#Unethical control with The Glass Man

and a little about playing the control strategy

Physically weak but packed with powerful
card advantage abilities, The Glass Man is
ideal at the helm of a controlling deck

One thing about Megacorp that becomes apparent after a little time spent building and designing decks is that the amount of direct card draw is very limited. This is obviously a design feature rather than a mistake, leaving aspiring deck builders to find other ways to obtain card advantage, and increasing the power of abilities like Mutation and Dead Drop, which allow players to extend their board position. As partial compensation for this, several of the founders come with massive card advantage abilities attached, which include the ability to search the deck for cards with certain hashtags, giving the game a little bit of the feel of the Commander/EDH format of Magic: the Gathering. The Glass Man - Corp by alignment but still a #human character rather than a Cyborg - is one such founder, allowing you to search your deck OR open market for a card with the #moral and #assault tags and put it into your hand. He also has the ability to return a card with the same tags from the network to your hand, allowing it to be re-deployed and its effect used again. This allows you to keep your hand full, and in particular, full of answers. This is what we want to do as a control deck; answer the opponent's plays efficiently, retaining as many cards as possible in our hand, because more cards =  more options. If you refer to our previous article on Making Money in Megacorp he also has the ability, through the use of the card Glass Man's Gambit, to turn into a money-making machine. This is again ideal for a control deck, because - just like a control deck in Magic: the Gathering requires a lot of mana - we'll need access to a lot of money to play all of our cards.

The Glass Man comes in a starter deck with many cards that work well alongside him, including his Gambit, and a few that could easily be considered "filler" so let's take a look at this starter deck list and explore what is worth keeping around, and what could be better replaced with a more powerful or less situational card. Here's the initial list, which as you might have guessed from the tone of the article so far, will be modified to a more controlling list, to take advantage of those previously discussed card advantage abilities:

The deck's main win condition. The Glass
Man can search for it, and the objective
of the deck is straightforward: use your
masses of #unethical removal to break
the opponent's board position, forcing 
them to spend money to avoid losing the
game from having an orphaned business.
Then, send them broke by playing one of
these in their network, in one of those
nice little holes you opened up with a 
removal card, right next to their business

1 The Glass Man

1 Corp Enterprise

4 Corp Advisor

3 Corp Executive

2 Bomber Drone

4 Corp Citizen

2 Horizon Advanced Restraints

2 Avatar Industries Mariner Suit

1 Powered Armour

4 Kickback

1 Tidal Wave

1 Assassination Contract

1 Population Displacement

1 Glass Man's Gambit

3 Sentry Drone

3 Sniper Drone

1 Anti-Gravity Field

3 Kidnapping

2 Rampant Bribery

2 Political Corruption

10 Selfish Consumers

5 Affluent Consumers

5 Entertainment Facility

Of the cards in this list, many of the removal cards are searchable via The Glass Man's effect, including Rampant Bribery, Political Corruption and Kickback, as well as the Glass Man's Gambit. Other removal cards in the deck include Kidnapping - one of the game's cheapest and most effective removal cards, and Assassination Contract - the game's most permanent. We'll be retaining all of these cards in our final build; as a control deck, we want to make sure we've got answers for our opponent's characters, although the number of Kickback is likely too high, since we'll be able to search for it and re-use it. Space may be better used for some other cards. We'd like to cut the Horizon Advanced Restraints as well, as they are a weak form of removal - their only real advantage, aside from being searchable by Dead Drop, is in not sending the removed card to the open market. We aren't taking advantage of the lockdown ability to land a Critical Hit or anything like that in this deck.

One of the game's most versatile cards,
and better than the Magic: the Gathering
spell of the same name, the ability of 
this card to redirect attacks as well as
events is what elevates it to god-tier   

Characters are not going to be the only part of the opponent's plans, however; they will no doubt have some events of their own to affect the game, and we'll definitely be wanting to stop those happening as well. Two Timely Interception - the game's version of a counterspell - and two Misdirection will be added to the final list to be able to deal with this kind of problem, so we'll have to find a few cuts. First to go is Tidal Wave; firstly, despite the potential for card advantage, allowing your opponent to search their deck for a #crisis card is usually a fairly bad idea - and secondly, it's very expensive. We can find a cheaper board sweeper - and we'll need one, as trading one for one is no way to establish a board advantage. Railgun Strike is likely the best choice; the ability hit a row or a column plus the more convenient trait cost makes it a superior choice to Telekinetic Slash, easily making up for the additional financial cost. Additionally, although expensive in trait costs, we actually have the ability to pay the cost of activating the Disruptor bonus effect on Railgun Strike; we have no characters with Magellan cells to gain the bonus effect on Telekinetic Slash. The other board sweeper we'll add is Vulcan Cannon. While technically a piece of equipment, it effectively grants the equipped character the ability to play board sweepers for you, discarding a card to BQ attack an entire column. Powered Armour is on the chopping block as well; the main use of it is to protect physically weak characters against removal effects, but there are other cards in the list that have the same function, and some better ones we can add in. Population Displacement is just as likely to hurt us as it is the opponent here; we've got plenty of civilians in our deck.

