TCG Design: Basic Principals

[Mistborn]

In case you haven noticed we've had just had two MtG set reviews posted in quick succession of each other. This is when you think about it a weird place to start for a symposium on designing TCGs. So what I thought I would do is start a thread for really basic principals for making TCGs. If other people want to post their own rants on this topic they're welcome. No one really wants to read a thread that's all Mistborn posts.

Basic Principal: Competitiveness
This should be obvious and go with out saying but people are going to want to win at your TCG, so you should never assume that people will respond to non-victory based incentives. If a card makes the game less fun but still lets them win more they won't not use it. They will use it and resent you for printing it.


these cards we're not fun but people played them anyway

There's also no reason for people from to do the most degenerate things that they can think of. It's like you're the warden of a prison you just have to live with the reality that people will turn even the most innocuous things into weapons.

these cards all ended up doing far more than their designers intended

Basic Principal: Resource management systems are important
Pretty much no matter what a principal resource principal resource in your game is going to be cards, more specifically cards in hand. If a player can gain more of this limited resources than their opponent than the have achieved an advantage. Any card that can neutralize two more of your opponents cards or allow access to two or more of your cards is innately better than a card that only "trades" for only one card. However that is only in the case that there is no other resource than cards. Most games have some other resource than just Cards be that mana, gold, or something else. This gives you another slider other than card advantage for balancing cards.

these cards are all broken

These cards are all balanced even though they do the exact same thing because they cost more mana

Basic Principal: Card Power is Contextual
When you're designing cards you usually want them to be powerful but not too powerful. What makes this hard is that the power of one cards depends on what the other cards in your format do. Often a card is powerful because it is the best card of it's kind in the format. Some cards end up never seeing play despite seeming extremely good in a vacuum because the match up poorly against other cards. Some can can chug along not impacting the format for years until the exact right combination of cards are there for it to be good. A major organizing principal of this is the relationship between threats and answers which we'll go deeper into next time.

these cards all under/overperformed due to the context of other cards in the standard format at the time

[ishy]

I assume you're talking only about pvp TCGs?

Interestingly enough, your first point was not always true. Back when I still played magic (When I had no internet access / dial-up), blue decks were literally unplayable. Nobody in my area gave a shit about tournament play and because cards like Ancestral Recall, Time walk and especially counterspell existed, people simply refused to play against blue decks.

[Josh_Kablack]

The distinguishing features of a TCG are

1. Players will have to spend out of game resources (usually money) in order to acquire cards usable in game
   *and*
2. Different players are expected to have different sets of cards to draw on when constructing their deck.

The first point contrasts starkly with other types of games that offer some form of deck customization. In deckbuilding games (Trains, Puzzle Strike, Star Realms) where the focus of the game is using in-game resources to acquire better cards. In drafting games ( Sushi Go, Seven Wonders ) the entire point of the game is to collect the best set of cards. And in hybrid drafting games ( Seasons, Splendor, Smash Up, Illuminati (classic or deluxe) ) the game is about using your cards to better advantage than your opponent.

The second point contrasts starkly with all of the above and also withthings like Living Card Games and Knightmare Chess which are sold in complete packs plus expansions.

[Username17]

Magic gives people a baseline of 7 cards at the start of the game and 1 card each turn. This makes the fact that a card costs the card draw that put it into your hand a fairly steep cost for every card you consider putting into your deck. But other card drawing systems exist. In Shadowfist, you refill your hand to 6 cards each turn. In Vampire, you refill your hand every time you play a card. In these games the cost a card place on your hand is not so much that you had to draw it, but that there was an amount of time when you hadn't played it yet. A Vampire card that you can play immediately was inherently free, while a card that you hold onto for five turns was effectively making you play with a smaller hand for five fucking turns.

In games where hands refill automagically, one of the most important costs a card can have is situational requirements to play it. Tempo is the primary cost, not card draws. So in such games, if it takes 2 cards or six cards to nail one enemy card that is completely acceptable so long as you could play all of those cards quickly without having to wait a bunch of turns for the perfect scenario to arise.


This card is very powerful in Vampire because the discarded card is immediately replaced.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

The distinguishing features of a TCG are

1. Players will have to spend out of game resources (usually money) in order to acquire cards usable in game
   *and*
2. Different players are expected to have different sets of cards to draw on when constructing their deck.

I'll get into the economics of TCGs at some point but the major thing is that you should never expect card scarcity to effect what cards people play. (It can totally effect "if" people play but that's another story.) But in the infinite frictionless plane that is "Basic Principals" we are assuming that all the people playing the game will have access to all the cards you print. With that said...

Basic Principal: "Threats" verses "Answers"
In a TCG each player is trying to win while at the same time preventing their opponent from winning. To this end players will dedicate most of their cards as the cards that will allow them win or "Threats" and the cards that neutralize their opponents threats or "Answers".

