The Zugzwang Machine | A History of Lantern Control
From a fleeting idea in a forum thread to winning the Pro Tour, Lantern Control challenged our understanding of Magic and forever changed how we think about its core game systems.
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I’ve become a member of BASILISK, the mission-driven eSports organization founded to inspire scientists through difficult gameplay. The story of Lantern Control explores how a simple deckbuilding question became a new pathway for thinking about Magic and changed our game forever. BASILISK believes this is a remarkable example of the scientific process in action. To celebrate our partnership, we are giving away nine copies of Thoughtseize, a staple of the Lantern Control deck, and a foil Enchanted Tales Rhystic Study to the Grand Prize winner. Follow the link below to enter. Thank you BASILISK for your partnership and support.
• The Compulsion to Move
I’ve spent the past month racking my mind for analogies and metaphors to describe the Lantern Control deck. Lantern Control is playing tennis against a brick wall. Lantern Control is walking up a descending escalator. Lantern Control is the 1992 Danish football team, who dominated the European Championship by repeatedly back-passing to their own goalkeeper. They stalled and stalled and stalled, then won. The laws changed following the match to eliminate this tactic from future games.
All of these examples are approximations. Lantern Control was much stranger. The deck presented a gameplay pattern that may have been completely unique to Magic. The closest parallel, in my estimation, can be found on a chessboard.
This position is the textbook example of “zugzwang,” a German term that translates to “the compulsion to move.” In chess, zugzwang occurs when one player, if given the choice, would prefer to pass the turn rather than move a piece, since any move will lose them the game on the spot. The 1923 match between Aron Nimzowitch and Friedrich Sämisch has been nicknamed “The Immortal Zugzwang.” Although Sämisch, playing White, still has most of his pieces on the board, he is trapped, paralyzed. Any legal move would make his position worse. So instead of moving, he resigned.
This game approaches the feeling of playing against Lantern Control. Lantern Control disassembles its opposition one card at a time and reduces decks to piles of dysfunctional game pieces. Lantern Control locks you into a losing position. It immobilizes you. Then, it compels you to move.
• Assembling the Pieces: The MTGSalvation Thread
In late November 2012, MTGSalvation user Zerodown had a passing idea in a new concept for a deck. The leading question was simple: what if you could manipulate your opponent’s draw step such that every card was dead in their hand or useless on board? What if, instead of commanding the stack or controlling the battlefield, you went straight for the source at the top of their library? Zerodown cobbled together a quick list of cards centered around the premiere combo enablers. They named the deck “Top Control” and wrote up a primer for the forum.
Impassioned by the possibilities, Zerodown began testing on Cockatrice. This is perhaps the first recorded glimpse of the idea in action, a proto-Lantern Control deck receiving concession on Turn 26.
Intrigued by the novelty, members of the forum began tinkering with new cards and proposing decklists in the main thread. Pages and pages of responses poured in. The idea was so strange that any given card seemed worthy of consideration. Is Trinket Mage necessary or expensive? Is Pyroclasm or Terminus the better answer for small creatures? What about Porphyry Nodes? What about Ancient Stirrings to find Lanterns? What about Duress to disrupt combos or Gitaxian Probe to gather further information?
Even in the earliest phases of ideation, determining the deck’s main colors was up for debate. The number of lands was also in contention – lists ranged anywhere from 16 to 23 sources, with accompanying mana rocks like Talisman of Dominance and Mox Opal included for fixing. User RogueOS commented that “People look at me weird when they realize exactly what this deck sets out to do, and then question the fact that this deck is actually 5 colors and that we only run 12 real lands.” In total contrast, user JohnnoCox posited that the suite of Urza Lands should serve as the primary manabase, an approach that seems absurd now but was still unproven at the time.
There were no straightforward answers to any of the questions that would otherwise be obvious in other archetypes because “Top Control” was unlike anything previously assembled in Modern Magic. How many lands? How many colors? How many combo pieces? How many answers? Nobody could agree.
Maybe the most pressing question of them all was “How does the deck win?”
