/. I missed out big time lol.
Yea I had to look that one up too, I wanted to see if playing a split card was worth it since I really really really wanted to have both cmcs in 1 card. The issue I think is they're just not that powerful if you're not pitching them. (If they make new ones in the future I'll Definitely be looking closely at them ). I guess far and away is likely the best option and not entirely unreasonable. I don't know if I'm that desperate though. (Maybe in like a teachings build? lol idk.)(also I still think its really weird how u can pitch the black half of the split card and have it still count as blue. I guess apparently it is multicolored while not on the stack really Bizarre).
On lightning bolt, this card is so good in control decks not just because it can kill creatures And deal damage to players, but it is its mana cost!
It only costs 1 red. Against aggressive decks its really easy to lose important tempo by playing things like dreadbore to remove their creatures, lightning bolting an early aggressive creature is a lot better. It isn't at its best in the sense that you usually don't want to have your plan be lava spiking your opponent in a control deck, you're right. I just think that dealing with early aggressive creatures is something that's important enough to be able to do that I just had to include 4 in the deck even if they aren't blue cards.
I want a Tezzert, agent of bolas package anyone have any ideas how to make it work?
Idk man that seems trickier to manage, but can you really turn down that amazing art on commandeer alone? The guy looks like he is a follower of nicol bolas !
How much testing have you done with this deck, and what results do you have for it? I'm especially concerned about Disrupting Shoal and Commandeer vs. decks packing countermagic. Getting either one of those Remanded sounds miserable.
well since it packs so many spell snares its a little less susceptible to remand blowouts. I mean, that is something you want to watch out for definitely as it would be miserable. The 2 maindeck cliques and another in sb. help a little to see if there's a remand in their hand though. In counterwars generally you can play the shoal when you know they will lose the counterfight. They are bottlenecked by mana a lot of the time, while you are less bottlenecked by this. Another thing that helps win counterwars on the cheap are the logic knots since these can be cast a lot of times for just 2 mana.
Finally, we have of course some disruption in the Sb. to try and strip their hand of these troublesome cards. I initially tried a UWR version of the deck out because I thought being able to pitch the already powerful supreme verdict for 4 and sphinx's revelation for 3 would be really good for this type of deck. It was but in the end I missed some of the discard from grixis and figured that this deck had enough 3's and 4's to still fight the good fight with the shoals. (also having to path so many threats was really annoying since we could abuse the bottlenecking issue a lot less).
My overall testing with the deck is not incredibly exhaustive because it's a fairly recent design to cruel control. In the matches I've played so far with it seemed rlly promising. I think there is still room for improving it that I haven't thought of yet, if anyone wants to test it out and notices a really strong new element to add I'd love to hear it. I can imagine teferi, mage of zhalfir being pretty good though if you are concerned about decks packing a lot of remands. I definitely have to say that the deck is very easy to fall in love with since it's just so much fun to play :). It took me a bit to figure out when exactly I needed to pitch a card, and how exactly to approach counterwars with multiple counters and shoals in hand, as far as which counters to use first. After that initial hardship though it just becomes so much fun pitching cards to win counterwars where I'm tapped out and they extend into my shoal :).
Commandeer is mainly for tron/faeries/liliana decks (so thats why I don't have sowing salts, and instead just have commandeer) because when they get to 7 mana they usually just slam down their threats like karn etc. Also with so many shoals cliques and thoughtseizes you can tend to keep them off of tron assembling, and then they don't have mana for things like remand etc when you commandeer their tapped out threat.
Oh and one thing that I noticed was that if a blood moon happened to land having shoals in the deck helped a lot in order to still play, being able to still counter things making use of potentially dead cards through a blood moon is a really interesting benefit. I also managed to still be able to commandeer with 1 mana in play after getting sun titan'd out of mana.
Hey guys, I'm very excited to share with you a recent and incredibly incredibly fun version of Cruel Control configured by yours truly :)! It all started when I faced a deck online that used Commandeer against me. It absolutely destroyed me but I noticed it was a monoblue deck and I thought he could really use other colors in the deck to shore up aggressive/other matchups that he was probably weak against. Another card that I faced that impressed me a lot was Disrupting shoal. Now people have been trying hard to make these cards viable in modern for a long time because they have alternate 0 mana costs to them, making them prime candidates for "Breaking magic"(In fact the red shoal is already banned in modern!). I decided that I just simply couldn't resist making a deck with these 3 GORGEOUS magic cards (and hey! they have interesting synergy!)
So without further ado, I present you guys with Cruel Command!