On Threats

These are all some classic threats from early mtg these each of these are exemplars of one of the three criteria by which threats are judged as threats. The Savannah Lions exemplify speed. They come out on turn 1 and puts them on the clock from there with their 2 power. Serra Angel exemplifies efficiency the ability to win the game with minimal support from your other cards. It can win the game reasonably well even if it is the only threat in your deck with it's 4 power and ability to fly over blockers. Ihsan's Shade exemplifies resilience the ability to ignore you opponents answers. It was immune to the three most popular answers of it's era Lighting Bolt, Swords to Plowshares, and Terror. A good threat stands out in at least on of these categories and a great threat in more than one.

these creatures were all standouts in two or more categories and thus held the spot of "best creature" for a time

On Answers

green really sucked in the early sets didn't it
While threats operate on some degree of their own metric answers are always purely contextual. This is where the phrase "while there are no wrong threats, their are wrong answers" The best answers are the ones that answer the best threats. Thus answers only have two metrics scope and efficiency. An answers scope is how many different kinds threats the card can deal with Vindicate and Counterspell are examples of answers with broad scope. Efficiency on the other hand is how much your answer costs to use relative to the threat it stopped. Lighting Bolt and Swords to Plowshares thus represent the gold standard of efficiency. The best answers of course are those that are extremely efficient relative to their scope.

On Threat/Answer Duality

threat? answer? why not both?
Of course another way for a card to be over the top is for it to be both a threat or an answer or both at the same time. Even back in they day if they played say a Phantom Monster and then you played a Serra Angel not only did you play a threat but you also "answered" their Phantom Monster because as long as the Angel is in play the Phantom is not getting value. Another example of this are burn spells they serve as answers because they can kill creatures but they're also a threat because they can hit players. This duality often ensures that cards are never "dead". Terror may rot in a players hand as you opponent never presents a target but Bolt can always go to their face. Players are going to look for this kind of flexibility. Having threats that can become answers or answers that can become threat lets them adapt better during the game. Having threats that are simultaneously answers is easy card advantage.
Threats and Answers in the Metagame
The interplay of threats and answers are what defines a TCG metagame. In order for the game to be enjoyable for players it needs to have a good balance point between threats and answers. If answers too are much stronger than threats then the game becomes a slog, on the other hand if threats are too much stronger than answers the game becomes an uninteractive race to the finish line. For instance very early in MtG's history there were a glut of "prison" decks and it was really obnoxious. On the other hand in Urza Block and Mirrodin block the game broke because the threats in the format completely outpaced the answers.

[Josh_Kablack]

While I agree that using card scarcity as a balancing factor is outright design failure, I disagree that you should assume everyone always has all the cards. A better, if much more difficult criteria is that you should aim for competitiveness between the best decks which can be built from any two random card pools of roughly even size, for any arbitrary size greater than the minimum entry size you care to pick. That is to say that not only should decks selected from amongst "all the cards" be competitive and non-degenerate, but in general decks selected from two different piles of like 10% of the card pool should generally be competetive.

Not worrying about the biggest spenders means you end up with a tournament scene that's dominated by degenerate decks. Not worrying about the casual players and light spenders means that you end up with a game that's only tournaments between big spenders and the high entry cost keeps the playerbase insular.

[Mistborn]

While I agree that using card scarcity as a balancing factor is outright design failure, I disagree that you should assume everyone always has all the cards. A better, if much more difficult criteria is that you should aim for competitiveness between the best decks which can be built from any two random card pools of roughly even size, for any arbitrary size greater than the minimum entry size you care to pick.

I'd argue that's not a very meaningful metric, two pools of random cards are always going to be pretty balanced against eachother. It doesn't really tell you what goes wrong when formats degenerate. Formats fail when either a: the best cards are in 1-2 decks and nothing else can compete or b: the financial barrier to entry is so high that new players stop buying in. (or in the case of scars block standard c: both). b is an insidious long term threat while a will kill you game much more quickly (it turns out players don't like deck building games when there's only one viable deck) Which is great segway to another basic principal.

Basic Principal: Some cards are better than others

that's why these cards are so good

To someone who knows nothing about TCGs some of the cards up there may not initially stand out as broken. None of the previous principals explain it that's for sure, they don't net extra cards(Mystical tutor is even card disadvantage) and they're neither threats not answers. If you opponent plays a Serra angel and you Demonic Tutor for an answer all the Tutor seems to do is eat more of your mana, why not just play more answers instead? Well the reason is that some cards are better than other cards. Sometimes that's because they're just plain better for instance back in the day Demonic Tutor was restricted because otherwise it would be Ancestral Recall/Time Walk/ect 2-5 and those cards are so good that you are ok with playing an extra 1B for them. Obviously as a designer you want to avoid some cards being that much better but even if the cards are fairly balanced in a vacuum once people build decks and start playing them some cards are still going to be better contextually.

Sometimes that's because there's a powerful synergy between two cards, sometimes the one card that's really good in this particular match-up, sometimes it's just the ability to draw a threat when you need threat or draw an answer when you need answers. Regardless in any game players are going to value some of their cards more than others and the ability to see more of your deck is valuable in and of itself even if it doesn't come attached to any card advantage.

