Howdy boys and girls!

I’m Plum, and welcome back to Episode 80 of Fun & Jank!

You all know I can’t resist a sweet new Alchemy toy, and the card we’ll be talking about is one that enabled me to play an archetype you may not have seen in years.

Enter Inspiring Easel from Secrets of Strixhaven: Alchemy. This mana rock got my Big Brewer’s Brain™ going as soon as I saw it. It taps for any color mana (as long as you’re casting a spell), and more importantly, it lets you supercharge any instant or sorcery in your hand by paying extra to copy it. And yes, those copies stack.

So of course I did what any sane person would do: I slammed it into a deck along with a couple Cruel Ultimatum and hopped onto the ladder. The result? A deck that plays like classic Cruel Control but feels completely fresh. You grind early with cheap interaction, drop an Easel, start copying your Chorus spells for absurd value, and eventually bury your opponent under a mountain of card advantage and removal. And I’m telling you right now, you haven’t lived until you’ve casted a Cruel Ultimatum and copied it 3x to win the game in one turn. It’s a feeling like no other.

Let’s dive in.

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A Brief History

Cruel Ultimatum has been one of the most iconic “I win the game” buttons in Magic since it was printed in Shards of Alara back in 2008. The deck built around it, affectionately known as Cruel Control, first blew up in Standard during the 2008–2010 era. The defining moment came at Pro Tour Kyoto 2009, where French superstar Gabriel Nassif took down the whole tournament with a 5-Color Control shell. Nassif became legendary for calling his shot, literally predicting he would topdeck a Cruel Ultimatum to win a crucial game. That moment (and the finals against LSV’s B/W Tokens) helped cement the deck as one of the most memorable control archetypes of all time.

After Standard, the spirit of Cruel Control lived on in Extended, Modern, and various eternal formats. Fast forward to 2026, and we finally have some new tools that make the old dream a reality in Historic yet again.

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The Deck

This deck is a Grixis Lurrus Control shell built around Inspiring Easel as the engine to turn your 1-for-1’s into better trade-offs as the game progresses.

The basic philosophy is classic control: survive the early turns with cheap removal and counters, then use Inspiring Easel to massively increase the power of every instant and sorcery you cast. Because almost every spell in the deck is an instant or sorcery, Easel turns into a ridiculous value multiplier. On top of that, we’re running the full Chorus intensity package (Ribald Shanty, Hymn to the Ages, Mycelic Ballad). Every time you cast one of these, they get stronger for the rest of the game, so the longer you go, the more overwhelming your spells become.

This is the card the whole deck is built around. For just two mana, you get a rock that taps for any color mana when you cast an instant or sorcery (huge for our three-color deck with big pip requirements) and it lets you pay UR to copy any instant or sorcery you cast. The copies are separate spells, which means they also trigger intensity for the Chorus package. Once you have an Easel in play, your removal becomes double removal, your Hymn to the Ages becomes a massive draw spell, and Cruel Ultimatum becomes completely disgusting.

The two most notable things here are the following:
First, when you copy a spell with Intensity, the copy has the base Intensity of the card, but will still increase the Intensity of all your real copies once it resolves.
Secondly, Easel’s copy ability does not cost mana. Which means you can tap it the turn it comes into play to double-up something in your hand for a future turn, or the same turn you top-decked it.

These two interactions combined make this card insane.

• 4 Ribald Shanty – Cheap removal that gets bigger every time you cast a Chorus spell. Early game it kills small creatures, late game it’s a one-sided sweeper.
• 3 Hymn to the Ages – Starts as a simple draw spell but becomes the best card in the deck as intensity grows. A fully pumped Hymn can easily draw 5–7 cards.
• 2 Mycelic Ballad – The flexible one. We’re only paly 4 creatures, and in many cases this is just a Damnation that happens to gain us life while also increasing the power of our other Chorus cards as well.

These three cards get stronger the longer the game goes, which perfectly matches our control plan. Obviously these can get even more out of hand as we start to copy them with Easel.

This is kind the Staple “core” of Cruel Control nowadays. Ultimatum is our main finisher, whether we cast it multiple times with Snapcaster mage, or copy it with Easel, ….or both. But Snapcaster is the perfect peanut butter to Ultimatum’s jelly since it can return a Snap from the graveyard back to our hand. There’s a lot of recursion and looping that both Easel and Snapcaster Mage enable in the late game. Who needs bolt-snap-bolt when you can just ultimatum-snap-ultimatum?

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This deck has a very clean and flexible answer package that’s tuned for both the current Historic meta and to maximize Inspiring Easel

Fatal Push (2) + Terminate (3): Our bread-and-butter creature removal. Push handles early threats for one mana, while Terminate is the reliable answer that doesn’t care about indestructible or big bodies. We obviously have Ribald Shanty as well, but I’ve notice that Shanty can be a bit awkward early in the current meta. Not sniping a Tamiyo or Frog on turn 1 can be brutal.

