Subject: Response: Rob's War College
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 21:09:36 -0800
From: "Michael Danielson" <ParadigmFlux@worldnet.att.net>

Now then:

In your "A: Aggro vs. Control" article, you mention two basic deck types:
the all-out attack, in which every card is dedicated to dealing damage to
the opponent, and the cathedral deck, in which almost every card is
dedicated to keeping that damage out.  The trend of today's T2, in which
decks have a mixture of both attack and defense, you say is risky for the
attacker, and mildly so for the defender.

I bring you to a truism of the martial arts:
soft beats hard.  hard-soft beats soft.  hard beats hard-soft.

        I'm sure you've heard this before; I bring it up to make a point: there is
a third style of deck to add to the equation: the disrupting deck.  The
Magic equivalent of the hard-soft martial art, disruptor decks have a
single goal: to keep the opponent from setting up his strategy.  If aggro
decks are, in your correlation, an army, and defensive decks are a citidel,
disrupting decks catapults and bombs: they are made to punch holes in the
citidel, to scatter the army.
        The trend of hard and soft decks toward the middle (hard-soft) is largely
the result of the huge influx of disruption cards in Weatherlight and
Tempest.  Cards like Tradewind Rider and Capsize are only the best examples
of these disruption cards, that can be used repeatedly to send the walls of
the citidel and the recruits of the army away from the battle long enough
for the few killers of the disruption deck to get through and strike.
        Two months ago, the tournament environment revolved around a basic theme:
every card has to count.  Each and every card in that environment had to
either kill your opponent or save you.  Today, there is a very different
idea behind the major decks: MesaCraft and ProsBloom are excellent
examples: they seek, through a complexity of "moving parts", to establish a
quick overwhelming kill.  These moving parts, however, are the joy of
disruption decks; they're easy to break.

           Of course, the hard-soft deck has the same weakness as the hard-soft
martial art: they are particularly vulnerable to the aggro heavy-assault
deck.  Right now, however, the environment tends to favor these decks by
giving them defensive resources like Tradewind Rider (quite the blocker in
addition to his ability) and Spinning Darkness (a free 3 life and I get to
Bolt a creature, too?  I'll take that).

        So, the question becomes:  what tactics are changing in the hard and soft
decks to deal with the insurgence of hard-soft disruptor decks?  How can a
basically passive citadel deck change it's style to deal with the incisive
resource-disruption of the hard-soft decks?
        Finally, how do oddities like ProsBloom affect the 'normal' interaction
between these deck metatypes?  (Introduce a flintlock into medival
Japan...)

Thank you for (both of) your time and effort.

Michael Danielson <essence@elwha.evergreen.edu>