[Username17]

I'd argue that's not a very meaningful metric, two pools of random cards are always going to be pretty balanced against eachother. It doesn't really tell you what goes wrong when formats degenerate. Formats fail when either a: the best cards are in 1-2 decks and nothing else can compete or b: the financial barrier to entry is so high that new players stop buying in. (or in the case of scars block standard c: both).

The issue is that formats fail on a or b at each level of buy-in. If two people who buy-in to a sealed deck format can both only put together one or two functional decks, the game is screwed. If two people who buy a box of boosters and do a little bit of trading to get some play sets together can only make one or two functional decks, the game is similarly fucked. If two players who buy the contents of net decks and have exactly the same deck because there's only one good top tier deck, the game is also fucked.

And then there's the question of increasing buy-in. If buying in to the next level is too expensive, people will not do it, and then the game atrophies. Let's use some old magic cards as examples:



At the level where you and your friends have some starter decks and a couple boosters each, that Hill Giant is going to earn a space in your deck. But as you get more cards, the fact that the Roc of Kher Ridges is a better card means that you will replace all of the Hill Giants in your deck with better cards as you gain more cards. If the benefit of swapping those cards is large enough, people will be pushed out of the game without wanting to make a further investment. And if the cost of doing that replacement is large enough, people won't want to make that investment. Either way you stop selling cards.

So a TCG has to balance rarity both in terms of marketing and play balance so that people with collections of very different sizes can still play games with each other.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

So yeah, meant to post this ages ago but forgot.

Basic Principal: Why Formats Break.
In order to keep the game fresh MtG changes it's primary format all the time, every thee months or so an new set is added and every year a block rotates out. The goal is despite that despite the smaller card pool in Standard the format is never "solved". This doesn't always work, sometimes the field narrows down to a few decks which are just better than anything else.

On three occasions one deck has dominated Standard to the point that Wizards has broken out the banhammer. The exact situation was different but each of those decks presented threats that the format had no real answers for. Since those decks were so hard to stop the only options were to play the dominant deck or play a deck tuned to disrupt their plan and the somehow win before they did. Usually playing the dominant deck and tuning for the mirror was just better.

Case 1 The Combo Winter(Urza Block)

...are you fucking kidding me

This stuff was all before my time, so bear with me. Academy wan't the only broken combo deck to come out of Urza block but it was egregious enough to overshadow all the other things that they would also end up having to ban. Fortunately it's not that complicated to explain there was too much fast mana and card draw in the format and the Academy deck could draw so many cards that made so much man that eventually they could use Stroke of Genius to make you draw your deck. The deck could win on turns 2 or 3 and sheer amount of card draw and fast mana made stopping the Academy player with a counterspell or well placed duress almost impossible. Of course on top of everything they were also a blue deck so whatever silver bullet you thought you had might Be countered

Tolarian Academy itself is such a broken card that it is to this day restricted in vintage and banned everywhere else. At the time people ran Tolarian Academy in decks that contained no Artifacts or Blue cards because playing your own Academy was one of the few reliable answers to the deck.

Going forward R&D drastically cut the amount and power of fast mana sources in future sets. This little kerfuffle also put combo decks on R&D's permanent naughty list leading to curtail the potential for combo decks in standard later on.

Case 2 Ravager Affinity(Mirrodin Block)

...ah memories
So yeah, the first time I played competitive magic it was with an Affinity deck. So I know from personal experience how much of a monster that decks was. In theory you were soft to artifact removal but sheer speed at which Affinity won games made it difficult to impossible to leverage that weakness. The primary game plan was for Ravager and Disciple to end the game in a single explosive attack step, but failing that the deck could just vomit out a bunch of Affinity creatures and beat down. The deck could take punisment pretty well too with Ravergers counters persisting beyond death and cheap draw spells like Thoughtcast and sometimes Nights Wisper to refill your hand.

When Darksteel first hit it Affinity didn't immedately eat the format because Skullclamp was broken in any creature deck. When Skullclamp got banned the decks that fomerly competed with Affinity suffered a worse blow and to add insult to injury Affinity got a powerful new weapon in the form of Cranial Plating.

When Onslaught block rotated many decks that could compete left the format and Kamigawa cards just weren't up to it. In the end only three decks could compete Affinity, Tooth and Nail, and Big Red that latter of which stayed afloat by running artifact hate maindeck. Regardless the Affinity player generally had the advantage against any deck but the mirror-match.

Eventually R&D decided that enough was enough and banned not only Ravager, Disciple, and Plating but also all the Artifact Lands. Supposedly this was when R&D learned to be wary of cost reduction but they printed cascades spells anyway. Though banished from standard the metal men continue to put up results in eternal formats to this day (though now cards like shattering spree keep them in check).

