Your playstyle is what kind of strategies you prefer.
Strategies in Mage Wars Arena are mostly defined by how offensive or defensive they are with what resources over time, as well as what sources of damage they use to kill the mage. That third defining feature of a strategy in Arena is determined by the two before it.
How "aggro" or "control" your strategy is depends on how early or late in the game you are going to kill the mage. If you kill the mage early in the game, that means that you are playing offensively earlier in the game. If you kill the mage late in the game, that means you are playing offensively later in the game.
An offensive tactic is one that lowers your opponent's resources. A defensive tactic is one that increases one's own resources. These resources are:
1) Mana
2) Options
3) Actions
4) Positioning
5) Life after Damage
1) Mana
Mana is one of the three costs for casting a spell. More powerful spells tend to cost more mana.
2) Options
Having more options gives you more freedom to respond to things your opponent does how you want to respond. It makes you more flexible and less predictable. Not to be confused with Actions. If you have a list of things you can do during each round, gaining an option is adding "OR (thing you can do)" to that list. While adding actions is adding "AND (thing you can do)" to that list.
3) Actions
Almost everything you do in the game has an action cost, including casting spells. The more actions you have, the more things you can do during the round. Not to be confused with Options. If you have a list of things you can do during each round, gaining an option is adding "OR (thing you can do)" to that list. While adding actions is adding "AND (thing you can do)" to that list. Actions are generated during the reset phase. Not to be confused with an "Action phase" which is the ability to generate actions during the reset phase, which a creature gains when it is summoned and lasts as long as that creature is in play.
4) Positioning
This is how far away things are from each other and whether they can see each other (range/los). It tends to be harder to target or affect objects in the arena if they are farther away. Most spells and attacks as well as many abilities have a maximum range of 2 or less. Some higher level spells have a range of 3. And there are also spells and abilities that target the whole arena, which tend to be things that scale in power with the quantity of a certain kind of object in play.
5) Life after Damage
If your damage becomes equal to or greater than your life, you lose the game. Having more life after damage means you have more time to do things in.
There is also a sixth resource, Spellpoints, which determines the number of copies of each of your spells that you are likely to have in your spellbook. However, this resource is even more relational/subjective than Positioning, since the number of copies of a spell that you include depends on how you want to manage the other five essential resources.
I did not include tempo, because tempo is special. Tempo, or momentum, or time, determines when you want to kill the enemy mage, when you are going to be more likely to be ahead of your opponent in resources and when your opponent is going to be ahead of you in resources. Tempo is how long you have left beore you die vs how long your opponent has left before they die, given the current board state. In other words, tempo can be described as thus: When your threat level against the enemy mage is higher and your life after damage is lower compared to your opponent's, you have more tempo. When your threat level against the enemy mage is lower and your life after damage is higher compared to your opponent's, you have less tempo.
(Mage1's life after damage) + (Mage2's threat level) - (Mage2's life after damage) + (Mage1's threat level). Threat level is the potential for damage to the enemy mage. It tends to be rather difficult to quantify precisely until the very end of the game, but it can be understood precisely enough for players to make meaningful tactical decisions about it.
Offense/defense exists on a continuum. For instance, a very offensive strategy might not use any burst healing at all, a very defensive strategy might use multiple burst healing spells, and a midgame strategy might use just one or two burst healing spells.
Early game=rounds 1-5
Late game=rounds 6-10
Early game win=~round 4 or 5
Late game win=~round 9 or 10
Offensive early game
1.) Increases own mana (discount rings tend to break even round 3)
2.) Increases own options (battle forge, familiars, mage wand/elemental wand, or a creature spawnpoint in the case of low level offensive creature swarms)
3.) Increases own actions (including pseudo-actions): cheetah speed, dancing scimitar, battle forge, ballista, wizard tower, buddy creature, etc.), a single copy of mind control.
4.) Getting closer to opponent: force push, lesser teleport, cheetah speed, force pull, tanglevine/force hold (so that your favorable positioning doesn't change once you have it), a single copy of enfeeble (same reason as vine/hold), teleport to get out of tanglevine quickly, etc.