It took nearly three years, 1500 responses, and countless iterations to answer this question. Pivotal to the deck’s development was “thnkr,” another forum user who began theory-crafting with the group and playtesting builds as early as summer 2013. In April 2015, they started uploading individual matchups of Lantern Control in Modern to YouTube. These exhibitions proved that the deck had legitimate application, that it could compete, and that it could win. Among thnkr’s viewership was a curious player who saw the deck’s nascent potential and started taking notes.
On May 10, 2015, forum user shadowgripper entered the conversation with an inquiry: “hey thnkr, question for you: why is Faithless Looting in the list?” Four days later, the same user declared to the forum: “I’ll be going to GP Charlotte. I plan on taking this…I’ve spent a lot of time practicing.”
“Hello and welcome to The Sideboard here at Grand Prix Charlotte hosted by Starcitygames.com…so we’re here with a ‘combo’ deck. We’ll call it that! It’s actually a control deck – or a prison deck – or a prison deck – is what it’s more commonly referred to.”
Grand Prix Charlotte 2015 was as stacked an event as they come. Hall of Famers and Platinum Pros filled the room, each of them piloting their choice of Modern’s strongest and most well-proven decks. Brian Braun-Duin on Abzan Company, Gerry Thompson on Jund, Justin Cohen on Amulet Bloom, The Calculator and Luis on Grixis Twin. It takes a lot of nerve to bring a pile of draft-chaff artifacts to a tournament of this caliber and risk getting stomped out of the room. But shadowgripper, or rather Zac Elsik, was all-in on Lantern Control. He knew which decks to expect and he knew how to beat them. By the end of the weekend, he would stun everyone by running hot and securing a top 16 finish.
The following Monday, Aaron Forscythe woke up to a surprising tournament report from Star City Games. To himself and others in the replies, it still wasn’t clear just what the deck was doing or how exactly it won. As they speculated, BBD chimed in, remarking, “I birded multiple matches from the deck. It was awesome and impressive in action.”
Meanwhile, back on MTGSalvation, Elsik was adamant he could’ve won the weekend with sharper play. Convinced of the deck’s power, he set his sights on the next Grand Prix in Oklahoma City a couple months down the road. In theory, rogue decks like this tend to lose their edge without the element of surprise. But Lantern Control was not like most gimmick builds – the deck exploited information and hid nothing itself. It locked opponents in zugzwang with all the pieces revealed.
Elsik’s list heading into OKC was a three-color deck comprised of 17 lands, 25 artifacts, and a singleton copy of the newly-printed Ghirapur Aether Grid. Maybe this card offered the win condition the forum so long desired. Or maybe the win condition was there all along, face up, and hiding in plain sight.
• There Is No Game To Be Played
In order to assemble The Zugzwang Machine, a player needs to gather a few, key pieces.
The first is Lantern of Insight, the central cog in the system. For one mana, you and your opponent play the game with the top cards of both libraries revealed. Lantern’s second ability is easily overlooked, but it offers a safety valve in corner-case scenarios, an opportunity to reshuffle your opponent’s deck before they can draw a useful threat, or reshuffle yours to reset a useless spell.
Accompanying Lantern of Insight are the so-called “mill-rocks.” These are Codex Shredder, Ghoulcaller’s Bell, and Pyxis of Pandemonium, one-mana all-stars that activate to either mill or exile the top card of a target player’s library. In general, players ran four copies of Shredder and two copies divided between Bell or Pyxis depending on the meta.
Together, these provide the core mechanism of “Top Control.” With perfect information in place, you decide what your opponents do and do not draw.
The final gear in the machine, and maybe the most important, is Ensnaring Bridge. Ensnaring Bridge was the only reason the deck could evolve beyond a hobby-horse in a forum thread and impact the meta at the highest level. Ensnaring Bridge was the steel frame that kept the engine encased and intact.
Zac Elsik made a few, significant changes to his list between GP Charlotte and Oklahoma City. Version 2.0 was sleeker, more focused, more proactive with hand disruption and more consistent with the main game plan. And that game plan itself was a distillation of the million-dollar question: how does this deck win?
In Elsik’s words, “I am finding more and more that the general public does not understand the concept that a game of Magic can be won by your opponent simply drawing a card and passing the turn, every turn of the game…The deck isn't trying to kill them. It's trying to put the opponent into that sleeper hold, preventing them from taking an action. Once you get there, you don't actually have to win. Your opponent will more or less give up against their will.”