Case 3 Caw-Blade(Scars of Mirrodin Block)

caw caw motherclucker

The previous two decks broke the format mostly because they ended games so quickly the opponent didn't get to play Magic. Caw-Blades dominance on the other hand was based on inertia rather than speed the deck could be outraced but it couldn't stopped.

People called Caw Blade a control deck but the number or dedicated answers it ran was often fairly light. It was more of a midrange deck one in which every other card could generate enough card advantage to win game left unchecked. Caw Blade had a bunch of different plans of attack and those plans all required different types of answers to stop. The Hawk+Sword+Mystic package gave the deck a plan of attack that generated card advantage every step of the way and was hard to interact with profitably. Caw Blade also had Jace and Gideon each of whom was more than capable of wining the game themselves while at the same time being potent answers. If all else failed they were packing 4 celestial colonnades so even their mana base could kill you.

The decks that had a chance were the faster aggressive deck that could win before Caw Blade established it's unbeatable board position (of course postboard Caw Blade had Timely Reinforcements and Day of Judgement so good luck with that). Otherwise eventually the deck would get one of it's value engines online and that would be that.

Some of the cards in Caw Blade were just too good but Jace wasn't just a broken card, he was a broken card released into a format with very few answers to him. Zen-Scars standard didn't have any good answers to 'walkers and it completely distorted into Jace decks (of which caw blade was the best) and also rans. (it didn't help that Jace ended up being a $100 card)

To wrap things up whatever cards you end up make you need to make sure that what ever threats you print have real answers. Letting a deck have an unbeatable proactive plan is the quickest way to make people stop playing your game.

[Prak]

So yeah, the first time I played competitive magic it was with an Affinity deck.

Anyway. This is actually a pretty cool analysis, Mistborn. You've absolved yourself of some small part of the sin that you committed by playing Affinity.

[Mistborn]

Not sorry lol. Besides Affinity was probaly the least worst format on that list. Like even champions standard never had a moment like 32 copies of Jace in the top 8 or "oh shit we have to emergency ban Memory Jar". Big Red and Tooth were real decks that also did busted things especially Tooth. There was even KCI if you wanted to be more creative with your artifact bullshittery.

But enough about formats people hated let's talk about one people actually liked. Let's talk about Ravnica standard.

Basic Principal: Good formats are defined by their answers


this is what dreams are made of pal

Ravnica's impact on standard was defined primarily by a) it's excellent mana fixing and b) it's highly efficient answers. Not that there were good threats in Rav you had your Watchwolves, your 'Hierachs, plus good ol' cap'n tickles. Even Bob was a legitimate aggro creature in his day. Genrally though people looked to other sets for their offensive plans, it was quite providential that the previous block had a bunch big cool Legends that were no longer sidelined by busted Mirrodin cards. You had your spirit dragons, north side, and Meloku

As good as those cards were Ravnica's removal suite was more than up too the task. Like I've sung the praises of Remand plenty of times but in this format where most decks were packing haymaker at 4-6 mana that card was a wicked tempo swing. Faith's Fetters on the other hand was one off those cards that looked innocuous but ended up being exactly the right card for the format precisely because it didn't kill things. Remember with the old legend rule if you say ffed their Jitte it turned off and if they drew another one they couldn't play it. Plus it stopped spirit dragons without their death trigger going off. Also vrs aggro that 4 life was no joke.

What the Ravnica era didn't have was a card over the curve or an aggressive plan that was so powerful that it warped the format. This was the era where pretty much every good creature lived exactly on the jedi curve and getting a vanilla 3/3 for 2 was a revolutionary concept. This lead to a rather stunning diversity of decks with pretty much every color combo and strategic archetype having a presence in the metagame.

[maglag]

Care to name one Dymir card that was tournament worthy? Or an Azorious card besides the untaping hussar?

How come the archetypal answer color combos of UB and UW don't get any representation in your showcase of answer cards?

When Onslaught block rotated many decks that could compete left the format and Kamigawa cards just weren't up to it. In the end only three decks could compete Affinity, Tooth and Nail, and Big Red that latter of which stayed afloat by running artifact hate maindeck. Regardless the Affinity player generally had the advantage against any deck but the mirror-match.

No, it hadn't. At the end of the day Big Red and Tooth and Nail still were what was winning 1st place at tournaments. Affinity was strong, but the artifact hate cards were stronger still.

However affinity was freaking cheap to build since most of the key cards were common, and that's why it made a pretty popular part of the meta.

[Mask_De_H]

Care to name one Dymir card that was tournament worthy? Or an Azorious card besides the untaping hussar?

How come the archetypal answer color combos of UB and UW don't get any representation in your showcase of answer cards?

Are you trying some bullshit gotcha thing or do you not consider monocolors a part of guild identity? Because U had Remand, W had Fetters and B had Gasp if you go off of LM's pictures. Also, Dimir's shockland and Cutpurse, if you are in fact stupid enough to consider only dual-colors to count.

I don't remember enough about Azorus to comment on their dual color cards, but I already responded to the in color ones.