We're then going to look at the character suite and cut about half of it for more powerful cards. While the drone cards have their advantages, including immunity to two different damage types and having the ability to move, albeit at a steep cost, their inherent attack power is fairly weak, and only strong in greater numbers. As a control deck, our cards will be spent stopping the opponent's plans; accordingly, we'll have less characters in our deck, and each one will need to be individually more effective. We'll retain the ones that provide card advantage - Corp Executive and Corp Advisor - and replace the drones with other individually effective or card advantage-based characters.

The resource deck is another part of the deck that needs some serious modification; there is no way to accelerate resources out of the deck, so we'll need to replace a few cards with Driverless Car Fleets - easily searchable by our four Corp Executives; we are running the Horizon Industries Mariner Suit, which can't be targeted if adjacent to terrain with #water, but the list has no terrain with #water to prevent it from being targeted! There is little to no cost (5% chance on missing out on a cashflow producing resource) in running two pieces of terrain, and Mangrove is ideal here; anything that can make our characters harder to target is to our advantage, and we only want to run Sea if we are running Factory. In addition, five slots are taken up with the inefficient Entertainment Facility, which is never worth the $4m cost to deploy, and we've got too many Affluent Consumers; since we'll be adding four ways to accelerate resources out of the resource deck, which we'll have to buy if we want them, we want them to be cheap!

A control deck's best friend (see text)
thanks to the ability to make multiple
kinds of trait resources and attack if
necessary. Far better than the weak
Entertainment Facility in the original!

The expensive resource card we want to run in this deck is Actor. Many of our cards, and in particular our removal cards, have differing trait costs - Kickback is MQ and EQ, Kidnapping and Assassination Contract are both MQ and BQ, Rampant Bribery an EQ, Misdirection is two IQ and Political Corruption, one of our win conditions, is three MQ. Actor's ability to make the trait resource of our choice each turn is ideal for this type of deck, as long as we have a little advance planning skill. Actor can also engage for three different trait costs directly and defend in all four, while Entertainment Facility only does two and two, and because he's a character, he can do things like drive a mech suit or be a backup attacker when required. He serves a similar function to a man-land in Magic: the Gathering, and note that these cards regularly feature in two different types of decks; controlling decks, where they turn from resource generating lands to attacking creatures once control of the game has been established, and resource limiting decks, where they serve the same function after the opponent's board state is cut back to the point where they are unable to do anything.

So, the following cuts will be made to the main deck, to get rid of the average quality cards that we just discussed, and remove the "vanilla" characters, i.e. the ones with no additional abilities

-1 Powered Armour
-1 Population Displacement
-1 Tidal Wave
-1 Kickback
-2 Bomber Drone
-3 Sniper Drone
-3 Sentry Drone
-1 Anti-Gravity Field
-4 Corp Citizen
-2 Horizon Advanced Restraints

And we'll be adding in the below cards instead; hard-hitting characters with saboteur abilities, board sweepers, and some heavy weaponry to Dead Drop onto the field. Note the addition of a Corp Executive, as we're adding in three more main deck and two side deck targets, and the addition of Dash Dingo, who will function as removal when we are searching our deck - or the opponent is. We are, however, adding several cards with an upkeep cost, so we'll need to ensure our resource deck can keep up with these. Incarnate Donor, despite also having an upkeep cost, will help us do just that by finding extra resources when it is deployed:

+2 Misdirection
+2 Timely Interception
+1 Michael Basa, Data Obfuscator
+1 Economic Hitman
+2 Anubian "Dash Dingo" Tracker
+3 Incarnate Donor
+2 Railgun Strike
+1 Railgun Lunasys MK6
+1 Vulcan Cannon
+1 Horizon Industries Mining Suit
+1 Corp Executive
+1 Jump Jets

We'll remove these cards from the resource deck, to eliminate the expensive cards and to balance out our trait generation, since we've added a few more cards that require BQ:

-5 Entertainment Facility
-4 Affluent Consumers
-2 Selfish Consumers

And we'll replace them with our alternative resource generation cards, terrain and acceleration to form a resource base any business owner could be proud of. A singleton Purchase Order sneaks in as a way to find equipment at instant speed and trigger our earlier addition of Anubian Tracker:

+2 Driverless Car Fleet
+2 Mangrove
+3 Actor
+3 Compulsive Consumers
+1 Purchase Order

For those who read these articles just for the deck lists (I know nobody comments on them, or shares their deck ideas with the author) here's the final list for #Unethical Glass Canno...I mean Glass Control

One of the game's best "saboteur"
cards, smashing bank accounts and
assets alike, and returning them to
your side of the field. Gross, really.

