I buy that you can start sending burn to the dome, but saying Grixis “struggles to answer geist”? That’s a joke, isn’t it?

Tasigur walls your 2/2. Heck, I’ve flashed in a snapcaster to block, then flashbacked Kommand to retrieve the snapcaster.

As a UWR control player, i have never lost to grixis control. The reason being i can become a burn deck and win via that method. You effectively blank half their hand because you dont use creatures sides snap. Also, geist of saint traft adds a difficult tempo element tjat grixis striggles to answer, finally path to exile ensures that they are not able to recurr any of their creature based threats.

This has already been mentioned, but I wanted to reinforce.

As a long time scapeshift player I can confidently say that control is probably the easiest matchup. The toughest matchups are: delver or other aggro control variants, super fast (pre turn 4) combo decks, and hyper aggro (non-affinity) decks. I think that the deck is unique among combo control in that the lands theme gives it a huge mana advantage against control decks.

I know that in magic history, combo control was probably weak to straight control, but in the modern context, combo control generally trades favorably with counter magic, has virtual card advantage (lots of dead cards in the control deck) and has a proactive plan that threatens to win, even from a losing position.

Again, I disagree–I think esper DOES have the cards to float through the other matchups within reason–for example, supreme verdict isn’t exactly the best positioned at the moment among modern’s decks, but it really won’t take that much of a metagame shift to make sweepers more powerful. Path to Exile and Snapcaster mage both stand on their own as powerful cards in their own right, and celestial colonnade has a strong pedigree in the earlier years of modern. If the random other decks I encountered were more aggressive decks, like the white weenie list recently featured here, or some tribal strategies, or even outliers like blue-tron or delver strategies, the story could have been much different. Those are decks that esper has tools that are well positioned for. 5 color kiki shenanigans? Naya collected company with mainboard gaddock teegs? Those aren’t the types of decks that the tools esper has are good against. If those rounds had been white weenie (the top 16 list) and/or some kind of tribal strategy, I could just as easily have been 6-2. Don’t discount decks that have strong potential just because the tools that they best abuse aren’t positioned well at the moment, because all it takes is one banning or one printing of the right kind of card to push wraths and card draw towards the front of the format.

I don’t consider 4-4 “reasonable,” either. If you can tune to beat the top decks, great, but your deck still has to be good enough to get past the “other decks” to be good enough for Modern. Take Monkey Grow: it’s a heavily metagamed deck that shines against top-tier strategies. Cards like Blood Moon or Disrupting Shoal are bad against a lot of random outlier decks. But the sheer power of Delver, Bolt, Snapcaster, Tarmogoyf, Huntmaster, etc. floats the deck through those matchups anyway. Esper doesn’t really have cards that do that.

Nor do I consider 4-4 to be impressive; the point wasn’t that it was a good finish, but rather that it, as a deck that was prepared heavily for the tier one and two metagame, with some very positive and some very negative matchups among those tiers, can still perform reasonably against a completely random sweep of the lower tier decks. One of the things that often plagues decks on the verge of breaking out (see grixis before kolaghan’s command) is the inability to perform reasonably against other decks in the lower tiers because of the concessions they make to have reasonable matchups against tier one decks. A 4-4 record against the swath of random decks mirrors the 50-50 “game against anything” style performance that makes BGx decks so attractive–you can metagame for what you expect, but still presume to have a 50/50 matchup or close to it against pretty much any opponent.

Switching between tempo and midrange builds post-board is common of both these archetypes. In iGrow, I frequently side out my Swiftspears and Undoings to play a midrange game with Snapcaster Mage and a ton of removal (against every aggro deck).

I don’t consider 4-4 an impressive record by any means, but am open to looking at some actual data suggesting Esper Control’s viability in Modern.

I agreed with your comments up until “and yeah, esper control is horrible”. The deck is solidly tier two in power level, and has plenty of game against the format. I took it to the DC premiere IQ a week ago, and I went 4-4 despite playing only one round against a deck I was even remotely prepared to sideboard for. I had eleven sideboard cards that remained 100% untouched at that event because I didn’t play against twin, affinity, grixis of any flavor, or burn even once, and only against jund once; the only tier two decks I played against were co-co elves (with dwynen’s elite) and infect. A dedicated control deck that can 4-4 an 8 round tournament with essentially a four card sideboard is definitely not “horrible”.

I should maybe have clarified that this was only a theory. I took for granted that readers would understand that, but as the first few comments indicate, that’s not what happened.

Another thing I should have addressed is that the matchups (strong against/soft to) are by no means set in stone and vary depending on players, playstyles, decks, and other circumstances. But I’ll stand by my claim that control decks generally beat midrange decks, as well as most of the others I make, even if they prove untrue in some cases.

I also really like discussing theory, so I’ll respond to your points!