[Mistborn]

eh Dimir did sort of get the short end of the stick, the big thing keeping pure U/B or U/W decks out was the ability of control decks to splash another color. So instead of U/W control you had U/w/r Firemane angel and insted of U/B control you had U/b/g. Actual Dimir or Azorius decks existed as aggro control decks with small creatures and counterspells.

U/B tempo was Dark Confidant, Dimir Cutpurse some other small black agressive creatures (sometimes they even played Dimir Guildmage) alongside cheep counterspells and removal. They had a pretty decent plan of attack were they played small creatures and stopped you from doing big things with their Remands and Mana Leaks

Similar story for Azorius skies only they had access to the awesome white small creatures like Issamaru plus the U/W guildmage was actually good because it countered transmute and tapped down big creatures.

[Mistborn]

So yeah I'm having way too much fun ranting about Magic theory

Advanced Principal: The Hows and Whys Magic the Gathering's Metagame

we'll get back to this thing later

So going back to those previous unhealthy metas I talked about people didn't just dislike them because one deck because too dominant but because they were fundamentally unlike the Magic they were used too. For instance lets compare some traditional threats in Magic to some traditional answers of equivalent cost.




As we can see for 1 mana threat the best you're getting is a Savanah Lions and it's 2 points of power and with a few exceptions that largely held steady to this day. For your one mana answer you get lightning bolt which not only kills their lions any other one drop they'er backing it's very frequently going to bring down even bigger targets. While you get better 2 drops even in those days the fact of the matter is then any now any single threat can be nixed for 2 mana. A 4 mana threat got you Juzam Djinn and these days it'll get you a 5/5 with upside but at 4 man Wrath didn't just kill the Djinn it kills any friends he might have brought with him.

The traditional Magic metagame is defined this advantage answers have over threats. This is what makes control and aggro the traditional poles the format. When the threats are more powerful than the answers Magic lurches onto alien ground. However in a traditional Magic metagame you have aggro decks anchoring one end of the spectrum and control deck anchoring the other (the place of Combo decks in there is sort complicated so I'm going to be glossing over it for now). The theory of deckbuilding in Magic is all about those archatypes, the interplay between them, and the various shades in between.

Taking Control

The Deck- Brian Weissman
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Amnesia
4 Mana Drain
2 Counterspell
1 Braingeyser
1 Timetwister
1 Recall

4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Disenchant
2 Moat
2 Serra Angel

2 Red Elemental Blast

1 Demonic Tutor

1 Regrowth

1 Mirror Universe
1 Jayemdae Tome
2 Disrupting Scepter
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Pearl

3 Strip Mine
1 Library of Alexandria
4 City of Brass
4 Tundra
2 Volcanic Island
4 Island
3 Plains

Sideboard
2 Blood Moon
2 Red Elemental Blast
2 Circle of Protection: Red
2 Dust to Dust
2 Mana Short
1 Balance
1 Amnesia
1 Feldon’s Cane
1 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Zuran Orb

This is "The Deck" by Brian Weissman it's generally regarded as the first serious tournament deck or at the very least the first deck built on Magic theory as we know it today. It was the first control deck and like the decks that would follow it it was principally concerned with defense and card advantage. The relative efficiency of answers to threats is central the Decks ability because being solely concerned with answering its' opponents plays the Deck generated a tempo advantage which it would spend on drawing more cards/making it's opponent discard. What Weissman was the first to realize is that if you do this you will eventually end up in complete control of the game and after that actually winning is a formality. Weissman is generally credited with inventing the concept of card advantage both by drawing extra cards and by exchanging a smaller number his cards for a larger number of his opponents. He also cemented another great control tradition of having whatever card you're using to win the game pull double duty as a defensive tool, as Serra Angel also protected Weissmans life total against whatever was flying over his Moats.

The control decks that would arise in various standards would be much more concerned about creatures than Weissman partly because creatures got better but partly because the aggressive decks tightened up their game. While the Deck had Moats too negate all opposing ground-pounders most of the decks that followed would often need cards like Wrath of God to acquire the necessary tempo and card advantage to take control of the game. Obviously though even more heavily associated with control as an archetype is the color Blue with some of the most versatile answers in the form of counterspells and the ability to just draw extra cards with no fussing about.

Despite control decks essentially having an advantage baked into the game itself it's rare for control to truly dominate a metagame. This because by focusing on answers they concede the first move to the enemy, and actually games are messy affairs. A wise man once said there are no wrong threats only wrong answers, if you purely reactive deck draws the wrong answers they just lose.

Learning Aggression
There have been decks solely concerned with playing creatures and turning them sideways since the dawn of magic. There were evens some early stand outs like the Zoo decks but the aggro as an archetype was really codified by Paul Sligh.

