Kimmo Hovi, elder brother of Tommi Hovi, is the complete source of inspiration for the eventual deck that I built.

During PTLA, Kimmo spent a lot of time playing in t2 side events with a deck he called "Staunch Bwatdown". A straightforward W/U control deck, it contained a small portion of off-color lands to support a couple main deck Gaea's Blessings and a Lobotomy or two. He killed by either decking you or smacking you for 3 a turn with a Staunch Defender. Hence, the deck's name. His sideboard innovation against threats of all kinds was... Nevinyrral's Disk, a largely forgotten card for W/U. (Mono blue and mono black Necro have traditionally resorted to Disk because of their relative difficulties in removing permanents from play. W/U typically does not use Disk because white has more than adequate removal of all types.)

I watched him playing in these side events, and was astonished to find that a deck this slow could do such a complete job on all the Stupid Red Burn running around. In such a sense, it really WAS like "The Deck" in t2... exceplly WAS like "The Deck" in t2... except the 5 casting-cost White Creature of Death was a Staunch Defender and not a Serra Angel.

Originally, I laughed at the concept because I am a stupid brainwashed human being sometimes and I believe the crap everyone else tells me. After watching Kimmo play for a couple hours, I realized that most of my opinions on t2 were utterly bogus and I asked for a decklist.

I deconstructed the deck at once and analyzed what appeared to be its two prime faults - Kimmo used a LOT of artifact mana and too many non-basic lands. He was practically dying to painland damage every game. Plus, he only had about 20 actual land. If you're only playing 20 land and the rest of your mana sources turn your opponent's Disenchants into Stone Rains, it's not hard to guess that your chances against another control deck are pretty slim.

So, out went the Fellwar Stones and Mind Stones and what-have-you. I stripped the deck of almost all the non-basic lands and raised the total mana production to 25 lands, 15 of which were basic Islands and Plains. It felt like building a t2 deck three years ago, when people actually played basic lands of both colors in a two-color deck.

I took out the main deck Lobotomies, reasoning that if everyone else was as brainwashed as me, they probably wouldn't be playing control in t2.

Some early playtendent> Some early playtesting snags revealed a bit of a stunning weakness to multiple Cursed Scrolls and not drawing mass creature removal early. Out went 2 of 4 Disenchants and in came 2 Disks, the all-purpose hoser of Stupid Red Burn With Stupid Cursed Scrolls.

Staunch Defenders wound up being too expensive to cast in terms of their vulnerability and the double white issue. I experimented briefly with a single Rainbow Efreet that eventually got sent to the sideboard to punish anyone playing a W/U control deck. The "Staunch Bwatdown" part of the deck ended there.

Kimmo's Dismisses in the main deck mutated into Power Sinks for their early and late game flexibility. They were 2 mana counters for the first few turns and late game Mana Shorts against reactive decks.

Forbid was tried briefly and discarded... Forbid and Gerrard's Wisdom is not now and probably never will be a combo.

At the late stages, I basically wound up with a U/W control deck with a splash of green for Gaea's... the sole way to win. This is not a happy situation. Getting a draw every round sucks.

By this time, I had foisted the deck on Brian. He reacted with a little early skepticism, but he always gives in if I tell him "just try it". I usually have to remind him not to change the whole deck around first. Brian is a completely intelligent theorist and intelligent theorist and player, but he has biases just like anyone else. If I don't tell him to try a deck as-is, he'll switch out a bunch of cards and turn it into a whole different deck. Our relationship in deck-building is symbiotic - he relies on me to keep an open mind about ideas conventionally considered "bad", and I rely on him to playtest endlessly (a chore I detest) and give me a blow-by-blow critique with specific suggestions for change.

Anyway, after a week of playtesting, Brian announces that at least half the time, he wished he had a Fireball in the deck so he could kill his opponent faster. I resisted it at first because of the mana issues. Then I immediately realized (duh) that since we were running 2 green spells from 5 omni-color sources, we could run a Fireball off the same 5 lands. Gradually that became 2 Fireballs, so that Brian had the capacity to kill an opponent without having to cast a Gaea's Blessing at all.

Final tweaks included testing (and immediately ditching) Reflecting Pools, adjusting the ratios of basic lands to accomodate the sideboard and various changes, removing a Gaea's Blessing (bringing us to 2 in the main deck), and scaling back the non-basic lands to just 9 (4 City of Brass, 1 Undiscovered Paradise, 2 Adarkar Wastes and 2 Thalakos Lowlands). By minimizing our usage of what Brian calls "gimplands" (Gemstone Mine, Undiscovered Paradise), this overed Paradise), this deck could claim a mana advantage over Donais' deck at least some of the time and was more resistant to Wasteland. In addition, a third Disk wound up main deck... a partial solution to those horrendous 3 Plains opening draws.

I still think now, as I did then, that the deck was a reasonably strong metagame decision. We gambled on there not being much black in the format, and thankfully there was not. The White Weenie issue was very touch-and-go, with the U/W only winning a match about 50% of the time. In a blooper of cosmic proportions, I utterly failed to consider the remotest possibility that anyone would play Bloom. Our deck and sideboard was woefully ill-equipped to deal with it.

At any rate, the environment pretty much dictated which cards were good and in what quantity, so it's not surprising that it looks like a direct descendent in the line of Donais 5CU.

Cathy Nicoloff