Play hydra with Stampeding Serow/Stampeding Wildebeests, where they used to work well with Witness/Viridian Shaman/Wood elves. Keep digging deeper and deeper and get the biggest threat into play.
Get a white paper, write on it "99UUUU, Legendary Wizard, no ability, 0/0" as your general. Beat them with your other 99 cards and they will learn stop groaning about general issues.
Do NOT just think in the way to react with control decks. You have way less reaction cards, or methods to get those cards, than a control deck's number of solutions. Even you have Rootborn Defenses/Fresh Meat in your hand waiting, control players will just say thank you for your 3~4 open mana wasted in every of your turns. Think of the play style that control decks fear most: Repeating threats outnumbering their solutions, and you have to switch to this play style right after you realize the man sitting across the table is a control player.
For your question, if you want one card to help you fight with BOTH tax+wipe, may I introduce Mirari's Wake:
- No it does not destroy tax enchantments, but it make you ignore them by providing extra mana to pay as much tax as required.
- No it does not protect your creatures, but it let you laugh at the wipes by casting double number of threats right after everytime he wipe your board
Besides tax+wipe it helps you fight control:
- It gives your tokens and nontoken creatures +1/+1 boost
- It makes land-ramp spells terrifying good. Oh my free Skyshroud Claim/Garruk Wildspeaker. Not counter this huh?
- It double-powers your token generators(Ant queen/Mobilization/Sacred Mesa)
- It enables you to play supersized X spells (Token: Entreat the Angels/Decree of Justice/White Sun's Zenith, Nontoken: Genesis wave/Genesis hydra/Martial Coup/Green Sun's Zenith/Chord of calling). Say "COUNTER THIS OR DIE!"
- It lets you cast less spells before your control opponent is forced to wipe the board, and you rebuild faster than anyone
- It supports you to put threats and repeatingly recast your general till the control player run out of gas
- It is good for both early and late game.
- It is never a dead card outside control matchups.
Drawback: Your 1/1 tokens become un-skullcamp-able lol
Also suggest Beastmaster Ascension. Once the quest is activated, just keep one to few creatures on board attacking and control players will run out of removals/counterpells very soon.
Plus most Zur players improved their decklists a lot, cutting down on unnecessary enchantments and including more permission and combos. The end result is that Zur became a deck with its worst matchups being 50-50, and its best hitting 70%+ winrate.
For any deck X, if enough supportive cards are printed and enough improvements are made, deck X will become a tier one deck and having incredible winrate. Then deck X will dominate tournaments, then peoples write in forums to suggest banning X, then one day X appears on the banlist and those lost to X celebrate whole night.
It is a PUNISHMENT for being improved. It's not fair to those spent so much time to design and playtest and tune his deck. The story is now teaching us that, if one deck wanna stay alive, it better stays low, has some unpreventable fatal flaws, and lose some or most tournaments. So everyone will be happy. But is this what you want to see?
I am ok to say goodbye to any single card, but I personally am against this banning concept.
I pilot my Zur deck and win local tournaments since Braids cabal minions was banned.
Auto win against XXX is always possible, it is just depends on how hard you want it done, including holding a full hand of dead cards against other decks and even auto-lose to some. But IF A SINGLE DECK XXX is dominating your area, all you need to do is to beat all those XXX in the tournament, stall out the rest, and finally win with highest opponent score.
If this plan fails, that means one or all of the followings: A) you are not desperate enough; B) that XXX deck is NOT THAT dominating; C) Other players DO NOT think XXX is their the-deck-to-beat.
(I miss the days of Affinity VS Anti-affinity.)
----
Edit: Add a story. Sorry in advance if my english is bad, since it's not my first language.
I was dominating the tables in my local card store with my Traditional banlist Zur(swiss knife build). Starting from a year ago I keep losing to a new Oloro(was Merieke) control combo deck. No one including me, except with occasional godly starting hand, is able to beat that deck. What happened? Is that deck unbeatable?
No. The real story is: the metagame in my local card store are midrange voltron/good stuff decks, and players are too busy running board warps and creature removals, and can't afford a lot of combo breakers which are dead cards in most of the games. Because the low possibility of facing a combo opponent, players CHOOSE not to main decking hate cards against combo. The Oloro player reads others' thoughts. He knows that, no matter how hard he slaps on their face, his lack-of-room opponents will CHOOSE not to give up the vs-midrange techs to free up spaces for enough hate cards against him. As a result, he wins almost all tournaments in 2013.
Moral of the story: You are what you CHOOSE to be. You choose to win A then will lose to B, vice versa.
-------
About Zur.
I do not see Zur overpowered. I am not drilling into the card ability nor the deck, but the number of Zur players in each tournaments:
Valence - FR: 1 out of 41
MTG MNL: 3 out of 25
My first point is, for a event with good prizes, if players think "playing XXX is the best choice", most of them will go to play that XXX. See counter-rebel and affinity and jund. Why not win and grab those cool prizes? The numbers tell us, most or the players in the tournaments(40/41=97%, 22/25=88%) DO NOT think Zur is the best choice. It is understandable that some players do not own those cards(esper lands are expensive I know), but the numbers are still over 40% even they are halved.
The second point is, since Zur is not a new deck but already notorious for a long time, if a player choose to play YYY instead of Zur, that means one or more of the followings: A) he THINKS he is ready for Zur matchup; B) he gives up this matchup and use the empty slots for another decks-to-beat. If finally Zur wins the tournament, that means: A) He was wrong-he is not ready; B) He was wrong-Zur IS the deck-to-beat. Combine both case, it reads: He didnt prepare correctly. If you walk in to snowstorm wearing only a undershirt, you freeze because you wrongly estimate the temperature and stupidly mis-prepared, but NOT because of THE SNOW IS TOO COLD.