Orcish Librarian Deck-Paul Sligh
23 creatures
2 Dragon Whelp
2 Brothers of Fire
2 Orcish Artillery
2 Orcish Cannoneers
4 Ironclaw Orcs
3 Dwarven Lieutenant
2 Orcish Librarian
4 Brass Man
2 Dwarven Trader
2 Goblin of the Flarg
14 spells
1 Black Vise
1 Shatter
1 Detonate
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Incinerate
1 Fireball
1 Immolation
23 lands
4 Strip Mine
4 Mishra's Factory
2 Dwarven Ruins
13 Mountain
Sideboard
1 Shatter
1 Detonate
1 Fireball
1 Meekstone
1 Zuran Orb
3 Active Volcano
2 Serrated Arrows
1 An-Zerrin Ruins
4 Manabarbs

When this deck showed up it blew people minds because it's one thing to win tournaments with Kird Apes and Black Vices like the old Zoo decks but it's another thing entirely to win with Goblin of the flarg. Aggro pilots already knew that in order to succeed they need to be as fast and consistent as possible but for the first time there was a formula for doing that which independent of the cards that composed your deck. You see Paul had discovered the Mana curve and Aggro decks wouldn't quite be the same afterward.

By playing 8 one mana creatures, 9 two mana creatures and 6 three mana creatures Paul could play a 1 mana guy, a 2 mana guy a 3 mana guy in that order across the first three turns pretty much every game. That speed and efficiency made up for how much the individual creatures sucked. Eventually his initial rush would be stalled out by his opponent having answers or better creatures but at that point Paul could transition to being a burn deck and win that way. Those burn spells gave Paul what would later be called Reach the ability to get those last few points of damage through opposing blockers/answers. Because Red packs so many burn spells that can bring an early end to the game by going to the face aggro has a deep association with the color Red in the same way Control has a deep association with Blue (though not quite to the same extent)

To wheel things back to basics however a pure Aggro deck is concerned primarily with advancing it's own plan of attack as quickly as possible to the exclusion of all else. It has little interest in interacting with your opponent cards or reacting to what they are doing. It's for this reason that combo decks tend to be placed in the "aggro" part of that diagram that I started off this post with as combo decks usually make even fewer concession to the fact that their opponent has cards than aggro decks.

Ebb and flow
Where this all starts getting complicated is that few decks are pure aggro or pure control most decks will have a proactive plan but will also be playing reactive cards. These various composite archetypes between aggro and control on that wheel diagram are defined by commitment to an aggressive plan and what exactly their answers are for. Generally such composite decks use there more limited suite of answers to try to control time(tempo) or card advantage. Unlike a control deck which controls both at the expense of a proactive plan or an aggro deck which is concerned with ending the game rather than controlling it.

For instance this is a Midrange deck

Necropotance-Leon Lindbeck
4 Hypnotic Specter
4 Order of Ebon Hand
3 Knight of Stromgald

4 Necropotence
4 Drain Life
1 Soul Burn
1 Dark Banishing
4 Hymn to Tourach
4 Dark Rituals
1 Dance of the Dead

1 Ivory Tower
1 Zuran Orb
1 Jalum Tome
2 Serrated Arrows
2 Nevinyrral’s Disk

4 Strip Mine
2 Ebon Stronghold
17 Swamps

Sideboard
1 City of Brass
1 Safe Haven
1 Feldon’s Cane
1 Meekstone
1 Apocalypse Chime
3 The Rack
1 Torture
1 Stromgald Cabal
1 Ashes to Ashes
1 Serrated Arrows
1 Jalum Tome
2 Nevinyrral’s Disk

This is one of the early Necropotance decks which would dominate standard in 1996. These decks weren't heavily concerned with drawing the game out or winning quickly despite playing some fairly aggressive creatures and one of the greatest card advantage engines in history. Like future midrange decks Necro is interested in controlling cards and uninterested in controlling time. A good example of this is Hymn to Torach it puts you ahead by one card but you spent 2 mana and didn't effect the board (so you lost out in tempo). Necro also verges a little into card efficiency side of the pool as well Necro plays pump knights not because it is particularly committed to an aggressive plan but because they were the best individual threats at the time.

Future Midrange decks would often get a bad rap for just being “a pile of good cards” but that's a little unfair. Midrange strategies want to maximize the value of their cards relative to your cards. Obviously this is achieved through straight 2 for one cards like Hym but this logic also extends to their threats. Unlike an aggro deck that's trying to kill you quickly through a critical mass of threats a midrange deck aims for each individual threat to do as much as possible. This is why as 3-5 mana creatures have gotten stronger midrange decks has become more common. Midrange decks share and fondness for inevitability with control they often win games by still having resources even after you've expended everything.