5.) Life after Damage: attack spells, one-time swarm attack buffs (call of the wild, unholy blood ritual), reusable swarm attack buffs (rajan's fury, tooth and nail, marked for death, etc.)
Defensive early game
1.) Decreases opponent mana: (mana syphon, essence drain etc.)
2.) Decreases opponent options: disarm on equipments like galvitar or mage wand/elemental wand, putting a wall in front of a ballista or wizard tower, metamagic, things that prevent your opponent from making certain choices, rather than responding to whatever they choose to do after the fact. For instance, preemptively revealing poisoned blood to stop them from revealing healing charm or using hand of bim's effect to heal.
3.) Decreasing opponent actions: either by attacking and destroying creatures, or by devaluing of enemy actions, or both such as sleep, charm, multiple copies of enfeeble, lowering attack die rolls, daze/stun, etc. Mind control effectively lowers opponent's actions by at least 2 as soon as it is revealed. This is because mind control stuns the creature when it is revealed, and also when it is destroyed, costing the creature's original controller two actions.
4.) Getting farther away from opponent: force push, teleport (to get two zones away rather than just one), lesser teleport, cheetah speed+mongoose agility (helps you to run away from enemys), force wave (to push larger numbers of enemies away), repulse (same as force wave, but in multiple random directions when the enemy creatures are already in your zone), walls (to block movement and los), tanglevines to trap enemies before they get too close especially with etherian lifetree and/or astral anchor, etc.
5.) Increasing own life after damage: sunfire amulet, regrowth belt, armor, multiple healing spells.
Decreasing opponent's life after damage (slowly): ghoul rot, magebane, force crush, etc.
Defensive Late game
1.) Increasing own mana (mana crystal doesn't give you a net increase in mana until round 6.)
2.) Decreasing opponent's options: generally involves destroying spawnpoints and familiars or things with spellbind, or things that effectively increase the number of spells you can plan.
3.) Decreasing opponent actions: destroying enemy creatures, or making them more permanently unusable in some other way (i.e. arcane ward on a turn to stone, putting them to sleep and behind walls, or arcane ward on a mind control. While mind control is good in the early game by lowering the opponent's actions by at least 2, it's also good for increasing your own actions if they leave it alone. Mind control is basically a spell that scales in power over the course of the game, just like magebane. You don't necessarily care that much if they get rid of it in early game because they paid about as much mana to get rid of it as you did to cast and reveal it, and they lost two actions while it only took you one quick cast. And if they leave it alone, it will just keep generating more and more actions for you and not for them.
4.) Getting closer to opponent. Oftentimes you don't have to get as close to opponent to kill them in the late game as the early game, because range 2 attacks tend to cost more mana/actions than range 1 attacks, and by the late game you have more mana. Oftentimes a more offensive opponent will already be closer from their failed attempt to kill you in the early game, if they were trying to rush you with their mage and a buddy creature rather than standing back and supporting a swarm. In any case, a lot of the time this involves using your superior board position that you've already accumulated to make it harder for the more aggressive mage to escape, recover and then try to finish you off. Use a combination of reusable positioning spells which you cast in the early game like cheetah speed, tanglevine/stranglevine/force hold/force crush/etc+astral anchor, teleport mage wand, enfeeble, etc. You could also use divine intervention if you already have a big threat on the board which you have been building up over the course of the game and all you have to do is bring the enemy mage in range of it (i.e. Disciples of Radiance).
5.) Life after damage: The game has gone on for long enough to build enough mana, actions and board advantage that it’s time for the finishers. Double fireball, Double Hurl Boulder, Double Forcehammer, drain soul, thunderbolt, Zombie Frenzy, Burst healing (if you have a lot of dot effects stacked on enemy mage), Drain Power, Teleport or Divine intervention on enemy mage (to bring them back to kill zone), wall of thorns push, etc.