So I knew from the beginning I wanted to play with a high amount of Spell Snare and disrupting shoal, with these two in hand we can counter both 1 mana and 2 mana spells for either 1 or 0 mana. This is of course very powerful even if it means having to 2 for 1 ourselves. (it reminds me a lot of control decks of old that played force spike to be able to counter early drops on the draw) Some spells we just HAVE to counter. Theres a long list of these cards, and a lot of other cards just don't matter that much from a lot of decks. A list that comes to mind includes cards like: Liliana of the veil, Geist of saint traft, bitterblossom, slippery bogle, cranial plating, etched champion, scapeshift, splinter twin, (even aether vial could be worth it to disrupting shoal pitching a spell snare depending on the hand), expedition map, amulet of vigor, Blood Moon etc. The list goes on! (oh and don't forget those completely absurd hate cards against us Choke and Boil .... ) but you'll notice that most of these fall in the 1-4 CMC drop range. So I knew I had to play with a LOT of blue spells that filled these CMC requirements if I was going to make this deck work.
So I had a base for 1's and 2's being counterable very early on in the game. I added some Quicken to the list to be able to quicken thoughtseize, damnation, and even cruel. But also it cycles early if they don't have the dangerous one drops, and if they do it lets us pitch it to disrupting shoal. It also lets us skimp on land just a touch, this deck plays only 25 land. It also enables a bit more delve fuel. Do you hate mana leak? this is the deck for you because it plays 3 logic knot! these of course cannot be spell snared(yay resilience!) and they also pitch covering our 2's (our 2 CMC pitching is very covered in this deck, which is great for countering those pesky mana leaks trying to stop us from ultimatuming!, and if we pitch a 2 cmc to stop their mana leak with our shoal, it cannot even be spell snared!).
now, an important thing to note is if you disrupting shoal for anything greater than Zero, it cannot be spell snared because the x gets added to the 2 blue. I made this deck to be very resilient to spell snare because that card is everywhere.
Next was 3 to add some reslience against liliana of the veil, blood moon, choke, geist of saint traft, and wild defiance. So I chose 2 main clique, 1 board. Plus this card is just bonkers against tron/combo. Another 3 CMC blue spell in the deck is electrolyze! This is such a natural fit, it cycles which is exactly what we want in a pitch card and it is blue! yay!
finally 4 CMC. This is where Jace, architect of thought does some work along with cryptic command. At this point however we don't necessarily need too many 4's since at that point in the game we have access to a little more mana and are getting closer to spiking in power as we are a control deck.
on a side note, even cruel ultimatum can pitch to counter something like a Karn, liberated or a sphinx rev. for x=4. These don't come up too often but vs. Tron I could see happening a little more realistically. A SUPER important thing to note is that you can just pay X with your mana to counter something with the shoal. You don't HAVE to pitch a card, it can very easily just be a spell blast that costs 1 more blue mana to cast. Not the strongest card, but this is it's worst mode. Also this deck REALLY rewards you for knowing the modern format inside and out. Knowing the most threatening cards in an opponent's deck can give you a HUGE edge with these shoals.
A real prize/payout of the deck however is that with all these blue cards you get to play Commandeer in the sideboard against Tron. I think that this is very awesome because one thing control hates to play against is tron, and Commandeering a Karn or Ugin is definitely something that can put us firmly in the drivers seat. I've also commandeered bitterblossom and boy was it fun and also strong. yes commandeer sets you back a bit in cards but a thing that I had to learn about it was that it stealing a prime threat that you didn't pay mana for can Definitely be well worth it.
With the pitch cards and cycling cards like Quicken the GY filling is also a powerful aspect to this deck. The fact logic knot dodges spell snare is HUGE, it also a lot of times is basically Counterspell. This is a huge boon to the deck that really combined with everything else really gives it some real power.
One last thing I wanted to say about this deck is that I noticed the most powerful thing about it was it solved some of the biggest issues with cruel ultimatum in modern. Have you ever wanted to apply pressure with those tar pits, but were scared of tapping low vs the opponent, but you knew you HAD to apply pressure because they had inevitability? Have you ever tapped out and played cruel ultimatum only to die after passing the turn to something you could've dealt with the next turn? Have you ever even tapped out for a batterskull against burn only to die to their last card a lightning bolt, and you still had plenty of cards in hand but they were just too fast? This is where disrupting shoal truly shines for this deck. We can be truly abusive and use our card advantage in these situations with the shoal to shut down these opportunities that our opponent have while we are tapped out. It is the closest thing to playing with force of will that we will ever get in modern, and I have to say after playing with the deck a bit, when your opponent feels safe behind a spell snare and mana leak/remand, forcing through a threat like cruel ultimatum [shoaling pitching something like mana leak or snapcaster(mind you this shoal cannot be snared!)]bypassing this counterwall (and invalidating spell snare especially) feels incredibly powerful (this type of scenario happens all too often). additionally when the opponent plays their Key spell after seeing you have tapped out, only to have it shoal'd the surprise factor is super awesome and even threatening. It's just like browbeat's flavor text, even the threat of power has power :).
