Today's decks are going to be focused on control.  But rather than spend a long-winded introduction paragraph rambling about the philosophies of control decks, all of which you're already familiar with, let's just get to the decks themselves.  As always, these decks are for CASUAL Vanguard!

Deck 1 Maralen of the Mornsong

This is a really interesting avatar to build around.  It seems to be suited for four types of decks in particular.

1. Win-all-at-once combo decks, that need help finding their combo pieces.  However, these to me are grossly unfun for both people involved, as they resemble two concurrent solitaire games rather than a single interactive actual game.  As such, I will never, ever be covering one for an article of mine.
    
2. Toolbox decks.  That is, decks that have a lot of situational one-ofs that it wants to tutor up at any given moment.  My playtesting with this avatar for toolbox decks hasn't been extremely successful, but this is not to say it can't be done.
    
3. The type I'll probably cover in a future article, decks that exploit the "You can't draw cards" line (trust me, it is possible and even desirable to exploit).
    
4. The type I'll be covering today, decks that have a very specific gameplan that relies on multiple elements coming together and that they want to consistently set up each game.

So what's this deck's gameplan, specifically?  To abuse this card as much as possible:

This deck actually started out as a non-Vanguard deck of mine, until I realized I wasn't drawing my combo pieces nearly consistently enough.  And when your deck is built around a card like Eon Hub, it really can't do a single thing until it gets that Eon Hub.  The Maralen Avatar, then, is perfect for us.

Here are some of the ways you can exploit the Hub.

1. Big creatures with upkeep costs.  Force of Nature, Greater Harvester, Benthic Djinn, Lord of the Pit and so on are now a lot more manageable.
2. Anything with Cumulative Upkeep, Vanishing, or Echo.  Consider Calciderm, Dreams of the Dead, Glacial Chasm, and Sustaining Spirit.
3. Cards with delayed upkeep triggers.  This includes all of the Pacts (Pact of the Titan) as well as Vanish Into Memory.  However, I must stress that as fantastic as Vanish Into Memory ordinarily is with an Eon Hub, it should NOT be used with the Maralen avatar.  This is because the avatar prevents you from drawing cards!  (For that same reason, you must never play a Brainstorm in a Maralen deck.  Oof, I learned that the hard way.)
4. Cards that give your opponent's cards suspend.  Delay is now a hard counter.  Even if you cast it a couple of turns before your Eon Hub comes out!  (Unfortunately, this seems to be the only card that gives your opponent's cards suspend.)
5. Cards with repeating upkeep triggers.  Loxodon Peacekeeper is now a bit more loyal.  (And in the Maralen deck, he's great for the early game, since our avatar all but guarantees we'll be at a lower starting life than the opponent.  He'll help you stall while you set up.)  Also, two cards that are absolute bombs with an Eon Hub in play:

When you're skipping your upkeep, either one of these will basically prevent you from ever dying damage.  They function slightly different, and I personally prefer Delaying Shield, but you are probably fine with either one.

So I used those ideas to make a UW deck that stalls the game early until it can get an Eon Hub out which it then uses to control the board in various ways.  Because of the avatar's semi-tutoring ability, I also included a few one-ofs that I may want to draw into but I will never want more than one of (for instance, Loxodon Gatekeeper and Damping Matrix).  There's also a slight hint of toolbox in cards like Rebuff the Wicked and Reprisal — we will usually know whether or not we want these when we see them during our draw step.  For our actual kill condition, all we need is 3 copies of Sacred Mesa (which, remember, also benefits from the Hub).  We could get away with one copy if not for the possibility of it being disenchanted when we don't have a Delay or Rebuff the Wicked in our hand.

Quick note about the land count.  I'm running 23 land with 4 Signets.  I originally thought I could get away with fewer lands, since the avatar would always help me find one when I needed one, but that's not the way the avatar really works.  What happens under that strategy is you find yourself wanting to take a land almost every turn, and having to pass up taking cards that would actually help you.  The only cards you get to cast in those games are the ones in your starting hand, which are randomized, not selected, thus defeating the whole point of the avatar.  So take it from me — you want a normal amount of lands here!

How much life is the right number to pay?  Experiment around, but I usually like to go 5 or 6.  You can wait until after you see your opponent's avatar to decide how much to pay, so if you get the sense he's probably playing a slow deck, pay more; an aggro deck, pay less.  But also remember that once we get both our Hub and Delaying Shield in play, our life total becomes pretty irrelevant.

Casual, Noncompetitive, Customizable Decklist:

Avatar: Maralen Land (23): 14 Plains 9 Island Creatures (10): 3 Wall of Hope 2 Wall of Shards 2 Loxodon Peacekeeper 1 Plumeveil 1 Loxodon Gatekeeper 1 Illusionary Wall

Noncreatures (27): 1 Rebuff the Wicked 1 Reprisal 2 Disenchant 3 Delay 4 Azorius Signet 1 Damping Matrix 4 Oblivion Ring 3 Sacred Mesa 4 Delaying Shield 4 Eon Hub

Deck 2 Peacekeeper

This is an avatar pretty obviously suited for control decks.  One potential problem with Peacekeeper decks is, if you don't build them with foresight, they usually go like this:

1. The opponent casts a creature; you activate your avatar and Arrest the creature.
2. They cast another creature, with the Arrested one still on the battlefield.  You activate the avatar again, which randomly chooses from among those two creatures.  You get lucky and it picks the right one.
3. They cast their third, fourth, and fifth creatures, and it becomes increasingly difficult to Arrest each one.  You find yourself activating your avatar multiple times before you hit a creature that hasn't already been hit.
4. This pattern continues until they have six creatures in play wearing 5 Arrests each and two creatures in play that are free to attack you until you're dead.

