Magic: The Gathering Deck Types - Recent Design Philosophy

Recent Design Philosophy

Traditionally, Aggro was seen as advantaged over Control, Control advantaged over Combo, and Combo advantaged over Aggro. Wizards of the Coast has sought to make high-casting cost spells more powerful than in the early days of Magic, and have also wanted to play up creature combat more - an aggressive deck should have to worry about blocking and opposing creatures even from Control and Combo decks. To that end, R&D member Zac Hill described an ideal metagame structured like so:

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Each of these 4 buckets would ideally occupy around 25% of a given metagame. In Hill's definition, Aggro refers most specifically to the fastest creature decks built to punish slow starts, ponderous Control decks, and aggressive decks who've substituted out damage for disruption. A modern iteration of such a deck is the 2012 Standard Zombie deck, utilising resilient and cheap creatures such as Gravecrawler. Midrange decks in this definition are slower creature-based decks who trump the speed of fast aggro with better quality from their somewhat more expensive spells, an Example of which is the modern Jund deck that utilises the card advantage from creatures like Bloodbraid Elf and its Cascade mechanic. (Both of these would likely be considered "Aggro" in the traditional definition.) "Ramp" and "Combo" are conceptually similar as noted above; while the combo deck might seek to set up a combination of 2 or 3 cards for a powerful, game-changing effect, the ramp deck instead focuses on building mana as fast as possible and then casting game-changing yet expensive spells, or taking advantage of certain interactions that require the ability to supply a large manabase. An example of this last type is Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle based ramp decks. A midrange deck often doesn't have the sheer speed to stop ramp or combo from either casting a huge spell or "going off" with the combo. Control decks can counter or otherwise answer the single big threat ramp decks and control decks provide while winning the long game. Similarly, "disruptive aggro" (equivalent to Aggro-Control in the classic archetypes above) can also stop the single threat Combo and Ramp offer while focusing on winning faster. The 2011 card Delver of Secrets is the pinnacle of a modern Disruptive-Aggro deck.