Hey all, I've recently gone up to 3 vendilion clique , 1 mainboard, 2 sideboard. After trying it out a little so far it seems to be working pretty well. I love it vs combo decks and things like tron etc.(tron is such a bothersome matchup). Also you can side it in vs control matchups as well. What do people think of the 3/1 flying faeries? 2 is of course reasonable but I don't really see too many people running more than that. It seems fairly natural to our deckstyle since we try to resolve ultimatum vs control decks and this is a great way to see if the coast is clear, without having to tap out. Grixis lacks a threat like Restoration angel, is vendilion clique a potential spot filler for that slot(I know they're pretty different, but still some similarities at least)?
Another thing is kolagan's command never really impressed me when trying it out. It just seemed not powerful enough, just ok-ish. The creature buyback didnt seem super relevant, buying back a snapcaster is great but since I only run 3 snaps and barely any other creatures this doesn't really come up often for me. Also the spell seems like something you'd wanna do earlier in the game, like killing something with 2 toughness, But it seems like the other 2 frequent modes (discard a card and resurrect a creature) are later game things. This is a very annoying anti-synergy in the card I think.
Anyway, I figured clique going down in price after MM15 would inspire more people to test out more copies. I know I've seen miracles play 3 copies before so despite the differences in formats, the card is at least a very powerful card.
hm, yeah but like, what if you don't draw the 1 anger. Also it seems like when u damnation they can rebuild with collected company.
Mainly it stops their combo with infinite lifegain via saccing finks and resetting through both exiling the finks when it's temporarily in the GY, or through finks just dying as a 2/1 that gets shrunk to a 1/0 from night while the bolster trigger is on the stack. It also just kills a lot of creatures, voice of resurgence token instantly dies so if you ever manage to get it by itself which shouldn't be hard, then even the voice isn't really an issue. Of course eternal witness just flat out dies too. Basically it "normalizes" a lot of their creatures so that they end up playing incredibly mediocre to useless spells. Perfect for our control deck to do its job against =p.
Also night just makes electrolyzes really insane vs. them and is great v. infect and decent against affinity as well. I know a lot of people here prefer rakdos charm instead of relic, but really I think if you test the matchup v. collected company you'll see that rakdos charm just doesn't do enough, we need to be able to kill kitchen finks with just 1 card, and also stop eternal witness loops. Rakdos charm exiling once just isn't enough most of the time. Also in grindy matchups the fact that it doesn't cycle is a decent knock against it.
I think the night works well particularly with my version of the deck because I try to win with 2 mainboard Jace AoT a lot of the time and Night has excellent synergy with his +1. Also the fact that he's not a creature, and therefore unaffected by Night, helps a lot too.
Modern's version of Hydroblast v. Pyroblast XD. Lol jk.
if u need land destruct btw, ghost quarter isnt the worst.
Logic knot is like my favorite. I really like it.
Bribery is another mana added on :/. slow. Doesn't deal with a threat on the board either (although it snags a really big fatty).
sower dies to almost everything, but I mean it is still really good.
the draw 2 on it is the only reason i gave this card any consideration. That and its added resilience above sower.
Wait wtf? Soul ransom? thats a card? How did I never hear about that lol. Actually seems alrite, though I never played with it. I would've definitely played it in the last standard cycle if I knew it was a card :/. I missed out big time lol.
On lightning bolt, this card is so good in control decks not just because it can kill creatures And deal damage to players, but it is its mana cost!
It only costs 1 red. Against aggressive decks its really easy to lose important tempo by playing things like dreadbore to remove their creatures, lightning bolting an early aggressive creature is a lot better. It isn't at its best in the sense that you usually don't want to have your plan be lava spiking your opponent in a control deck, you're right. I just think that dealing with early aggressive creatures is something that's important enough to be able to do that I just had to include 4 in the deck even if they aren't blue cards.
