The most important section of that post by Mike Flores is often forgotten.
Who's The Beatdown?
Mike Flores
1/01
Another classic from the Dojo
" The most common (yet subtle, yet disastrous) mistake I see in tournament Magic is the misassignment of who is the beatdown deck and who is the control deck in a similar deck vs. similar deck matchup. The player who misassigns himself is inevitably the loser.
You see, in similar deck vs. similar deck matchups, unless the decks are really symmetrical (i.e. the true Mirror match), one deck has to play the role of beatdown, and the other deck has to play the role of control. This can be a very serious dilemma, if, say, both are playing aggressive decks. "
This is a great post with lots of insight but people tend to forget what he talks about is when a build is close but not a perfect mirror then the player must figure out what role to take in the match. He also still refers back to the aggro and control archetypes.
I do like the fact that we are having a well thought and intelligent discussion. I just do not see a need to break away from what has become the standard for naming build archetypes.
You may have been able to tell that this is my all time favorite article on magic strategy. It is close to 13 years old and still relevant today.
He most certainly does reference aggro and control, I chalk that up to it being an article about magic. I mentioned the article because I think it offers insight into many games including MW. Plus it is about match ups and the previous post mentions match ups.
I built a priestess book the other day. I constructed it by selecting the cards I felt I needed to advance my strategy along my chosen path of victory. Then I selected the cards I thought would be useful in disrupting and countering my opponents game plan(I am using opponent generically here, I didn't have a specific person in mind). I had 126 points in my book (that's pretty low for me, I used to end up with 160 plus) so I trimmed the cards I thought I was least likely to need to get to 120. For the first time ever I then proceed to count my proactive cards which I consider to be cards that advance my strategy and/or don't require my opponent to do anything in order to be useful and my reactive cards I use to disrupt my opponent or remove his threats. The ratio was 62 points proactive to 58 points reactive. I was surprised to see how balanced it was. I didn't have a preconceived notion of what the ratio should be but when I was building it I was thinking of it as a control build. With almost 50% dedicated to countering my opponent it is fairly controlish. I counted my damage dealers and found there to be 39 points worth of them. Almost 1/3 of my book is offense, this seems high for a control deck and just a little bit low for an aggro deck. If I so chose I could start off playing threats and continue to do so for turns to come. With all that firepower and the ability to get any card i want from my spellbook on turn 1, forget that defense lets go beat up the opposing mage. In all fairness my creatures aren't the type I would use to pressure my opponent early. I guess in magic terms I had built a mid range control book.
I looked at the ratios of the other books I had built and none of them had much more than 70 points dedicated to proactive or reactive. It seems most of the books I build are pretty balanced. I don't know if this is more my nature or the nature of building spellbooks in Mage Wars. I'm thinking its more an indication of MW. This being the case it would seem if you apply magic terms to describe spellbooks almost all would be classified as control or mid range control. And yet mage wars does not feel like a never ending series of control vs control match ups (which would get boring pretty fast) every game so far has been exiting, it just feels different.
Mage Wars just plays so different from magic that my attempts to impose magic style classification has seemed inadequate. I suppose I might be trying to import the classifications too literally.
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