1) I say in the article that I’m defining unfair as a deck that wins in a way other than attacking with creatures fairly consistently over the course of a game, or can end a game from “0” (i.e. with an opponent at 20 life, or 0 poison) in a single turn. “Fair” is one of the most contentious terms in Magic, since different players “feel” like some strategies are more fair than others and bring their own definitions and biases to the word. That’s why it’s so important to clearly define it. The only grey area in my definition is how to measure the “consistency” of these attacks, but I think it’s impossible to completely eliminate gray areas with definitions like these.

2) Your claim that “rock” and “midrange” ignores that this article only proposes my theory. In this theory, rock is a sub-division of midrange, so actually yes, rock is a midrange deck. I locate the Naya Zoo decks between midrange and tempo, depending on the build; the “bigger” CoCo decks are closer to rock, as they aim to accrue advantage over time with cards like CoCo and Knight of the Reliquary (so yes, they do have sources of card advantage). Small Zoo is a fish deck, backing a bunch of cheap creatures with enough disruption to “get there.”

2.2) The BGx decks are indeed rock decks that boast game against combo, mainly because of hand disruption. That said, they have less game against these strategies than blue rock decks like Grixis Control, which has better answers and can play proactive games of a similar caliber with Scour-Tasigur for quick beats or even EOT-deployed Snapcaster Mages. All that said, these decks especially prey on fair decks. When it comes to beating combo (we’ll use Storm as an example, since you pointed it out and it’s clearly a pure combo deck), the grow deck will outperform the rock deck any day of the week. That’s because tempo decks like grow are aggro decks watered down to beat unfair strategies like combo. Midrange decks, like rock, on the other hand, can obviously perform against combo, but crush fair decks like no other. At the end of the day, Siege Rhino and Lingering Souls are way better against Wild Nacatl decks than against Pyromancer Ascension decks, whereas almost every card in RUG Delver contributes to a cohesive plan against Ascension decks.

On Jund vs. Combo: of course Jund can win. But it’s “natural” plan – of disrupting opponents, then beating down with threats – matches up poorly against control decks, which have the same “natural” plan but execute it much more succinctly. Take the Jund vs. Esper Control matchup, for example (and yeah, Esper Control is horrible). Jund is forced into an aggro role here, which can obviously work for it sometimes. But Esper is the clear favorite here. It stops Jund’s attrition plan with Think Twice, Esper Charm, and Think Twice, has Pulse-me-or-die threats like Gideon Jura, can ravage Jund’s aggro plans with Supreme Verdict, and boasts an insane late-game spell in Sphinx’s Revelation. As you pointed out, Tron sits at the top of the “go long” hierarchy, even beating most control decks because its ramp is just so strong. Midrange decks presumably deserve their name because they are situated “between” aggro and control, and can fluidly adapt their roles depending on the matchup – Jund is an aggro deck against Ad Nauseam and a control deck against Zoo, for example. It’s more true of Abzan than of Jund, but in general, BGx has a much stronger late-game than it does an early-game, and I believe that decks with better late-games than BGx tend to beat it.

3) Which aggro decks are you referring to? It seems to me that Scapeshift is mostly soft to aggro-combo if anything, and to tempo decks, of course.

I see few things wrong here that I will address:
1) You say that Control is unfair but how? You classify unfair as winning in nontraditional ways, usually violating game rules. Since when is attacking with manlands or creatures or winning with planeswalkers or burn a violation of the game rules? I don’t see it.

2) Your Midrange section has several problems and I as someone who has kinda specialized in these kind of decks find them very noticeable:
2.1) You assume that Rock and midrange are basically the same which is false. While the Rock-style midrange decks are indeed most of the time the biggest and most successful kind of midrange decks in any format for many reasons they are still just a very specific kind of midrange deck and are not representative of the entire archetype.
Take for example a deck like Big Zoo/Naya Midrange. Are they midrange? Of course they are. They play stuff like Path to Exile and Lightning Bolt as removal and have big, efficient creatures like Loxodon Smiter, Knight of the Reliquary, Tarmogoyf and so on. They couldn’t be more different from the Rock though. They don’t attack the hand or the opponents resources in any way, they have little to no card advantage at all, they are not interested in long attrition battles. What they do though is stomping any kind of aggressive deck which was the original idea behind midrange. An aggro deck that is basically pre-sideboarded to win aggro mirrors. That’s why these kind of decks are indeed weak to the type of decks that you have mentioned. A Storm deck that is trying to go off with Pyromancer Ascension couldn’t care less about Path or Bolt or your Loxodon Smiter. That brings us to the next point though.
2.2) The Rock-style decks are certainly not weak to any kind of combo deck. In fact that is what the decks are preying on. Why do you think BG/x is called the police force and fun police of Modern? If your deck has a combo or the characteristics of a combo deck like Infect you will automatically will be the dog in the matchup when going against a deck like Jund. When you are playing combo you actually hope to avoid decks like Jund and Abzan. You can ask Storm players or Ad Nauseam players for example. They all dread playing against a deck like Jund. That’s why these kind of combo decks have been pushed out to the fringes. Twin doesn’t have good matchup either because the combo is simply bad against BG/x. That’s why stuff like Grixis Twin is even a thing to make their bad matchups at least a bit better and All-in Twin has ceased to exist.
The same is true for control to a lesser extent. The average Jund mainboard is already able to beat any kind of control deck game 1. It’s true that the removal is dead but the maindeck discard, Liliana of the Veil, fast clocks like Tarmogoyf, card advantage engines like Dark Confidant, manlands, Scavenging Ooze growing huge and invalidating Snapcaster Mage, etc are all hugely relevant and live and can already do the heavy lifting and after board things get even better with the useless removal leaving and more relevant cards coming in like Land destruction in form of Fulminator Mages and haymakers like Thrun, the Last Troll which can beat a control deck single-handily.
In my opinion it’ s like playing a BG/x mirror making it a mostly 50/50 matchup. You just take out all the removal instead of the discard when sideboarding.
The only type of deck that can undeniably claim to have decent BG/x matchup is GR Tron and even that one is far away from auto winning. That lies simply in the nature of Rock-style decks.
You see the same thing being true for Abzan in the current Standard, Mono-Black Devotion last Standard season, when Jund was big in Standard, etc.