“Hello and welcome to coverage of Grand Prix Oklahoma City. I’m Marshall Sutcliffe in the booth with Randy Buehler and we’re ready for the finals…and we’re left with Brian Braun-Duin playing Twin. He’s up against Zac Elsik who’s playing that card Randy. He’s got a Lantern Control deck that has kind of been the darling of our weekend.”
From Friday to Sunday, Elsik ran the tables and secured a spot in the Finals of the Grand Prix. His opponent was none other than Brian Braun-Duin, the pro who admired the Lantern deck and understood the play patterns by witnessing it at GP Charlotte a couple months before. I remember watching this match live on stream – like the commentary team, I was awestruck by The Zugzwang Machine. Never before had I seen a deck like this in action, one that played more like a Vintage home-brew from the early 90’s than a tightly-selected 75 from the mid-2010’s. Some viewers found the gameplay excruciating and dull. Others, including myself, were mystified and enthralled. We could feel the paradigm shifting in real time.
The match opened with an early-game haymaker from Lantern Control. Elsik took an extremely aggressive line on BBD’s turn 2 Upkeep by casting Surgical Extraction naming Misty Rainforest. BBD responded with Dispel, only for Elsik to pay another 2 life for a second copy of Extraction. As Surgical resolved, Elsik found a pair of Misty Rainforests in BBD’s hand, effectively Stone Raining two lands with one spell for zero mana at instant speed.
“I’ve never seen that happen before! No, I haven’t either!”
Highly technical lines like this defined Lantern Control’s core gameplay, especially against blue-based decks like Splinter Twin. From this moment forward, every game action from one side was met with sharp resistance from the other, a power struggle for priority and permission. Seemingly innocuous decisions represented micro-advantages as the game stretched into the later turns. Splitting such hairs was the only way Elsik would win, especially against a strategy that thrived on tempo and card advantage.
“There’s the Remand. And he says sure, you draw that thing, this goes back and I’ll just recast it. So now we have Bridge on board! Uh oh!”
Once Elsik secured Ensnaring Bridge, BBD’s footing started to slip. Among Twin’s most powerful outs in this spot was Snapcaster Mage – knowing this, Elsik closely monitored the draw step, and on four separate occasions, he sacrificed his Lantern of Insight to shuffle BBD’s library. Understanding an opponent’s most significant threats was a key skill in piloting this deck, one that separated mediocre players from the elite. Proving this skill, Elsik allowed BBD to draw Splinter Twin with Deceiver Exarch in play, a line that would have easily deterred inexperienced players in similar spots.
“And he’s basically built an engine that allows him to reshuffle – it’s ‘Skip your draw step, target opponent reshuffles the top card of their library, which, when you can see what the card is, is not awful!”
Slowly but surely, the mandibles of Lantern of Insight and Ghoulcaller’s Bell began to immobilize the Twin deck. With all the lock pieces in place and facing lethal activations from Pyrite Spellbomb and Aether Grid, BBD was forced to resign, and the players moved to game 2.
“This deck is insane. Yes, this deck is insane.”
Game 2 was just as technical and even more of a thriller – both players skated on a razor’s edge while searching for the tiniest margins to leverage. The pivotal moment came after Elsik had already successfully assembled the three pieces to his combo, when BBD scried Keranos, God of Storms to the top of his library.
“Keranos is nice…what does Zac do against that?”
Keranos seemed to be the most threatening card in Brian’s sideboard, one that drew concern from Zerodown in the MTG Salvation forum as early as April 2014. How could the Lantern deck beat this card without Spellskite in play?
“Is Keranos, God of Storms a card that scares us?”
“Kinda looking at this, you know, Zac doesn’t have anything going as far as actually ending the game. Right. He could shuffle, so it’s like, Bell, response Cryptic, response sac Lantern to shuffle. Right, but then he doesn’t have his Lantern anymore which is a big deal. Not as big a deal as Keranos…”
As Brian went to his draw step, Elsik surprisingly put up no resistance and allowed him the Indestructible Enchantment. This became the most crucial – and controversial – decision of the match.
“Is this gonna happen? Alright. He just let him have it.”
