How three lands change everything

So, early in my testing gauntlet I dismissed UW control as unplayable because it lost to basically all of the myriad of aggro and midrange aggro I constructed.  It did beat some decks, but most of those were test builds that were designed to push a deck to a particular extreme in one way or another, and weren't actually good decks.  I was running them just out of curiosity to see what the strengths and weaknesses of a strategy were if you pushed it.  This sort of data is often useful because knowing the strategic extremes allows you to better incorporate those ideas into your gauntlet decks, thus making them stronger.

Throughout testing, I continued to occasionally run decks up against UW to ensure that my results were still valid, not because I thought the deck was good, but because I thought people would play it, so I believed I still had to be ready for it.  I think that people often play bad decks, especially in a new format, and that is a major factor when testing for a new format - ensure you beat all the bad decks.

But something funny happened last night.  I went to my LGS and people seemed to be on UW.  The lists were not that different, except for one change - my UW list was not running Mutavault.

I found it difficult to believe that Mutavault alone could change the results of a deck that performed so poorly in testing, yet I respect the players at my LGS so I didn't dismiss it and went home and swapped out three lands for three Mutavaults and ran the most problematic match-ups for UW from my gauntlet testing (it's a midrange aggro deck), a deck that has been demolishing pretty much every control deck we put in front of it.

UW improved it's results from a projected 20/80 to a projected 50/50.

Three Mutavaults.  That was all.

I still don't fully believe what I saw last night but this fact alone means that UW is back on the map, and the deck not being vulnerable to Burning Earth (due to 16 basics), is, in fact, a huge point working in its favor.  That was the entire reason I considered the deck in the first place.  UW is significantly harder to side against for the aggro/midrange strategies than Esper is due to the lack of Burning Earth as an option.  Things like Hammer and Purphoros are still good against it, as are Planeswalkers, but there is no dedicated "I win" card against UW.

A tabled Burning Earth will beat Esper, American, or Grixis most of the time.  UW can easily work around it for an extended period of time.  This alone means that UW solves one of the main problems I was encountering with the three color control decks - the post board games were difficult because of Burning Earth.

There are a few more hurdles that UW has to overcome, but I will be looking into that today.  There are also tweaks that I will definitely be making around the edges of my list, due to what I've discovered from playing the other decks, but it's a strange experience to have such a strong contender appear so late in testing.

All because of Mutavault.  !@#$ you Mutavault.