This week is the reverse. Let’s be mostly positive.
After the most recent bans Standard is a fairly open format, but among the
things that are certain is that aggro is good. Between Mardu, Mono-Red, and
the Night Market Lookout scale of Mono-Black to B/R, there are three fairly
distinct decks.
If you look through Shaun Mclaren’s Top 16 Standard deck rankings
last week
you also get to see some even odder aggro options like W/U Auras or the
Path of Mettle W/R deck.
Like I said, this is the inverse. How do you build a good aggro deck, why
are these decks good, and especially what might have improve with the
midrange metagame shift from Temur to Grixis, G/R, and G/B?
Tempo and Resources
Basic definitions time.
Magic is about three resources: life, cards, and untapping (mana). Life is
largely non-renewable, while cards and mana are both renewable. Which
renewable resource you are limited on usually changes as the game
progresses from mana to cards.
Card advantage should be obvious. You make a play that puts you ahead on
cards. The less obvious part is that this is largely a count of useable
cards. Your seventh land in aggro likely isn’t a real card.
Virtual card advantage is making a play that doesn’t physically place you
up cardboard, but makes some of their cards unusable. You Wasteland their
Underground Sea and activate Rishadan Port, their True-Name Nemesis and
Jace, the Mind Sculptor are unusable.
Tempo is the act of attempting to convert mana and cards either directly
into damage or into temporary card advantage that you can then leverage to
produce real damage or cards.
Not all aggro is tempo. Aggro largely applies to any deck where if given
the decision between including a card focused on exchanging resources or
focused on profitably attacking or dealing damage, you choose the later.
The lines are blurry; you might play Fatal Push because it clears a path or
play Glint-Sleeve Siphoner because it’s hard to block and the card stream
keeps you in the driver’s seat or you might sideboard into a control role
against a faster deck, but in most matchups your goal is going to be
proactively killing them.
That all said, let’s get going.
Fallacy One: Card Parity