Within a few turns, Elsik would die to the triggered ability and force a game three, winner take the Grand Prix. The deciding game was just as close as the previous two. Elsik proved his prowess with a series of critical decisions and accurate threat assessments. The cards were falling in his favor and compounding his advantage. As followers and friends from the MTG Salvation thread watched along and cheered, Elsik milled the final six cards in BBD’s library and was crowned champion of Grand Prix Oklahoma City.
“Unbelievable, Zac Elsik is going to win the Grand Prix with Lantern Control.”
“And that’s gonna do it, Zac Elsik wins with Lantern Control to a huge round of applause and a big smile. Well-deserved, also great job Brian Braun-Duin…”
“We’ve been calling him Lantern Guy all weekend. But now he’s Zac Elsik, GP Champion”
• A Cult of The Obsessed
Following Grand Prix Oklahoma City, Zac Elsik became a household name in Magic. The deck with whom his name was synonymous entered the gamut of the Modern format as a valid contender and attracted the game’s brightest minds to master its complexities.
“…What is this deck? It just has a bunch of loose artifacts in it…How can this deck actually be a thing? And then he wins the GP with it.”
“That’s what this Lantern deck really does. It gets your hopes up that maybe you’re going to win a game…”
“When you got the reps with this deck, this deck is unbelievable. I know Zac Elsik did win a Grand Prix with it. Sam Black has had a lot of success with the deck. Very Sam Black deck. Sooo Sam Black.”
Sam Black was among the earliest adopters of Lantern Control, and he championed the deck throughout 2016. In February, Black went 8-2 with Lantern at Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch against a field of overpowered Eldrazi. He then traveled to SCG Louisville a couple weeks later and barely missed day 2 with a record of 6-3, citing a critical mistake in round 8 for the loss. Later the same year, Black finished 24th at Grand Prix Indianapolis with another stellar performance of manipulating his opponents’ draw steps. This match in round 5 highlighted some of the same technical uppercuts that Elsik deployed in Oklahoma, like blind-hitting 2 Serum Visions with Surgical Extraction and nullifying a Flooded Strand with Pithing Needle.
“Oh wow, is Sam gonna Needle Flooded Strand? That would be savage. He sees the Flooded Strand on the top of Braden’s deck. Needle actually does stop Flooded Strand from being sacrificed. Sam can cut Braden off from a third land here.”
After the tournament, Sam Black published a comprehensive guide to playing Lantern Control in Modern. This article detailed all the subtleties that made piloting this deck so challenging, and why it appealed so strongly to a very specific type of Magic player. It also provided a fascinating assessment of Ghirapur Aether Grid, the soft win condition. Upon reflection, Black dismissed its spot in the 75:
“Ultimately, I think it’s one of those “training wheels”-type cards…it’s very good at forgiving some mistakes and taking a game over by itself, but once you understand how the deck operates and how you need to deal with everything, I haven’t found it necessary for anything I’m trying to accomplish.”
I find this observation striking because it answers the one question that the forum could never agree on: how does this deck win? Zac Elsik understood this dilemma, and after hundreds of reps himself, he came to the same conclusion as Sam Black:
“The deck doesn’t try to win. It tries to prevent both players from playing.”
This position was echoed by Brian Braun-Duin in his write-up, a player obsessed with Lantern Control after facing it at OKC and who played the deck exhaustively in the two years following:
“You're not actively trying to win the game, but rather you're trying to reduce your opponent's ability to win until they cannot anymore.”
Justin Cohen also shared this perspective, calling Lantern Control a “Deterministic Victory” by means of “completely eliminating losing as an option.” It seemed that any player who spent enough time learning the ins-and-outs of the deck was forced to reflect on what it meant to play Magic. The deck inverted intuition. Entrenched players all felt the impulse to think deeply about its play patterns and write long posts and articles dissecting its nuances. Lantern Control became a puzzle box more than a Magic deck, a test of wit for those with encyclopedic knowledge of the game to express that knowledge in the most technical way imaginable.
Because the deck did not actively win, it required its pilots to take game actions at breakneck speed and communicate clearly to succeed. More than the prison-style locking mechanisms, the deck’s slower, grindier game plan became the feature that opponents despised most. Dissenters compared Lantern Control to Eggs, a deck that was banned following Pro Tour Return to Ravnica because of its drawn-out, solitaire-type turns. Elsik pushed back against this correlation:
“Lantern games…are only slow because of opponents, not because of the lantern pilot. An inexperienced lantern pilot will durdle and try to play Magic instead of focusing on the fact that neither player should be playing the game. The opponent should do the same. There is no game to be played. Lantern creates a lock – it feels like a soft lock but statistically it’s a hard lock. The game is over, it’s just neither player is dead.”
