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As archetypes go, Aggro may be the archetype that is most misunderstood. Derided as being “brainless” or “cheap,” a dominant Aggro deck in the metagame will often be used as an argument that the format is half-baked or broken. However, Aggro decks are deceptively decision-dense and do more for the health of formats than they get credit for.

The pioneer of the Aggro strategy is the deck called “Sligh” after its creator, Paul Sligh, which was the first deck to consider the idea of a deck’s “curve,” which is the distribution of costs in the deck that defines the options available to a deck at a given time. The idea behind the deck was to always spend all the mana available on a given turn to maximize the threat presented.

Aggro is a deck that seeks to win the game as soon as possible, usually at the expense of having a plan for the late-game if anything goes south. All of Aggro’s cards are aimed to maximize their impact in the early-game, ideally before its opponent has the ability or opportunity to deal with them. As a result, a key mission statement behind Aggro has become:

While there are wrong answers, there are no wrong threats.

Aggro composes a suite of only threats and hopes that its opponent doesn’t have the right answer. A key strength of Aggro is its low variance – since it is composed almost entirely of low-cost interchangeable threats, there are few “bad” hands for Aggro, where an opponent will have to have a deck that can match Aggro’s pace. The tradeoff of this is that the lack of variety of threats can make answers to Aggro more effective – in games that have multiple-game matches this can put Aggro on the back foot in later games when its opponent is ready for it. However, the rise of Best-of-One digital CCGs may necessitate a different model for thinking about how Aggro should interact with the metagame.

In a healthy format, Aggro is a niche archetype that plays the role of enforcer. Aggro ensures that decks cannot just ignore the early-game – where Combo is a predator that demands interaction, Aggro decks are a predator that demands action. Aggro tends to dominate early in formats before the core strategies have arisen and when experimentation is high. After that initial period, usually anti-aggro tools will be found, but the ebb-and-flow of the metagame will give Aggro a chance to come back if the speed of decks in the format ever slows.

This week’s prompt – How do you feel about Aggro? Bane of your existence, EZ-Win button or Face Smasher?

Or, as always, feel free to talk about anything going on with you in the world of *CGs.