So how do you avoid games like that?  I've come up with three options, two of which the below deck uses.

1. Kill the creatures that have been Arrested.  This may seem redundant, as why would you kill something that's already useless?  And if you could kill it, why bother with the avatar to begin with?  But it's worthwhile in that it allows you to successfully Arrest the other creatures.  And the answer is you're going to kill them in ways that are unique to the avatar.  And while there's no creature (yet) that says "T: Destroy target enchanted creature," there IS a creature that says "T: Gain control of target enchanted creature," which, for our purposes, is just as good.  Remember, all we're trying to do is reduce the number of bodies on our opponent's side, so the randomization of our avatar becomes less random.  Sometimes the triggered ability of the creature we just stole will even help us, even if it can't attack, block, or use activated abilities.
2. Get so much mana that you can afford the ridiculous number of times you'll have to activate your avatar to hit all of your opponent's many creatures.  This one I'm not doing with the below deck, since I'm going mono blue.  I may or may not come back to this idea in a future article though.
3. After you inevitably see one of your opponent's creatures with several Arrests and another with zero... use Simic Guildmage to move them around a little more equitably.  This switches the avatar from "pay 3 mana and hope" to "pay 5 mana and guarantee."  And if that doesn't sound like a good deal, consider that without that guarantee you'll often be spending at least 9 mana before you randomly hit the creature you wanted to.  Sometimes, you will never hit it.

So we've got a mono-blue deck with both Rootwater Matriarch and Simic Guildmage.  Where to go from there?

Arcane Laboratory can help prevent our opponent from outnumbering our ability to activate our avatar.  Sage Owl and Thieving Magpie can help smooth out our draws, as well as attack next to Wasp Lancer and Spire Golem.  Empyrial Armor can turn any of them into a huge threat.  And the last huge threat comes from a normally terrible card, Beast of Burden.

I know this card is bad in most decks.  I know this.  But remember that Peacekeeper decks do not play out like regular decks. The pattern that always happens is that your opponent will be forced to cast creature after creature, while all of his old ones stay on the board. (Whether we've stolen them or not, they are staying on the board.) Those many creatures combined with one or two of your own will often make Beast of Burden around a solid 6/6.  Sometimes more.  And when you're running mono blue, it can be hard to get creatures that efficient. One phobia most Peacekeeper Avatar decks will have is facing a horde of 1/1 tokens, which besides being very difficult to lock down themselves also prevent us from locking down the bigger creatuers on the field.  My solution was to run a couple of Echoing Truths.

Casual, Noncompetitive, Customizable Decklist:

Avatar: Peacekeeper Land (24): 24 Island Creatures (19): 2 Sage of Epityr 2 Sage Owl 3 Simic Guildmage 1 Wasp Lancer 2 Rootwater Matriarch 3 Thieving Magpie 3 Spire Golem 3 Beast of Burden

Noncreatures (17): 4 Empyrial Plate 3 Simic Signet 2 Echoing Truth 2 Arcane Laboratory 2 Shielding Plax 2 Steal Artifact

Deck 3 Serra Angel

The idea for this deck came 100% from my desire to use this flip card:

Vanguard is a great format to cheat around things that are ordinarily difficult to do, like having more than 30 life.  This avatar and the Loxodon Hierarch avatar are both great ways to do this.  But the avatars themselves aren't enough to flip our Rune-Tail, assuming our opponent actually does anything.  So this deck will also enlist cards like Wall of Hope and Feudkiller's Verdict to help gain more life.  Similarly, instead of running Disenchant, we're running Terashi's Grasp.  Instead of Wing Shards, we're running Exile and Chastise.

Once Rune-Tail is flipped, his ability is pretty strong.  Our creatures cannot take damage.  How can we take advantage of that?  If you're running red, there's always Inferno-type effects.  But even in a GW deck like mine, there are plenty of tricks.

Creatures with low-toughness no longer have a liability — Nath's Elite is free to take down creatures with impunity.  Creatures with shroud become almost indesctructible.  They can't be bolted, terrored, pyroclasmed, swordsed, killed in combat,(Of course,combat damage still kills them!) or really removed in any way besides wrath effects.  Gigapede and Kodama of the North Tree are two of my favorite shroud creatures, so I'll be using those.  Also, Nature's Revolt becomes a bit one-sided with a flipped Rune-Tail.  We can also do some funny tricks with Masako the Humorless.

You might say that Wall of Hope has a bit of anti-synergy with a flipped Rune-Tail, since it can't gain you any more life if it's not taking damage.  I say, That's true, but by the time that becomes relevant you won't need to gain any more life.  The Wall's in there for the early game alone.

Casual, Noncompetitive, Customizable Decklist:

Avatar: Serra Angel Lands (24): 12 Plains 12 Forest Creatures (19): 3 Wall of Hope 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder 1 Masako the Humorless 4 Rune-Tail, Kitsune Ascendant 3 Gigapede 2 Kodama of the North Tree 2 Nath's Elite

Noncreatures (27): 1 Time of Need 3 Kodama's Reach 2 Terashi's Grasp 2 Exile 2 Harmonize 1 Chastise 2 Nature's Revolt 4 Feudkiller's Verdict

So there you have it, three casual control decks.  I hope I gave you all some ideas.

See you next time, and have fun with vanguard!