Unitless X Blue v.4.3

The strategy for playing the deck is as follows: Remove all the opponent's threats with Permafrost, Eilyn's Choice, Slay, Feeding Time, and In Cold Blood. If playing against aggro or tokens, Hailstorm their board. For late-game board control, Harsh Rule is integral. The Celestial Omen package helps you get Harsh Rule, if necessary, but otherwise has a package of Azindel's Gift against control and midrange, The Last Word as a win-con against lifegain and control, and Touch of the Umbren if your life total is low and the opponent has good units. Strategize and Wisdom of the Elders help the deck maintain card advantage. The primary win-con is Channel the Tempest. The deck is strong against aggro, midrange, and tokens. The deck is weak against decks that use relic weapons and other control decks.

But this deck is a result of months upon months of work. To start with, we need to go back to a JPS control list I made back when Dread Reckoning was released. It was titled Control X Control, to signify that it's as controlling as it gets. The deck was a Channel the Tempest unitless control deck. It relied on the then new Hailstorm for a significant boost against aggro. It also ran a simple weapon package consisting of Duelist's Blade and Sword of the Sky King. This deck can be called v.0.0

The next iteration, that originally seemed unrelated, was a Nictotraxian Control list. It ran all of the good removal spells in all factions, and was generally a really fun Celestial Omen pile. But after seeing potential in this deck, I had an idea. By cutting red, I was able to create Exodia Control, this was v.1.0. It didn't run Celestial Omen due to how disappointed I had been with that card in the Nictotraxian list, but preserved most of the removal package. It was called Exodia Control because it relied on Temporal Distortion in order to win in conjunction with Channel the Tempest and Aid of the Hooru.

After submitting that deck to reddit, I was able to create v.2.0, Temporal Tempest V2 with the feedback I got. It was mostly minor changes to tune the deck more. Trail Maker became Find the Way. I started running Disjunction and I reduced the cards in the win package. I also added Touch of the Umbren as a lifegain card and The Last Word as a win condition against other control decks. Most importantly, I started running Celestial Omen again. The other changes were comparatively minuscule. This slowly evolved into v.3.0, which I called Four Faction Blue, it stopped trying to combo and started to focus more on removal and card advantage. The deck got significantly more tuned in this iteration, until I realized that the fourth faction was not worth the effort. From this, Unitless x Blue was created. And v.4.0 has been by far the most successful of any iteration.

The first question has to be, why does the deck not run units? This is not on principle, blanking the opponents removal is good and all, but units mostly don't advance our strategy. Champion of Cunning is good, but with the TJP metagame, it loses a lot of value. Furthermore, usually it's just better to win with other cards in the deck. The only other unit that furthers our strategy is Black-Sky Harbinger, but Touch of the Umbren is better removal and lifegain. The deck also started to run Azindel's Gift, which is a powerful conditional tool but was previously not played due to the influence requirements. The changes from v.4.0 to v.4.2 only included tuning the deck further with Permafrost and other small changes. And finally, v.4.3 added In Cold Blood as a replacement for two Feeding Time.

And I need to insert this final note. The inclusion of merchants will make the deck unimaginably better. Some cards in the list can be dead draws. But, just by adding four of Kerendon Merchant, the deadly market package of The Last Word, Azindel's Gift, Touch of the Umbren, Slay, and Feeding Time will greatly increase the quality of the average draw and early-game. Another strong option would be to run Jennev Merchant for Channel the Tempest, Long Live the Queen, Eilyn's Choice, Celestial Omen, and Feeding Time. It might seem tempting to run merchants of multiple factions, but this is wrong. It may seem that each additional merchant expands the options in the market, but this is false. Even if all cards in the market have multiple factions, each merchant could have access to three or four. The choices for the merchants themselves are reduced, which makes them powerful tools for consistently drawing integral cards. But this means that the packages of niche powerful cards would have to be in the maindeck, which is a strong negative. The only reason I see for running merchants of multiple factions is if there is a pressing need for more than four merchants in the deck.