Idk man that seems trickier to manage, but can you really turn down that amazing art on commandeer alone? The guy looks like he is a follower of nicol bolas !
well since it packs so many spell snares its a little less susceptible to remand blowouts. I mean, that is something you want to watch out for definitely as it would be miserable. The 2 maindeck cliques and another in sb. help a little to see if there's a remand in their hand though. In counterwars generally you can play the shoal when you know they will lose the counterfight. They are bottlenecked by mana a lot of the time, while you are less bottlenecked by this. Another thing that helps win counterwars on the cheap are the logic knots since these can be cast a lot of times for just 2 mana.
Finally, we have of course some disruption in the Sb. to try and strip their hand of these troublesome cards. I initially tried a UWR version of the deck out because I thought being able to pitch the already powerful supreme verdict for 4 and sphinx's revelation for 3 would be really good for this type of deck. It was but in the end I missed some of the discard from grixis and figured that this deck had enough 3's and 4's to still fight the good fight with the shoals. (also having to path so many threats was really annoying since we could abuse the bottlenecking issue a lot less).
My overall testing with the deck is not incredibly exhaustive because it's a fairly recent design to cruel control. In the matches I've played so far with it seemed rlly promising. I think there is still room for improving it that I haven't thought of yet, if anyone wants to test it out and notices a really strong new element to add I'd love to hear it. I can imagine teferi, mage of zhalfir being pretty good though if you are concerned about decks packing a lot of remands. I definitely have to say that the deck is very easy to fall in love with since it's just so much fun to play :). It took me a bit to figure out when exactly I needed to pitch a card, and how exactly to approach counterwars with multiple counters and shoals in hand, as far as which counters to use first. After that initial hardship though it just becomes so much fun pitching cards to win counterwars where I'm tapped out and they extend into my shoal :).
Commandeer is mainly for tron/faeries/liliana decks (so thats why I don't have sowing salts, and instead just have commandeer) because when they get to 7 mana they usually just slam down their threats like karn etc. Also with so many shoals cliques and thoughtseizes you can tend to keep them off of tron assembling, and then they don't have mana for things like remand etc when you commandeer their tapped out threat.
Oh and one thing that I noticed was that if a blood moon happened to land having shoals in the deck helped a lot in order to still play, being able to still counter things making use of potentially dead cards through a blood moon is a really interesting benefit. I also managed to still be able to commandeer with 1 mana in play after getting sun titan'd out of mana.
So without further ado, I present you guys with Cruel Command!
3x Cryptic Command
3x Disrupting Shoal
1x murderous cut
3x Logic Knot
3x Electrolyze
4x Lightning Bolt
2x Quicken
2x Remand
3x Spell Snare
2x Terminate
Sorceries:
1x Damnation
1x Cruel Ultimatum
Creatures:
3x Snapcaster Mage
2x vendilion clique
1x Batterskull
Planeswalkers:
1x Jace, Architect of thought
Lands:
2x Island
1x Mountain
1x Swamp
2x Steam Vents
2x Watery Grave
1x Blood Crypt
4x Polluted Delta
3x Scalding Tarn
4x Creeping Tar Pit
2x Sulfur Falls
2x Ghost Quarter
1x sunken ruins
1x Batterskull
1x keranos, god of storms
2x Commandeer
1x Engineered Explosives
1x Dispel
1x Disrupting Shoal
1x Tasigur, the Golden Fang
2x Shattering Spree
2x Relic of Progenitus
1x Vendilion clique
1x inquisition of kozilek
1x Thoughtseize
So I knew from the beginning I wanted to play with a high amount of Spell Snare and disrupting shoal, with these two in hand we can counter both 1 mana and 2 mana spells for either 1 or 0 mana. This is of course very powerful even if it means having to 2 for 1 ourselves. (it reminds me a lot of control decks of old that played force spike to be able to counter early drops on the draw) Some spells we just HAVE to counter. Theres a long list of these cards, and a lot of other cards just don't matter that much from a lot of decks. A list that comes to mind includes cards like: Liliana of the veil, Geist of saint traft, bitterblossom, slippery bogle, cranial plating, etched champion, scapeshift, splinter twin, (even aether vial could be worth it to disrupting shoal pitching a spell snare depending on the hand), expedition map, amulet of vigor, Blood Moon etc. The list goes on! (oh and don't forget those completely absurd hate cards against us Choke and Boil .... ) but you'll notice that most of these fall in the 1-4 CMC drop range. So I knew I had to play with a LOT of blue spells that filled these CMC requirements if I was going to make this deck work.