Knowing when to concede against the lock became another point of disagreement. Some players outright refused to resign against a deck with no clear win condition. Others did not understand when it became useless to keep fighting back, forever holding out hope for a lucky draw to escape the position. Carmen Komplarens faced this scenario incessantly over the course of her tenure playing Lantern in tournaments, so much so that she retired playing the deck out of fatigue. Common wisdom concluded that Lantern plus two mill-rocks was usually enough to seal the deal, and Lantern plus three mill-rocks all but shut the door entirely.
Regardless, the onus fell on the Lantern player to play fast and constantly urge the opponent to do the same. Cohen noted that “if you are averse to encouraging your opponent to play at a faster pace, even multiple times in a match, you will lose match points. If you hesitate to call a judge over to watch for slow play, you will lose match points. If you employ the wrong rhetoric, scolding an opponent who would have responded to a nudge, you will lose match points.” Not only was the deck challenging to pilot, but it required its players to constantly monitor all the interpersonal and social cues that arise in a tournament setting. It was high-maintenance within the battlefield and surrounding it.
Despite general chagrin toward the archetype, the deck continued to attract new players and evolve with subsequent set releases. With the printing of Kaladesh in September 2016 and Aether Revolt in January 2017, Lantern Control picked up a pair of significant artifact tutors in Inventor’s Fair and Whir of Invention, as well as some mana-fixing lands in Spire of Industry and Blooming Marsh. Mishra’s Bauble also began sneaking into lists this year, which was reinforced by the card’s reprint in Iconic Masters in November. BBD claimed that this card was by far the hardest to play in the list, a piece that offered myriad decisions and applications. Again, Lantern most appealed to those who enjoyed leveraging minute advantages that were unclear in the abstract, and Bauble provided that feature in spades.
In February 2018, BBD put Lantern Control to the ultimate test by registering the deck for Pro Tour: Rivals of Ixalan. As did Piotr Glogowski, a prolific theory-crafter and connoisseur of strange builds who made Top 8 with Lantern Control at GP Birmingham a few months prior. Like the other diehards, Kanister was pivotal to the deck’s development throughout 2017. His streams educated players on navigating the tricky play patterns, and he created community spaces for others to share ideas and match data. He was also constantly tinkering with the deck, especially in the sideboard. This 5-0 league list from November 2017 showed off a curveball in Hazoret the Fervent, a spicy piece of tech that sadly never found legitimate application.
Yet another pro player was on Lantern Control that weekend, the rising star in Luis Salvatto. The Argentinian found himself in a crucial win-and-in in round 16 against fellow teammate Lucas Esper Berthoud. After committing a sideboarding error resulting in a game loss, then winning game two, Salvatto leveraged a dominating position in the deciding game three over the opposing five-color Humans deck.
“…He may escape that gaff in game number one and come back to win this two games to one. I will remind you at home that Luis Salvatto, if he wins, it’s a clean win-and-in. He is in our Top 8. That’s it.”
“This is pure misery here for Lucas Esper Berthoud. It’s one of those situations where you’re playing for the Top 8, you know you’re more or less going to lose this game, but you still have to play it out because you never know...”
“Lucas Esper Berthoud has to sit here effectively helpless…”
Staring down zugzwang, Berthoud asked Salvatto an honest question:
“Do I have any chance of winning?
“No.”
And in a wholesome display of sportsmanship, Berthoud wished Salvatto luck in the Top 8.
“Congrats man. Let’s win tomorrow alright?”
Salvatto took that to heart.
“…Let’s just settle in, Simon, to what is an incredible deck, and just shows what Magic can do with thousands and thousands of cards in a pool. Yes, it shows all of the uniqueness of the Modern format.You can win not by dealing damage, not by dealing poison, and to be fair, not even running your opponent out of cards. You’re winning because they just don’t have any chance whatsoever to draw out of the lock you’ve assembled. Ensnaring Bridge means you can’t be attacked. With Lantern of Insight and something like Codex Shredder, you make sure that they don’t draw any outs. And if there are other combo pieces, you can lock them out with Witchbane Orb or Grafdigger’s Cage, there’s just no way you can lose from a certain board state.”
