Why are People Playing Control Katsu? A Genuine Question
I don’t have an answer to this one and I’m asking with sincerity. Before we get into this, I want to define what I mean by “control Katsu”. If a deck has more than nine defense reactions (excluding blue Flic-Flak because that’s a resource card) it’s probably a control deck. If a deck has three red Fluster Fists and Pounding Gales, without Head Jab or Open the Centre, it’s a control deck. I’ve seen more than one claim online of “midrange Katsu” decks with 15 defence reactions and those red combo-enders. Just because you have 2 red Leg Taps and a red Rising Knee Thrust does not make the deck midrange. Aggressive Katsu and Midrange Katsu are both currently very strong, and I have no questions about either. My gripes about definitions aside, the prevalence of control Katsu in the current metagame puzzles me.
Let’s take a quick dive into the long history of this deck in the brief life of FaB. The first constructed Calling event in New Zealand was won by a control Katsu deck, called Spaghetti Tornado at the time, piloted by Sasha Markovic. This was in the Welcome-to-Rathe-only days, and was something people were not fully expecting. The deck also had success as a meta call at a very Warrior-heavy Road to Nationals event in Nelson in 2020, a day after Crucible of War was released. I believe it went by the moniker of “Ninja Turtle” during that era. In both of these instances, the card pool was very different and the control Katsu decks were trying to accomplish specific things, something that I do not think the modern iterations are doing.
In the Monarch meta, control Katsu seems to be confused. It is not the best fatigue deck, and it is not the best deck at pivoting towards aggressive play. It can be fatigued by Bravo and Dash. Its defenses can be smashed through by any number of decks including Chane, Rhinar, Levia, and Sonata Viserai. Boltyn has all the time in the world to set up against it, and dealing with Prism requires most of your sideboard to be taken up by six- or seven-power cards. It does have its good matchups, namely Dorinthea and other versions of Katsu, depending on the build. Unfortunately, Dorinthea isn’t as popular as she once was and it makes it feel like the “best” matchup for this deck is being squandered because of it. Katsu’s ability is nice to fix hands and add a bit of explosive damage but feels underutilized because the deck will rarely be playing attack action cards with Go Again or playing out entire Combo chains. There is also limited benefit to your opponent not knowing if they are sat across from an aggressive or defensive deck. That falls apart quite quickly once people identify the control Katsu deck after the second or third round of Swiss.
If you’re currently playing control Katsu and you don’t want to play a midrange Katsu, swap to Dash and try it out. She does everything that control Katsu does but better. She has more explosive damage turns when they are needed, she has a better weapon. The only thing she is missing is Flic-Flak, which isn’t the dealbreaker that many people seem to think. Is Flic-Flak single-handedly that good? I think it is the best defense reaction in the game (honourable mentions to Soul Sheild and Steelblade Shunt). I do not think it makes up the difference between Katsu and other control decks though. It does make midrange Katsu a defensive monster with minimal deck changes though, and that is where the card’s strength lies.
I would also like to say that I don’t mean to knock the deck if you are either a dedicated ninja player and Katsu is just your jam or you’re making a bold meta call. But if you’re playing this because you believe it’s the best deck in the meta and you really want to win, please tell me why.
Maybe it’s just all the Ira players transitionimg from Blitz to CC.
Maybe it’s just all the Ira players transitionimg from Blitz to CC.
To answer one of the points raised in the article, I refer to my katsu as midrange to distinguish it from Sasha’s old style of control ninja. He ran tome of fyendal and remembrance and, as far as i know, focused much more heavily on fatigue – whereas a “midrange” deck focuses on efficient trades and actually pressuring hands/killing them well before they run out of cards.
As someone who played katsu midrange/control for a long time, I played it because it was very fun and i never ran into anything that could consistently beat it that wasn’t also destroyed by other decks in the meta. It beat up aggro katsu, prism, chane, dori, aggro dash. I’ve slaughtered every Levia list i’ve encountered so far, so it surprises me to see the author reckons that Levia beats it. Rhinar is also not a definite loss – i’m 2 for 2 against adam little! – but Meataxe or Cadaverous can tilt the balance into the rhinar’s favour. I’ve also beaten some very good Boltyns i’ve faced with the list, though there were some awkward sideboarding decisions at the start 🙂 I would go as far as to say that control katsu ought to be favoured in the matchup. Prism has to get a bit lucky to win, with stuff like consecutive auras and multiple sequential tome draws, which beats most decks.
Chane was a big problem though, as shortly after the Pro Quest Chanes did actually figure out how to beat control lists, using seeping shadows and howls – and the rise of Dash and Bravo in popularity was not favourable to the list either.
I played control Katsu at 3 RTN events because it has very good matchups against the field except Chane.Its gameplay is very simple blue pitch kodachi x2 and an attack means in a 6+ swiss round event you don’t get as tired as people on other decks.Now that Chane is the best deck I would not play control Katsu anymore if I wanted to top 8 a big event.If you are an experienced Katsu player the Rhinar/Bravo matchups are easy and Dash is a coin flip.