23 Spells
Mox Diamond
Duress
Inquisition of Kozilek
Swords to Plowshares
Faithless Looting
Sensei's Divining Top
Wall of Omens
Abeyance
Demonic Tutor
Dreadbore
Rakdos Charm
Lightening Helix
Talisman of Indulgence
Blightening
Vindicate
Lingering Souls
Chandra, the Firebrand
Murderous Redcap
Gideon Jura
Austere Command
Grave Titan
Bonfire of the Damned
17 Lands
Plateau
Badlands
Scrublands
Sacred Foundry
Godless Shrone
Blood Crypt
Arid Mesa
Marsh Flats
Swamp
Plains
Mountain
Lava Claw Reaches
Karakas
Graven Cairns
Caves of Koilos
Boros Garrison
One of the main problems for non-blue control decks is an inability to cope with certain kinds of spell, the best examples being things like Armageddon which can single handedly beat you. To ensure this deck could deal with powerful sorceries I played a reasonably high count of discard effects and an Abeyance. With the exception of Blightning all of those effects go one for one and all of them can become near dead draws later in the game. Card quality and card advantage can still be obtained outside of blue but it is generally less convenient and certainly less abundant. Most of the card advantage this particular deck obtains is through effects rather than dedicated card draw and therefore must be acquired gradually. With a lack of card advantage the inclusion of the discard is a little dangerous and so I crammed in as much card quality (Top and Faithless Looting) as possible to remedy this a little.
So far I have only talked about ways in which this deck is inherently worse than a blue control deck and how those shortcomings have been tackled. For a deck to be a viable tier one deck it really needs to be the best way to build that archetype, certainly you may be drafting and become cut out of blue and consequently draft the closest next-best-thing to your initial aim which could easily be a deck like this however you would never set out to draft a sub par deck. What advantages does this UBR deck have any other three colour control deck and are they enough to make it tier one?
Firstly it has some very high value and efficient spells such as Vindicate which it can reliably cast off the mana base. This makes it a little more stable early in the game, particularly as you are not trying to keep up mana as blue mages are. It also means you can have a slightly higher curve with a higher threat count as your early game is more robust and your disruption cards are versatile.
One of the present main benefits of going for a deck in these colours is the fact that you will get more powerful late picks and better dual lands due to it being an uncommon selection of colour combinations. Although BR, BW and BR do get played they tend to be aggressive decks and so when you are sharing dual lands and gold cards with others won't take as many of your cards as they otherwise might. This benefit always balances itself out over time as people become aware of the archetypes potential and so cannot always be relied upon as a good reason to play the deck.
Is this enough to make it tier one? Having only built a deck like this the once recently it is impossible to say, it looks like it is capable of holdings its own against anything a cube can throw at you and performed well on its only outing so far. I suspect it will perform very similarly to the rock over time being able to beat anything based on build but very difficult to tune appropriately. A solid all round deck with a very close to 50/50 matchups across the board.
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