Here's the deck.

The general idea is obviously to hold a lot of control, while partially establishing a bit of board state with tribal humans.
The main reason for the humans is two fold:

1. Ravenous Demon - Get him out, transform him, and keep him going.
2. Ravenous Demon - Get him out, transform him, and then give him away with Switcheroo :cool:

After giving him away, the idea is obviously to keep him from attacking by either keeping him tapped out until they run out of humans or until I can destroy them all with various other means, therefore leaving him there to do 9 damage to them each turn or for them to waste a removal spell on.

Additionally, most of the humans are relatively weak, besides some of their ETB effects, so giving them away in exchange for bigger and better creatures is always a good deal. Plus, a bunch of them die straightout under the opponent's control if I can pull out a Curse of Death's Hold.

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I've never really played any type of control deck before, so any ideas/hints would be much appreciated.

This deck is really spread out, there are so many things that you're only using one of that I don't know where to start looking

First off you shouldn't have things that you need to sac in order to benefit from, like Alchemist's Apprentice. Another thing is that if you have things like Archaeomancer then you give them away with Switcheroo, your opponent will get the same benefit. Finally you should be looking at a very creature-heavy build if you're going for sacrifices, also you should think about using black manly for removal and blue for humans since the black humans are rare and usually not too good, especially for this deck

imsully2 wrote:First off you shouldn't have things that you need to sac in order to benefit from, like Alchemist's Apprentice. Another thing is that if you have things like Archaeomancer then you give them away with Switcheroo, your opponent will get the same benefit.

No, they won't..... They say when they "enter the battlefield". Switcheroo doesn't make them re-enter the battlefield, it just makes them switch control. The only way they can get the benefit is if they are able to flicker the creature.

Is there any specific reason for not having things that I need to sac to get a benefit? It's a body that I can use to either give away (without too much benefit for them), use to block or sac to the demon. And if I find that I don't need it for any of those things any longer then I can get a card out of it. It's not like the sac effect is the only thing that I can benefit from.

I agree that there are a couple one-ofs, but they all have at least some purpose. What would you actually suggest having more/less of? And is there any reason that I really need to limit black to removal and not humans? I think that most of the black humans I have a very good in the context of the deck.

NullParameter wrote:Is there any specific reason for not having things that I need to sac to get a benefit? It's a body that I can use to either give away (without too much benefit for them), use to block or sac to the demon. And if I find that I don't need it for any of those things any longer then I can get a card out of it. It's not like the sac effect is the only thing that I can benefit from.

There's no sure reason that they won't help, but they're more likely to help out your opponent, and you're likely to need them for sac fodder later. I'm not saying that it's a bad card in the deck I just think there are probably better cards for this deck

As far as the colors, I agree that the black humans you currently have are great choices accept for Harbor Bandit. but I think you should have close to twice as many creatures as you do, I can't see you being able to sac something to Ravenous Demon more than once before you're out of creatures. I can see where your instants and sorcerys are very control oriented but at the same time they're just not the same sort of deck you're using, I think the issue is that you're trying to use a specific combo in a control oriented deck, there's too many things pulling your deck in different directions (I tried using the random hand generator for this deck and I had to mulligan a lot of times, I wasn't finding creatures, I'm not saying the hand generator is very good but you're going to average 1-3 creatures in your opening hand but likely only one will be playable in the first 3 turns, and that's assuming you have at least 2 lands.) Maybe I'm just not seeing it, I can see a lot of potential with this deck, I really like the idea but I feel like you need to go more control or more combo with it, I'd be very interested to hear how it works out for you and if you think what I'm saying is gibberish :P The only reason that I'm saying that you should consider more creatures is that you've got 14 creatures and 5 of them need sacrifices to work, of course one of those is really best to be sacced after it's cast anyway but still.

My actual advice? Go for the combo, Cut Ponder, Sleep, maybe even Negate to put in more creatures, pull harbor bandit (if you want unblockable go for Invisible Stalker) and of course change Unsummon to Vapor Snag, but as always my main advice is to test it out, i think in a slow game it will do extremely well but against an aggressive deck it will quite possibly fall short but every deck has it's weaknesses so that's not too big of a deal

P.S. My bad about Switcheroo, I mis-read it, you are correct indeed