To be perfectly honest, I’m not much of an aggro player. When it comes to decks, I prefer control and combo strategies to the purely “smash your face” strategy. This wasn’t the case when I was first playing this game, and my old decklist from the 2003 World Championship reflects that through its aggro-control structure.* However, as the years have passed, I’ve grown to enjoy obscure combo decks and pressure-inducing control decks a lot more.

This is a warning: I’m going to be talking a lot about control decks and control strategies today. If the aggro player inside of you wants to send me an email with an aggro card you want highlighted, feel free to do so, and I’ll consider analyzing it later this month. It’s the least I can do after today, where life point tempo and smashing face will be neglected topics, locked away in some confined space.

With the apology to aggro players out of the way, let’s talk about how awesome control is! Control decks, unlike aggro decks, tend to be very reactive. Their strategy is to let their opponent play out any threats that he or she may possess. The control player will hinder most of the opponent’s early plays, then fire back with a ridiculous win condition when he or she is vulnerable later in a duel.

One of the defining factors of most control decks is the ability to stabilize board position and card presence—usually through various strategies that improve the player’s card quality. Search effects, which add to a control deck’s consistency in hitting the key cards that it needs to stabilize for a late game win, are a key component to one such strategy. However, this deck lacks many search effects for anything other than monsters. It’s not disastrous, since Apprentice Magician fetches some amazing control monsters, but you’re left with only one generic option for non-monster search effects, and Different Dimension Capsule isn’t exactly the most stable card available. This leaves control decks with a backup plan in the form of card drawing. The ability to sift through your deck is a little more randomized than search effects, but it still allows you to find the non-monster cards you need much faster.

Another key stabilizing factor is non-monster recursion. Spells and traps push a control deck over the top against aggressive and creature-heavy decks, and the ability to recycle powerful spells and traps is essential for control. This is done primarily and most recognizably through Magician of Faith, but there’s another powerful monster that can recur powerful support cards. Mask of Darkness is one of the game’s most underrated cards ever since its release in North America way back in 2002. It has seen occasional play over the years, with some players comboing it with Tsukuyomi and Time Seal. Actually, Mask of Darkness is a solid control card on its own. While Magician of Faith can provide solid stall and card quality with Swords of Revealing Light and Graceful Charity, Mask of Darkness can provide powerful recursion of your reactive options.

Breakdown and Strategies

One of the card’s most important abilities bears a real similarity to that of Magician of Faith. However, the type of cards that you’re able to recycle with Mask of Darkness makes it very different. Unlike Magician of Faith, which returns faster spell cards, Mask of Darkness returns slower trap cards. Unlike Magician of Faith, this means that you won’t be able to play the card you recycle from your graveyard immediately (which is why Magician of Faith has been so popular).

However, just because trap cards require time before they can be activated doesn’t mean that Mask of Darkness is inferior. It turns players off when the opposing player knows what trap card Mask of Darkness is returning, which leads them to ignore the card’s better features. Yes, the opposing player can play around reactive trap cards, such as Mirror Force. However, this is not necessarily bad for the user of Mask of Darkness. While you may not be able to use reactive removal such as Mirror Force, it gets set on the field immediately, requiring your opponent to play around it whether he wants to or not. This will force him or her to either attack into a possible field-wipe, or to simply pass turns and wait until he or she draws into spell and trap removal to take care of your set Mirror Force. Either play is going to help you get into the late game, allowing you to dominate your opponent with your game plan.

Of course, with some fast shuffling of your hand, your opponent may lose track of the card that you return with Mask of Darkness. This can cause your opponent to wonder whether you’re actually going to set the trap card you returned to your hand with your flip effect monster. Perhaps you’re bluffing with a spell card instead of that Mirror Force you returned to your hand. If your opponent uses the spell or trap removal that he or she might be waiting to draw into, it could be wasted. However, continuously passing your turn until you draw into the removal needed to clear your back row is a serious dedication on your opponent’s part. Any decisions that you can force out of your opponent while they’re waiting for a final decision are bound to be strenuous and unpleasant. Remember that your opponent is thinking about all of this while noting that he or she only has forty minutes in which to complete the match. Forcing too many decisions upon him or her under a time limit can easily cause a mistake, and control decks are meant to capitalize on mistakes.

Mask of Darkness and its ability to return cards like Mirror Force can help a control player to get to a late game, but what I find particularly amazing is its ability to recycle one of the best cards in the game, Solemn Judgment. While the life point cost is steep, most of the time you’ll end up losing the same amount of life points (if not a little more) if you let specific threats from your opponents hit the field. This includes (but is not limited to) Heavy Storm, Mobius the Frost Monarch, and Magician of Faith.

Mask of Darkness also gives you the ability to destroy your opponent’s luck factor when trying to counter your defense, perhaps with Level Limit - Area B or Gravity Bind. The flip effect of this trap-recursion monster effectively turns one of your Solemn Judgments into two copies of the most powerful denial card in the game. If you have the ability to recycle Mask of Darkness, whether it’s a temporary recycling ability such as Book of Moon, or something more game-breaking such as Tsukuyomi, you can effectively play Solemn Judgment more than three times in a single duel. Besides which, Tsukuyomi, Mask of Darkness, and Solemn Judgment all effectively lock a topdecking opponent out of the game. Multiple copies of Solemn Judgment is one of the most powerful weapons available to a control player, which makes Mask of Darkness a solid option for those considering such a strategy.

Final Thoughts

There’s no denying the power of Mask of Darkness: the simple ability to recycle Solemn Judgment or Mirror Force makes it a powerhouse even if your opponent knows that you have those cards. However, this flip effect monster was recently limited to one per deck, which makes control decks a little tougher to play. What made Mask of Darkness so amazing was the fact that you could run multiple copies to solidify your denial cards, such as Solemn Judgment, or make sure your defensive cards, such as Gravity Bind, stay face-up on the field. Sadly, that’s not possible anymore.

Despite the limitation, Mask of Darkness remains one of the best cards available to a control deck that’s running a trap count in the double digits. It gives them more stability against standard removal cards like Heavy Storm, and cards that can help you recover from spell and trap removal effects are incredibly important to a control deck’s strategy.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this or previous articles, feel free to email me at Mrosenberg at Metagame dot com. I will try my best to answer all the emails I receive.

*My deck for that tournament was a really mediocre hand-destruction aggro-control deck that randomly ran aggro monsters such as Goblin Attack Force with the hand-control effects of Spirit Reaper and Yata-Garasu. Looking back on that tournament, I probably should have run a more control-based deck, possibly with Masked Sorcerers and Mystic Tomatos, along with more removal.