After milling out Jean-Emmanuel Depraz’s Death Shadow deck in Game 5 of the Quarterfinals and locking away Ken Yukuhiro’s Hollow Ones under Ensnaring Bridge, Salvatto secured his spot in the Finals of the Pro Tour. Marshall Sutcliffe was commentating that match and reflecting on the first time he saw the deck in action.
“Man, it’s crazy how far this Lantern deck has come. I remember its breakout performance at GP OKC, with Zac Elsik piloting it, and you know at first glance it looks like the worst deck you’ve ever seen in your life.”
Standing between Salvatto and a PT title was Gerry Thompson on Mardu Pyromancer, a synergistic spell-slinging deck that generally favored Lantern in the matchup. As per usual, Thompson was a great sport. He held his head high and his racket strong against the brick wall. He also understood very clearly when he was effectively dead on board.
“I think Gerry’s trying to figure out if he can just scoop. And honestly Gerry is asking –– So people understand that I can’t win?” Gerry actually asking Rashad Miller, ‘so I can concede and people will understand I can’t win?’ Gerry is awesome.”
Game one went to Salvatto, and game two followed in suit. All the while, Gerry kept the table talk light and friendly, with jokes and laughs to segue the players through the turns. Thompson knew his outs were few, that the escalator would outpace his ascent. Despite producing an army of Elemental and Spirit Tokens, the advantage bar for game three remained firmly on Salvatto’s side of the table. Eventually, Luis activated Mishra’s Bauble targeting himself and found Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas, and the commentary team started doing the math.
“That is going to make it effectively impossible for Gerry Thompson to win. Well, it’s actually going to do 16 damage next turn off the Tezzeret ultimate. And guess what, Gerry is at 16 life! Are we going to see a victory via a Tezzeret ultimate? I believe we are.”
Game, set, match. Lantern Control wins the Pro Tour.
“Luis Salvatto is your champion! Congratulations! He came back and he won three games to zero over Gerry Thompson in the Finals. Fantastic work for Luis Salvatto, he puts his hands in the air, and darn it he should!”
• The Light That Never Goes Out
Following Pro Tour: Rivals of Ixalan in February 2018, Lantern Control began to lose position in Modern’s diverse and ever-shifting metagame. To some extent, the deck’s efficacy was always dependent on the landscape surrounding it. It was always a mirror to the format, the film negatives that inverted the photograph’s lights and shadows.
2018 saw the rise of UW Control, Burn, Tron, and Jund – all relatively strenuous matchups for Lantern. Soon after the Pro Tour, a brand new contender entered the arena, a deck that challenged Lantern from a totally different angle. In March, Matt Nass made Top 8 of Grand Prix Phoenix with a novel and highly complex artifact-based combo deck, then turned the corner and won two more Grands Prix and made 4th in another with the same deck. Ironworks Combo attracted many of the same players who enjoyed the decision agency of Lantern Control, including Zac Elsik himself, who embraced KCI across various tournaments that summer. Almost overnight, Codex Shredders and company fell out of favor.
Many cite January 13, 2020 as the official death-day of Lantern Control in Modern. The Banned and Restricted announcement that morning listed Mox Opal among the cards falling to the hammer, a foundational role-player in Lantern decks for the entirety of the archetype’s existence. Others instead point to May 3, 2019 as the day the music died, when War of the Spark introduced Karn, The Great Creator to the card pool. Karn singlehandedly stonewalled Lantern Control, and its blanket utility lended to new, more oppressive prison-style decks and powerful combo builds. At worst, the Planeswalker occupied a safe spot in the sideboard as a silver bullet against a variety of artifacts in the format, and Lantern could never keep up with its rate on return.
So for a couple of years, the light of Lantern of Insight dimmed to a lowly flicker. But it never went out entirely.