4 Corp Executive
3 Incarnate Donor
2 Anubian Tracker
4 Corp Advisor
1 Michael Basa, Data Obfuscator
1 Economic Hitman
2 Horizon Industries Mariner Suit
1 Horizon Industries Mining Suit
2 Misdirection
2 Timely Interception
3 Kickback
3 Kidnapping
1 Assassination Contract
2 Rampant Bribery
2 Political Corruption
1 Vulcan Cannon
2 Railgun Strike
1 Railgun Lunasys MK6
1 Glass Man's Gambit
1 Guided Munitions
1 Jump Jets

The deck is, as mentioned earlier, a little character-light, but the use (and re-use) of all of that cheap #unethical removal is more than enough to hold the fort until the cannons come online or the corruption takes hold at the root of the opposing business. Vulcan Cannon and Railgun Strike take out multiple targets in one shot, and granting a saboteur like Michael Basa the Precision ability via Guided Munitions will devastate the opponent's hand. The Horizon Industries mech suits allow re-use of Corp Executive and Incarnate Donor's abilities to continue adding to the board, and the control elements of Misdirection and Timely Interception hold back the opponent's stronger plays until the deck takes over. Given the powerful resource generation abilities of the deck, this doesn't always take very long. Consider the following opening sequence, assuming we've paid $2m for the privilege of taking the first turn:

1) reveal Selfish Consumers, engage business for 10 MQ to purchase
2) play Corp Executive from hand for $4m ($4m remaining) and dead drop a Driverless Car Fleet and Horizon Industries Mariner Suit into play
3) engage Driverless Car Fleet for BQ, pay $1m to bond the Corp Executive to the Mariner Suit ($3m remaining) and pay the BQ to re-deploy the Executive, dead drop another Driverless Car Fleet and Jump Jets into play
4) Play Corp Advisor, drawing a card ($1m remaining)
5) Engage Driverless Car Fleet to purchase the top resource card, revealing a Mangrove
6) Purchase the Mangrove for zero and deploy another resource card, reveal another Selfish Consumers and purchase it with one of the remaining MQ
6) Divest the Corp Executive at end of turn ($5m remaining)

The only cards we have played from hand are Corp Executive and Corp Advisor, and given that we are running four of each, it isn't that unlikely a beginning to the game. At the end of this turn, we have nine cards in play - business, founder, two DCF, Mariner Suit, Corp Advisor, Jump Jets, two consumers and the terrain - and still four cards in hand. We have $2m in cashflow and $2m in upkeep on the board, and $5m still in the bank. Left to our own devices, we'll be able to add $3m in cash flow to the board next turn; the usual reveal, plus two Driverless Car Fleet activations, and start some real cash flowing into the business.

Corp Advisor and The Glass Man both remain disengaged to pay the resource cost of  Misdirection, kidnapping or Rampant Bribery - or to defend our business. We'll never want to leave everything engaged at the end of our turn! All interactive cards in Megacorp have trait costs attached so doing this indicates to the opponent that they can proceed with their plans unopposed, and an important part of playing the control role in trading card games is to buy time to make your big plays by making the opponent play with "the fear" that you'll counter their play. If they don't make a play as a result of this fear, you are winning - at the end of their turn you play the card advantage spells and effects that you were holding onto (in this deck, activate one of the Glass Man's abilities, play removal cards, or both!) and only then begin your next turn. Advance your board state a little, and end the turn with resources free, threatening to interfere with your opponent on their next turn.

Coming to a control deck near you on
Friday, 27th April 2018. 

Teferi, Hero of Dominaria is, by this standard, the absolute epitome of control cards. Planeswalkers in Magic: the Gathering are permanents, so they add to the battlefield when you play them, and you can activate one of the abilities each turn if you have enough counters on them - and then you adjust the number of counters up or down from the ability. In most cases, you would play Teferi for five mana, then use the first ability to draw an additional card, leaving the same number of cards in hand as before. Then at the end of turn, you untap two lands, leaving the ability to play spells on your opponent's turn when they try to remove your card-advantage machine from the board. Conveniently, in the format where Teferi is legal, two spells will be legal that both cost two mana - one is white and one blue - one that exiles an attacking creature, and one that counters a non-creature spell. If you're in a position where you are behind, Teferi instead functions as a removal card that deals with any nonland permanent and leaves a way to catch up on the battlefield for later. 

Imagine a Megacorp character with the abilities "unique" "this character cannot attack" and "0: at the beginning of the next A phase, draw a card and add one trait of any type to your trait pool. Use this ability only on your turn and only once per turn."
Unless you're playing a hyper-aggressive deck, you're likely to be playing four of this card, correct? Eventually you'll just bury your opponent in cards - which is what we want to do as a control deck. When you have six cards in hand to your opponent's one...that's when you start playing the cards that actively defeat your opponent.

It could be a ham sandwich for all you care. You won the game when you established control of the board state and your opponent; the rest is merely a formality. Play a control deck in Megacorp at Rabblemaster Games today!