Sheoldred’s Edict (1) + Prismari Charm (1): Excellent flexible answers. Edict is fantastic against auras, reanimator, or decks with a single big threat. Prismari Charm gives us a cheap mode for removal, a loot, or even a burn spell when we need it.

Counterspell (4) + Cryptic Command (3): The backbone of our permission. Four hard counters keep us safe while we set up and keep the opponent’s plan in check. And I know Cryptic is not a card that nearly as popular as it once was, but it still puts in decent work, especially when you can add some copies to it with Easel. We could even jam a Mystic Sanctuary into the manabase to loop it if we wanted to. All around great utility card for the list.

Search for Azcanta is another throwback card that I mainly jammed for the hit of nostalgia, but was pleasantly surprised to see every time we drew it. It provides consistent card selection, helps fill the graveyard for potential Snapcaster value, and flips into Azcanta, the Sunken Ruin, which gives us even more card draw and mana fixing in the late game. It’s a perfect fit for a grindy shell like this.

Ok I know this card has been out-favored by a lot, but boy has it felt incredible. All the modes have been relevant, especially returning Snapcasters from my yard to hand. But I can’t even begin to tell you how fun it is to give it the ‘ol Easel treatment and make your opponent discard two and take four damage after their draw step. This is definitely more of a flex slot along with Prismari Charm, but Kolghan’s Command has felt right at home in this list.

Lurrus is here because it’s Lurrus. it can rebuy Snaps and any Easels that were destroyed, and sometimes it can get in for decent damage if we have nothing else to do.

Overall, the interaction is cheap, efficient, and plays perfectly with Inspiring Easel — you can copy removal when you need to, or copy counters when you’re protecting a big turn.

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Yes, this deck is extremely greedy on mana. We’re playing full Grixis with Blue-Red for Prismari Charm, triple-blue for Cryptic Command and Counterspell, Black-Red for K-Command, and the bajillion pips it takes to cast Ultimatum on time. On paper it looks like it should be clunky… but in practice it has felt shockingly smooth during all my testing. Starting Town is an absolute hero in this list. Combined with 4 Prismatic Vista, and Easel as a mana-rock, we have excellent smoothing and very few truly bad draws in terms of mana.

Gameplay

The deck plays exactly like you’d hope. Early game you’re just trading one-for-one with removal and counters, trying to stick an Inspiring Easel or start the Chorus intensity train. I like to think the main “pivot” point comes when you’re able to fire off your first copied spell from Easel and start chaining together 2-for-1’s or better every turn.

The Hymn to the Ages turns are some of the most fun I’ve had in a while. You cast one early, it draws a card or two… then a few turns later with intensity stacked and Easel out, you’re drawing five, six, or even seven cards in a single turn.

But Like I mentioned earlier, there is nothing quite like casting copies of Cruel Ultimatum to just destroy any hope your opponent may have had of winning.

In this game, I got to OHKO my opp by casting a single Cruel Ultimatum that got copied 3 times.

Like I mentioned above, copying Chorus cards with Easel gets out of hand rather quickly.

The deck is just an absolute pleasure to play in my opinion. I fell like I had a grin on my face for the entire stream we tested it. This has been one of my favorite builds I’ve played in a while. t rewards patience, good sequencing, and recognizing when to start going off. When it pops off, it feels extremely powerful for a jank deck, and the games are almost always long, grindy, and full of big satisfying plays.

The initial version from the video above didn’t do spectacular on stream, but showed a lot of promise, and the premise of playing a competitive Cruel Ultimatum shell in 2026 felt like it was worth my time. I spent a few days refining it into the list from this article, and I’m pretty happy with where its at for now. There’s definitely a few tweaks to be made here or there and some flex spots to test out. But the deck is clean, its fun, and it can handle its own on the ladder.

Closing Thoughts

So yeah, overall this list is sick. It successfully scratches that old-school Cruel Control itch while feeling fresh and powerful thanks to Inspiring Easel and the Chorus intensity mechanic. The deck isn’t perfect, it can still get run over by super-fast combo or hyper-aggressive decks if you don’t draw your early interaction, but when it gets going, it feels way stronger than it should. If you’re a control player at heart, enjoy long grindy games, or just want to relive the glory days of Cruel Control with some new Alchemy spice, I highly recommend giving this deck a shot. It’s definitely worth the wildcards (hehe).

That’s it for me!

Thanks for reading!

As always, feel free to comment and leave any questions you have below. And make sure to come back next week for even more Fun & Jank!

If you want to help me brew, come hang out with me on stream where we test, refine, and have a ton of fun together.

Happy Brewin’!