In this Standard format we’ve seen a dearth of decks featuring Thalia's Lieutenant, Collected Company, or Archangel Avacyn; but, none of these cards lend themselves toward a real control strategy. One of the big issues with control as an archetype in the first few weeks of a new format is the difficulty in identifying which answers to play. Additionally, the rotation of Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise mean control decks are running short on efficient ways to generate card advantage. Fortunately, Demonic Pact is still around, and this card is incredible in a midrange format as long as you can manage its drawback. JayBoneCapone accepted this challenge and found a wonderful shell for the powerful Enchantment.

U/B Demonic Pact ? Shadows over Innistard Standard | JayBoneCapone, 5-0 Standard League

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Ob Nixilis Reignited

• Spells (33)
• 1 Ultimate Price
• 2 Anticipate
• 2 Silumgar's Command
• 2 Transgress the Mind
• 4 Grasp of Darkness
• 1 Flaying Tendrils
• 1 Read the Bones
• 1 Ruinous Path
• 3 Crush of Tentacles
• 3 Dark Petition
• 3 Duress
• 3 Languish
• 3 Oath of Jace
• 4 Demonic Pact

• Lands (26)
• 13 Swamp
• 6 Island
• 3 Choked Estuary
• 4 Sunken Hollow

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Duress
• 1 Flaying Tendrils
• 1 Ob Nixilis Reignited
• 1 Read the Bones
• 1 Silumgar's Command
• 2 Transgress the Mind
• 2 Disperse
• 2 Dragonlord Silumgar
• 2 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
• 2 Negate

Buy This Deck

This deck is single-minded in its goal. You can use Black removal and hand disruption to ensure you don’t fall too far behind before you can resolve a Demonic Pact. Once a Pact has hit the table you can begin to grind your opponent into the dust with Pact triggers. Use Pact triggers and cheap interaction to keep your opponent contained and then take over by Surging a Crush of Tentacles to pick up your Pacts, reset the board, and generate an overwhelming board presence.

The cute part of this deck is you get to play a bunch of cheap discard in the form of Duress and Transgress the Mind to clear the way for Crush of Tentacles and turn on Surge. Similarly, you have access to Oath of Jace to generate even more value off of Crush of Tentacles.

One of the problems with this style of deck is you’ll get flooded with Crush of Tentacles when you can’t effectively utilize them. Normally, this would mean you don’t want to play as many copies of Crush, but that’s not really an option when you have Demonic Pact in your deck. Consequently, JayBoneCapone has hedged his bets by playing Dark Petition. This deck plays enough cheap discard and removal to consistently turn on Spell Mastery, which means Dark Petition is yet another way to turn on surge for Crush of Tentacles and gives you the ability to play a number of powerful singletons in the seventy-five to swing difficult matchups.

All told, this seems like a powerful and somewhat proactive take on control. Crush of Tentacles seems awesome when the best decks are looking to flood the board with creatures. Demonic Pact seems like a great way to fight against the midrange decks featuring Gideon, Ally of Zendikar or Thought-Knot Seer, and Languish is awesome against everything from Archangel Avacyn to Zurgo Bellstriker. If I was looking to play a control deck in this format, I’d strongly consider picking up this as a starting point.