The flip side of the midrange strategy is the aggro-control deck and it's big siblings hybrid control and tap out control

Countersliver-Trey Van Cleave
4 Crystalline Sliver
4 Hibernation Sliver
4 Muscle Sliver
3 Winged Sliver
2 Acidic Sliver
4 Aura of Silence
4 Daze
4 Force of Will
3 Annul
2 Swords to Plowshares
3 Demonic Consultation
4 City of Brass
4 Tundra
4x Underground Sea
2x Scrubland
2 Gemstone Mine
1 Undiscovered Paradise
4 Flood Plain
1 Tropical Island
1 Volcanic Island


Sideboard:
4 Erase
2 Swords to Plowshares
4 Pyroblast
2 Hydroblast
3 Worship

Aggro-control and friends aren't interested in tempo advantage rather than card advantage. Unlike midrange or control these decks are unconcerned with inevitability they just want to extend the game just long enough. The classic Aggro-control deck like Countersliver wants to establish a superior board position and then deny your ability to interact with it until they win. Most often this is accomplished through the use of permission spells but a lot of the old Armageddon/Wildfire decks operated on similar principals. Establish a strong board position and then blow up all the lands so they couldn't do anything about it.

What distinguishes the decks on the left side of the spectrum is that they plan on “turning the corner”. the aggro, midrange and control plan to maintain one type of strategy for an indefinite period of time aggro control and hybrid control are going to do one thing for a few turns and then do something completely different. The aggro-control deck will play guys but once they have enough guys they'll start countering your spells. Closer to the control end of the spectrum is the hybrid control deck which adopts a defensive posture until they have amassed enough resources to excucute an aggressive plan. These decks had their heyday in the Ravnica era when 5-6 drops had finally gotten good enough that you could tap out for them and reasonably believe that was better than whatever your opponent was doing.

Welcome to Broken Magic land
Now all of these archetypes are based on the idea that answers are more powerful than threats, the control decks exploit it and the aggro decks try to route around it. However what happens when the reverse is true and threats outpace answers? Well then you enter broken magic land and the meta game becomes fundamentally different. Instead of this

you get this

When threats are better than answers there is no control deck. If you try to sit back on answers you just lose so you need to have some sort of proactive plan. So how do you beat an aggro deck if threats are better than answers? Well one obvious answer is be the better aggro deck. If you can goldfish faster than the rest of the field you don't need to answer anything. This is the rock to the face or “fast aggro”

Another answer is that you don't have to stop aggro just delay or disrupt it long enough to execute your own game winning maneuver. A set of answers that's unable to stop aggro could still trip it up long enough that a slower more efficient plan can prevail especially if the aggro deck is optimized for speed above other factors. This is “disruptive aggro” the paper to fast aggro's rock. These disruptive decks are in turn sliced to ribbons by the scissors of resilient aggro which has been designed to be maximally difficult to disrupt.

No it's even possible to imagine a healthy version of this format. Old Modern was likely as good as this type format could get you had multiple types of fast aggro like affinity and the various all in combo decks. You had resilient aggro decks like Pod, or Boggles. Along with disruptive aggro decks like Jund, Twin, or Scapeshift

Unfortunately these formats get stupid really fast when a deck can perform in multiple roles Tolarian Academy was fast and resilient Caw-Blade was resilient and disruptive so those decks strangled the format. Affinity wasn't as bad because more resilient Affinity decks did come at the cost of speed but the end result was there was still way more Affinity in the metagame then any reasonable person would want. Twin was the evil vizier of modern for years on end because it was disruptive and fast.

[Username17]

I would say the answers in the original set were way too strong. Mind Twist and Counterspell worked on literally everything, and that was fucked up. There was a brief period when you could run four Mind Twists, and let me tell you - those games were kinda bullshit.

Anyway, these days the question of Threat vs. Answer is a little bit more muddled. Control Decks these days pack a lot of Planeswalker cards, which are generally answers that have to be answered (often by threats) in turn lest they accumulate enough loyalty counters to turn into threats.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

I would say the answers in the original set were way too strong. Mind Twist and Counterspell worked on literally everything, and that was fucked up. There was a brief period when you could run four Mind Twists, and let me tell you - those games were kinda bullshit.

Anyway, these days the question of Threat vs. Answer is a little bit more muddled. Control Decks these days pack a lot of Planeswalker cards, which are generally answers that have to be answered (often by threats) in turn lest they accumulate enough loyalty counters to turn into threats.

-Username17

Eh Control Decks have been pulling that sort of nonsense since day 1. Weissmans Serra Angel was also a flying wall as was Morphling and Psychatog (well nix the flying for 'tog) Control Magic/Treachery/Veldelken Shackles/Threads of Disloyalty let you take their guy and beat down with it like various value creature turn sideways ect, ect.

[CapnTthePirateG]

I would say the answers in the original set were way too strong. Mind Twist and Counterspell worked on literally everything, and that was fucked up. There was a brief period when you could run four Mind Twists, and let me tell you - those games were kinda bullshit.

Anyway, these days the question of Threat vs. Answer is a little bit more muddled. Control Decks these days pack a lot of Planeswalker cards, which are generally answers that have to be answered (often by threats) in turn lest they accumulate enough loyalty counters to turn into threats.

-Username17

Mind Twist I'll grant, but I don't think Counterspell is necessarily that bad. You need UU at the time your opponent casts your threat/whatever and that can be a big deal, and it's certainly not removing a threat when it hits play.

[Josh_Kablack]

I would say the answers in the original set were way too strong.