I wonder Jeska would be in Jeskai color hmmm
and of course dont forget Price of Glory
If you play bant/simic goodstuff, Sunken Hope/crystal shard are your friends
T2: this
T3: Sac it x=1
T4: this again
T5: Sac it x=2
T6: this again
T7: Sac it x=3
You opponent will be sad.
Deck
1 Orcish Settlers
59 Mountains
10 Burns
10 Beaters
10 Spells destroy artifacts/lands
10 Creatures CIP destroy artifacts/lands
You cant stop creatures being bounced but you can make them pay. Main deck Boil.
For your question, if you want one card to help you fight with BOTH tax+wipe, may I introduce Mirari's Wake:
- No it does not destroy tax enchantments, but it make you ignore them by providing extra mana to pay as much tax as required.
- No it does not protect your creatures, but it let you laugh at the wipes by casting double number of threats right after everytime he wipe your board
Besides tax+wipe it helps you fight control:
- It gives your tokens and nontoken creatures +1/+1 boost
- It makes land-ramp spells terrifying good. Oh my free Skyshroud Claim/Garruk Wildspeaker. Not counter this huh?
- It double-powers your token generators(Ant queen/Mobilization/Sacred Mesa)
- It enables you to play supersized X spells (Token: Entreat the Angels/Decree of Justice/White Sun's Zenith, Nontoken: Genesis wave/Genesis hydra/Martial Coup/Green Sun's Zenith/Chord of calling). Say "COUNTER THIS OR DIE!"
- It lets you cast less spells before your control opponent is forced to wipe the board, and you rebuild faster than anyone
- It supports you to put threats and repeatingly recast your general till the control player run out of gas
- It is good for both early and late game.
- It is never a dead card outside control matchups.
Drawback: Your 1/1 tokens become un-skullcamp-able lol
Also suggest Beastmaster Ascension. Once the quest is activated, just keep one to few creatures on board attacking and control players will run out of removals/counterpells very soon.
Sad him. He will live with painful memories as Karn did.
For any deck X, if enough supportive cards are printed and enough improvements are made, deck X will become a tier one deck and having incredible winrate. Then deck X will dominate tournaments, then peoples write in forums to suggest banning X, then one day X appears on the banlist and those lost to X celebrate whole night.
It is a PUNISHMENT for being improved. It's not fair to those spent so much time to design and playtest and tune his deck. The story is now teaching us that, if one deck wanna stay alive, it better stays low, has some unpreventable fatal flaws, and lose some or most tournaments. So everyone will be happy. But is this what you want to see?
I am ok to say goodbye to any single card, but I personally am against this banning concept.
I pilot my Zur deck and win local tournaments since Braids cabal minions was banned.
Auto win against XXX is always possible, it is just depends on how hard you want it done, including holding a full hand of dead cards against other decks and even auto-lose to some. But IF A SINGLE DECK XXX is dominating your area, all you need to do is to beat all those XXX in the tournament, stall out the rest, and finally win with highest opponent score.
If this plan fails, that means one or all of the followings: A) you are not desperate enough; B) that XXX deck is NOT THAT dominating; C) Other players DO NOT think XXX is their the-deck-to-beat.
(I miss the days of Affinity VS Anti-affinity.)
----
Edit: Add a story. Sorry in advance if my english is bad, since it's not my first language.
I was dominating the tables in my local card store with my Traditional banlist Zur(swiss knife build). Starting from a year ago I keep losing to a new Oloro(was Merieke) control combo deck. No one including me, except with occasional godly starting hand, is able to beat that deck. What happened? Is that deck unbeatable?
No. The real story is: the metagame in my local card store are midrange voltron/good stuff decks, and players are too busy running board warps and creature removals, and can't afford a lot of combo breakers which are dead cards in most of the games. Because the low possibility of facing a combo opponent, players CHOOSE not to main decking hate cards against combo. The Oloro player reads others' thoughts. He knows that, no matter how hard he slaps on their face, his lack-of-room opponents will CHOOSE not to give up the vs-midrange techs to free up spaces for enough hate cards against him. As a result, he wins almost all tournaments in 2013.
Moral of the story: You are what you CHOOSE to be. You choose to win A then will lose to B, vice versa.
-------
About Zur.
I do not see Zur overpowered. I am not drilling into the card ability nor the deck, but the number of Zur players in each tournaments:
Valence - FR: 1 out of 41
MTG MNL: 3 out of 25
My first point is, for a event with good prizes, if players think "playing XXX is the best choice", most of them will go to play that XXX. See counter-rebel and affinity and jund. Why not win and grab those cool prizes? The numbers tell us, most or the players in the tournaments(40/41=97%, 22/25=88%) DO NOT think Zur is the best choice. It is understandable that some players do not own those cards(esper lands are expensive I know), but the numbers are still over 40% even they are halved.
The second point is, since Zur is not a new deck but already notorious for a long time, if a player choose to play YYY instead of Zur, that means one or more of the followings: A) he THINKS he is ready for Zur matchup; B) he gives up this matchup and use the empty slots for another decks-to-beat. If finally Zur wins the tournament, that means: A) He was wrong-he is not ready; B) He was wrong-Zur IS the deck-to-beat. Combine both case, it reads: He didnt prepare correctly. If you walk in to snowstorm wearing only a undershirt, you freeze because you wrongly estimate the temperature and stupidly mis-prepared, but NOT because of THE SNOW IS TOO COLD.