On June 16, 2021, the World Champion Paolo Vitor Damo da Rosa hypothesized a potential comeback for Lantern Control. The printing of Urza’s Saga in Modern Horizons II injected new life into the archetype. The card was a perfect fit for the build – it hit on every single pressure point and offered an optional win condition that the deck so long desired. Kanister went undefeated in a Modern league that June running four copies of the utility land. Perhaps the deck could overcome the absence of Mox Opal after all?
Despite Paolo’s endorsement, the community at large seemed much less optimistic. The contemporary Modern format is layered with heavy-hitting cards that are too efficient and redundant and aggressive. There are too many incidental shuffle effects and too many answers to artifacts and too much card draw. The format is defined now by proactive decks that win with accumulated value, especially compared to the slower, more methodical pace of The Zugzwang Machine. How can Lantern Control realistically compete in a world of Boseiju and Grief and The One Ring?
Well, maybe it can. Just maybe there is still a flicker of hope.
In one of his many articles written about Lantern Control, Sam Black described Modern as a format full of dedicated and passionate sub-communities. These communities will champion decks and will work together through a year’s worth of theory-crafting in a matter of days. They will congregate behind the scenes to iron out all the ideas, then celebrate when their passion project hits its breakthrough moment.
As Joseph Dunlap wrote following Elsik’s win at Grand Prix Oklahoma City, “Lantern Control is a triumph of the Magic community.” What started as a fleeting idea in a message board changed how we think about Magic forever. There are no 1:1 parallels to Lantern Control, either within Magic or outside of it. Because it lays bare the system that makes the game hum, there may always be a future for The Zugzwang Machine. There may always be a place for the deck without a win condition, the distorted reflection of the format, the antithesis of the game itself.
In Justin Cohen’s words,
“Honestly, Lantern Control can just barely be considered Magic and I absolutely love it.”
I know a forum full of folks who would agree.
• The Magali Villeneuve Playmat Collection
The final sponsor of this episode is the Magali Villeneuve Playmat and Print Collection on Kickstarter. Over 6,000 backers have already supported this project, and the organizers are accepting late backers for a limited time. This project features an array of Magali’s iconic portraits, including a select group with artwork extended to fit the width of a standard playmat for the first time. Available as well are limited edition double-sided flip playmats of Huntmaster of the Fells and the new Tamiyo from Modern Horizons III, two-player playmats of the Secret Lair sketches, and table-length playmats of the Stained-Glass Basic Lands from Dominaria United. Limited-edition giclée prints are also available as add-ons or as standalone purchases. We are really spoiled for choice with this collection. Sign up now before time runs out for good to show your support for Magali Villeneuve, one of the game’s most acclaimed artists. I’ll be picking up a Death’s Shadow playmat from this project, and maybe Sorin, too.
• Rules Technicalities Galore
Playing Lantern Control at the highest level required deep knowledge of the Modern metagame and specific rules knowledge for certain card interactions. For example, the Humans deck could often chip away at Lantern players through Ensnaring Bridge with Noble Hierarch, since the Exalted trigger goes on the stack after attacks are declared. In the early days, Elsik and company ran Bow of Nylea in the sideboard to add counters to opposing Hierarchs and Signal Pests for this reason, a counterintuitive but effective way to stop creatures with zero base power from attacking.
Tron players took advantage of Chromatic Star in more ways than one – first of all, it could not be named with Pithing Needle, since the activation is considered a mana ability. Cantripping cards like this also provided safeguard against Codex Shredder activations, one of many reasons that this deck was such a bad matchup for Lantern.
Finally, when casting Scry effects like Serum Visions or “look” effects like Ancient Stirrings with Lantern in play, the top card stays revealed, but anything beneath it is not revealed until the spell resolves. However, if a player explicitly draws cards, each one will be revealed as they are drawn. Essentially, there can only be one card revealed at a time.
Pro Magic players were often the best at knowing when they were dead on board against Lantern Control, and when it was time to move to the next game. Of all the early concessions I saw while reviewing matches, none beat Ken Yukuhiro’s game 1 against Salvatto in the Semifinals of the PT. This guy just seems like the happiest Magic player to ever play the game.
“Yes, he is in fact going to be able to empty his hand, Ensnaring Bridge says no more attacks from creatures for effectively the rest of the game. That’s basically it, right?! And Ken just counted it up, and he’s like ‘well, I can only do 13 in the absolute maximum scenario, and I’m gonna call it good.’ Ken Yukuhiro just shot up in my player rankings right there. Oh yeah, he spared us a little bit of agony there.”