3) Scapeshift is actually strong against control but weak to aggro. Scapeshift has a ton of counterspells and has the mana advantage thanks to the ramp spells making it tough to win counterwars against them after a certain point which will be reached thanks to control having no clock not to mention Boseiju, Who Shelters All which invalidates basically the entire control deck. Scapeshift has huge trouble with early pressure though since it doesn’t have much removal and is so reliant on counterspells to be relevant and stuff like Remand is garbage against aggro as is Cryptic Command. That’s why the deck has fallen of the map for the most part. The deck is unable to beat both BG/x and aggro since you lose to BG/x if you pack more removal for the aggro matchups and if you play more card selection against BG/x you lose to aggro not to mention the omnipresence of land destruction thanks to decks like Tron or Amulet Bloom being in the meta too.

http://www.gatheringmagic.com/sculpting-formats-circle-predation/

http://www.gatheringmagic.com/circle-predation-part-2-indepth/

This article mostly just posits my own theory. It’s pretty lengthy so I’d rather keep the comparisons to other theories somewhere else. That said, I’m not familiar with most of the ones you posted but I’ll check them out and get back to you.

I did read the Drew Levin article on aggro-control and hybrid control, and I’ll contrast it to this one. Compared with my theory, Drew’s aggro-control is grow. As it moves closer to aggro (beatdown), it becomes fish. Zoo is between aggro and fish, and the 20 Savannah Lions deck is undeniably aggro.

Hybrid control is rock midrange. So is midrange control, and so is midrange beatdown. They’re all rock to me. I define midrange decks as aggro decks with control elements (or control decks with aggro elements) that disrupt opponents first, then commit threats to the board and attack to win. These decks make great use of tempo along the way, although unlike grow and fish decks, they’re wary of throwing cards away for the sake of tempo. Most of the “tempo” cards midrange decks play break parity at least on card advantage (Remand, Repeal, Smallpox, etc.).

What I call tempo decks are aggro with control elements (or again, control decks with aggro elements) that commit threats FIRST, and disrupt after. These decks also use tempo along the way, but they don’t mind throwing cards out for more tempo (Vapor Snag, Disrupting Shoal, etc.). That’s because they don’t have much of a lategame, whereas midrange decks do – after all, they’re most proactive in the lategame, after opponents have been disrupted.

Yes on Tokens, but that deck is certainly closer to the aggro side of the spectrum than the control side. Same with Zoo, which is about as interactive as tokens, but in a different way (with removal and reach over removal and discard effects).

This makes sense to me, too. I don’t want to discount what others have said about the matchup, since I’m not expert, but I would assume Rest in Peace out of UWR hoses Grixis decks.

Yep, that enchantment deck sounds like midrange to me. Prison cards are control elements, so they can fit into control decks, combo-control, or aggro-control (tempo and midrange). Ghostly Prison, for instance, could find itself in each of these archetypes.

Definitely possible: the article classifies G/W Hatebears as Fish tempo. B/W Tokens is usually classified as Aggro-Control; by this system, it’d also be a Fish tempo deck.

In regard I’m thinking of my own enbantments prison deck that’s utilizes the synergy of constellation cards like eidolon of Blossoms and/or enablers like Monastery Siege with Starfield of Nyx. I think the deck would certainly fall under the aggro/control umbrella of midrange as I ultimately win with creatures.

Additionally, are cards like ghostly prison and suppression field tempo cards or control cards? Or both?

Source: more than 20 3 game sets of grixis v UWR in the last week.