Conversely, threats in the original set were either banbait broken combos (channel + fireball ; time vault + animate artifact + instill energy ) or overcosted weaksauce creatures.

The only creatures in Alpha/Beta with an innate power over 6. Everything else took more than three unblocked hits to win

[Josh_Kablack]

Principle: available cards which are circumstantially better or worse make for a more varied meta, cards which are universally better or worse make for a narrower meta"


So it's been a long long time since I played MtG, but back in my day I did run a deck titled "Grizzly Bears, and reasonable facsimiles thereof" because there were a lot of 2-cost 2 power green creatures, and in the early days several of them were somewhat tournament viable. As the game advanced, more options appeared for basically the same role in decks, and it was several years before there were always right and always wrong choices to make between the cards. My knowledge is specific to this subset of cards, but I'm trying to make a general point

To start out, Alpha gave us


at common and also the



at rare.

The elves are better if you expect to be blocked or blocking by anything under 3 toughness. The bears are better if you expect your opponent to be running Pestilence or Prodigal Sorcerer. For 4 mana an opponent can split a Fireball to take out 2 Elvish Archers, but it costs them 6 mana to do so against a pair of Grizzly Bears. The Elvish Archers ended up seeing a lot more play in tournaments, but that was due to the Elvish Archer + Lightning Bolt combo being a mana efficient and card-equal answer to Juzam Djinn. So there are arguments to be made for and against running either one.

But the next several expansions added a bunch of other options to compete with these cards:

Up first


The Argothian Pixies have the same 1-toughness vulnerabilities of the Elvish Archers and lose first strike, but they saw a bunch of play when Juggernaut became really common in the meta.


Next up



This requires both of your mana to be green and starts out as a 1/1. However it doesn't require any sort of combo to answer Juzam Djinn, and it has the potential to be a growing threat, hence Bertrand Lestree running it in the first world championship.



This is identical to the Grizzly Bears, so you could now run more than four of them. Also, there are some really obscure edge case differences involving things-what name cards like Null Chamber and things that could influence apes rather than bears.



These require both mana to be specific. As dual color they are vulnerable to both Blue Elemental Blast and Circle of Protection: Green. However they can benefit from Gauntlet of Might and Goblin King as well as anything that cares how many Green Creatures you have.



Most of the time you can ignore the weird "this hose is not a hose if the defender has black cards in play" bit and just assume this untaps every other turn. Being 3/3 meant that it blocked better than any of the other options - trading with Juggernaut and in a no-blocking slugfest it compares to the baseline Grizzly by doing one more point of damage on the first attack at the expense of falling behind in sustained damage on future turns. And in pure rushdown, that one point of damage now, could be a critical tempo advantage/

And up to here which of the above creatures you wanted in your deck depended on your other choices and what you expected to be facing the most of. If you expected Juggernauts you'd pick Argothian Pixies. If you expected Juggernauts + Pyroclasm you'd pick Spectral bears. If you expected Juzams you'd pick either Elvish Archers or Whirling Dervish depending on your mana base. If you were running Goblin King and Goblin Grenade you'd want Scarwood Goblin. But against another R/G deck running Fireballs you probably want the baseline Grizzly.


The next couple of cards are where the power creep reached the point where many of the previous cards became objectively wrong deckbuilding choices and players had fewer viable options in that particular cost /power slot:



Here being dual color is the only downside to a 2/2 which comes with an ability and two tribe types (one of which would later become useful). So this is where the baseline Grizzly starts to show its age. However you can argue that the 1G casting cost makes Grizzly easier to play and Prot:Blue isn't that massively useful an ability, so there are still a few decks where Scarwood Goblins are a better choice.



The Muscle Sliver costs the same as a grizzly bear, has the same stats and multiples buff each other. The only time it not the correct choice is if your opponent is running more Slivers than you are.



This costs the same as a grizzly bear, has the same stats and also has a really useful activated ability with a lot of combo potential. You have to get into Null Chamber type edge cases to find any circumstance where you would rather have drawn a Grizzly Bear than a Wild Mongrel.

And apparently today power has crept to this standard



Where your Grizzly Bear will be somewhere between 0/1 and 8/9 depending how many turns into the game you are. Although interestingly, you can construct cases where this is inferior to the other options, those involve rarities like both players delving everything or somebody recurring Tormod's Crypt.

[Mistborn]

I feel like you missed someone

'goyf isn't so much an evolution as an outlier it was above the curve when it was printed and it has remained so to this day. Generally for creatures that are intended to be played for p/t alone the gold standard for 2 mana creatures since Ravnica is 3/3.. More generally for a 2 mana creature to be an aggressive option at all 2/x has been the bar since day 1. What has changed is that wizards prints less creatures that are below the curve.

But to the main point yeah having 'goyf in a format kind of sucks given how many non-goyf creatures he invalidates. It's not even good for creature based strategies. The decks the love goyf are the ones who want to play 4 of the best possible creature and no other creatures i.e. control decks.