Many considered the Lantern Control deck masochistic Magic for both sides of the table. While that view may have some merit, the real test of endurance was found in the mirror match. Brad Nelson and Ross Merriam put themselves through mutual zugzwang for our enjoyment in January 2018. If you’re a sicko like me, you’ll love this game, and if you hate the deck, yet somehow made it all the way to the end of this video, it’s worth checking out if only for the comments section.
You can support Rhystic Studies on Patreon for access to our Discord and to my podcast, to get your name in the credits, and to receive a signed card in the mail directly from me. Thanks so much for watching! Long live Lantern Control!
• Sources
https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/modern/established-modern/control/221769-lantern-control - Original Lantern Control Deck Discussion (beginning 2012)
https://www.reddit.com/r/spikes/comments/3m4c1x/other_hi_im_zac_elsik_1st_place_at_gp_oklahoma/ - Zac Elsik AMA - GP Oklahoma 2015
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernMagic/comments/3lzjoa/comment/cvbdm6u/ - Elsik on why he played Lantern in Charlotte
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/296698#paper - GP Charlotte 2015 - Zac Elsik Decklist
https://x.com/mtgaaron/status/610319485837271040 - Aaron Forsythe Tweet
https://web.archive.org/web/20190517065633/http://modernnexus.com/primers-lantern-control/ - Original Primers of Lantern Control (Sept 2015)
https://www.quietspeculation.com/2015/09/primers-lantern-control/ - Lantern Primer (Sept 2015)
https://www.quietspeculation.com/2015/09/how-lantern-control-won-and-how-to-beat-it/ - How Lantern Won and How to Beat It (Sep 2015)
https://github.com/maxmakesmagic/ormos/blob/main/archive/en/articles/archive/week-was/2015/09/modern-insight-2015-09-18.md - BDM Recap - GP OKC / History of Lantern Control
https://web.archive.org/web/20151221120542/https://manaleak.com/mtguk/2015/09/5-reasons-lantern-control-is-a-triumph-of-the-magic-community-by-joseph-dunlap/ - Lantern Control is a Triumph of the Magic Community
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pe1BWLKN_dvAE5QXEKdqeUorcO-yOt4pzqZrbFO_Oas/edit - Lantern 101 - Justin Cohen
https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/a-guide-to-playing-lantern-control/ - A Guide to Playing Lantern Control - Sam Black (2016)
https://infinite.tcgplayer.com/article/The-Ultimate-Guide-to-Lantern-Control/8d9ce9f0-e339-4fa7-aca2-76f88d4384c5/ - Lantern Control Guide - BBD
https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/whir-of-re-invention-the-next-stage-of-lantern-control/ - Next Stage of Lantern Control - Sam Black (Nov 2017)
https://www.quietspeculation.com/2017/12/dotw-whir-lantern-control/ - Deck of the Week (Dec 2017)
https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2018/02/luis-salvatto-shines-spotlight-lantern-control-pro-tour-rivals-ixalan/ - Lantern Control Wins PT (2018)
https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/saving-lantern-control/ - Saving Lantern Control - Sam Black (2018)
https://articles.starcitygames.com/magic-the-gathering/premium/lantern-control-is-ready-to-terrorize-modern-once-again/ - Lantern Control is Ready to Terrorize Modern Once Again - PVDDR (June 2021)
https://infinite.tcgplayer.com/article/Let-s-Go-to-Prison/589a2881-5605-40e5-97a8-997705c48cd6/ - Let’s Go To Prison - Ali Aintrazi
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernMagic/comments/179xftz/is_lantern_control_worth_to_play/ - Is Lantern Worth it to Play? (Dec 2023)
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/6192269#paper - Abzan Lantern (Feb 2024)
https://x.com/BraunDuinIt/status/643834792824426496 - BBD Tweet - Dreaming About Lantern (2015)
https://x.com/Mengu09/status/1757449557388960244?s=20 - Mengu loses to Lantern Control (Feb 2024)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5d1KNNFArSOSHxsA39IL5YMh4JkavQuk - GP Charlotte 2015 Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/@lanterninsights - Lantern Insights YouTube Channel