So I had a base for 1's and 2's being counterable very early on in the game. I added some Quicken to the list to be able to quicken thoughtseize, damnation, and even cruel. But also it cycles early if they don't have the dangerous one drops, and if they do it lets us pitch it to disrupting shoal. It also lets us skimp on land just a touch, this deck plays only 25 land. It also enables a bit more delve fuel. Do you hate mana leak? this is the deck for you because it plays 3 logic knot! these of course cannot be spell snared(yay resilience!) and they also pitch covering our 2's (our 2 CMC pitching is very covered in this deck, which is great for countering those pesky mana leaks trying to stop us from ultimatuming!, and if we pitch a 2 cmc to stop their mana leak with our shoal, it cannot even be spell snared!).
now, an important thing to note is if you disrupting shoal for anything greater than Zero, it cannot be spell snared because the x gets added to the 2 blue. I made this deck to be very resilient to spell snare because that card is everywhere.
Next was 3 to add some reslience against liliana of the veil, blood moon, choke, geist of saint traft, and wild defiance. So I chose 2 main clique, 1 board. Plus this card is just bonkers against tron/combo. Another 3 CMC blue spell in the deck is electrolyze! This is such a natural fit, it cycles which is exactly what we want in a pitch card and it is blue! yay!
finally 4 CMC. This is where Jace, architect of thought does some work along with cryptic command. At this point however we don't necessarily need too many 4's since at that point in the game we have access to a little more mana and are getting closer to spiking in power as we are a control deck.
on a side note, even cruel ultimatum can pitch to counter something like a Karn, liberated or a sphinx rev. for x=4. These don't come up too often but vs. Tron I could see happening a little more realistically. A SUPER important thing to note is that you can just pay X with your mana to counter something with the shoal. You don't HAVE to pitch a card, it can very easily just be a spell blast that costs 1 more blue mana to cast. Not the strongest card, but this is it's worst mode. Also this deck REALLY rewards you for knowing the modern format inside and out. Knowing the most threatening cards in an opponent's deck can give you a HUGE edge with these shoals.
A real prize/payout of the deck however is that with all these blue cards you get to play Commandeer in the sideboard against Tron. I think that this is very awesome because one thing control hates to play against is tron, and Commandeering a Karn or Ugin is definitely something that can put us firmly in the drivers seat. I've also commandeered bitterblossom and boy was it fun and also strong. yes commandeer sets you back a bit in cards but a thing that I had to learn about it was that it stealing a prime threat that you didn't pay mana for can Definitely be well worth it.
With the pitch cards and cycling cards like Quicken the GY filling is also a powerful aspect to this deck. The fact logic knot dodges spell snare is HUGE, it also a lot of times is basically Counterspell. This is a huge boon to the deck that really combined with everything else really gives it some real power.
One last thing I wanted to say about this deck is that I noticed the most powerful thing about it was it solved some of the biggest issues with cruel ultimatum in modern. Have you ever wanted to apply pressure with those tar pits, but were scared of tapping low vs the opponent, but you knew you HAD to apply pressure because they had inevitability? Have you ever tapped out and played cruel ultimatum only to die after passing the turn to something you could've dealt with the next turn? Have you ever even tapped out for a batterskull against burn only to die to their last card a lightning bolt, and you still had plenty of cards in hand but they were just too fast? This is where disrupting shoal truly shines for this deck. We can be truly abusive and use our card advantage in these situations with the shoal to shut down these opportunities that our opponent have while we are tapped out. It is the closest thing to playing with force of will that we will ever get in modern, and I have to say after playing with the deck a bit, when your opponent feels safe behind a spell snare and mana leak/remand, forcing through a threat like cruel ultimatum [shoaling pitching something like mana leak or snapcaster(mind you this shoal cannot be snared!)]bypassing this counterwall (and invalidating spell snare especially) feels incredibly powerful (this type of scenario happens all too often). additionally when the opponent plays their Key spell after seeing you have tapped out, only to have it shoal'd the surprise factor is super awesome and even threatening. It's just like browbeat's flavor text, even the threat of power has power :).
Another thing is kolagan's command never really impressed me when trying it out. It just seemed not powerful enough, just ok-ish. The creature buyback didnt seem super relevant, buying back a snapcaster is great but since I only run 3 snaps and barely any other creatures this doesn't really come up often for me. Also the spell seems like something you'd wanna do earlier in the game, like killing something with 2 toughness, But it seems like the other 2 frequent modes (discard a card and resurrect a creature) are later game things. This is a very annoying anti-synergy in the card I think.
Anyway, I figured clique going down in price after MM15 would inspire more people to test out more copies. I know I've seen miracles play 3 copies before so despite the differences in formats, the card is at least a very powerful card.