The Hidden Structure of Strategy In Magic: The Gathering 

Been playing Magic for 30 years, and this was the most lucid explanation I've ever heard in defense of Magic's mana system: "Magic forces a tension in deckbuilding between an economy strategy and a rush strategy." Incredible stuff.

their are 3 strategys 1 Hardended scales 2 Lantern control 3 Primeval titan

I like to think of the 3 axes -Tempo vs Innevitability -Threat vs Answers -Redundant vs Specific Tempo + Threats + Redundant is aggro. Each card does the same thing, win now. The Philosophy of Fire (1 card = x damage) incarnate. Tempo + Threat + Specific is combo. You want those 2 cards asap to close the game. Tempo + Answers + Redundant is Aggro-control or Tempo. Few threats but enough disruption to delay the opponent enough to win. UG madness with counters and Death's Shadow with Thoughtseize. Tempo + Answers + Specific is rarely a archetype, but is how many sideboard "silver bullet" act. Blood Moon vs Tron or Graveyard Hate vs dredge will not stop them, but will delay them enough, hopefully. Innevitability + Answers + Redundant is control. You have enough counterspells or removal to survive until your late game finisher secures your win. Innevitability + Answers + Specific is prison. Lantern control and Shop/Trinisphere. Once you invalidated the opponents deck, winning is a formality. Innevitability + Threat + Redundant is Midrange. Instead of playing removal every turn, present a new threat every turn like a resilient creature (bloodbraid elf, spiritmonger, hazoret, heart of kiran) or planeswalker until you snowball or overvalue your opponent. Innevitability + Threat + Specific is the other side of combo. If a control deck doesn't close the game, the combo player can just sandbag ressources until they can play past the wall of permission. That plus the eternal question "Who is the Beatdown". In my old modern grixis control, I had to be the beatdown against Tron and Primeval Titan decks or they just can play 3 wincons in a turn with natural land drops.

This seems like the right video to say that while your MtG content is clearly the most successful and it makes sense that you would continue to focus on Magic as a primary point of reference. I see your channel as a games design channel first and a magic channel second.

So glad you mentioned Lantern Control, that was immediately what popped in my head for defense when the 3 categories were laid out

Also highlights how the system wasn’t built for commander, sorry I had to do it.

Oh yeah, this is a classic Rock Paper Scissors triangle. This same one is also in StarCraft. There are also bacteria that take up this strategy. Some spend their energy to develop powerful poison to melt other bacteria, some spend their energy to develop defenses against poison, and some forgo attack or defenses to try to eat as much as possible. Not every game follows this triangle in particular, not every card game even, but it's the bedrock of all multiplayer games where you interact with your opponent in a meaningful way. Fighting games have attack/block/throw, but also poke/whiff punish/pressure. Pure racing games have passing on the left or the right

The strategy circle of rush/economy/defense is a wonderful concept. In all my years of being an avid consumer of game design media, I've seen many people try to break down universal game strategies but they never pulled it off this successfully. This is the most interesting video you've made for me, personally, and I'd love to see more on how it applies to not just mtg and starcraft but other games as well. I will definitely be keeping the concept in mind in the future. Good work, fellas.

To help people think about the economy outside of MTG think about; ammo for shooters, timers and stamina for sports, quarters for old school arcades, patience for playing "getting over it," or different friends to play commander with after wipe all their lands

blessed be the algorithm that delivered this high quality high level discussion on mtg game design. great work fellas, subscribed.

Loving all of this conversation. Great stuff guys.

I'm trying to think through this in terms of fighting games, which is what I usually do here. Rush is obvious, we have an archetype literally called rushdown where you're trying to be so aggressive that your opponent doesn't have a chance to put up their own gameplan. Defense is likely zoning, where you're staying far away, using projectiles or very large hitboxes to preempt approaches and restrict the opponent's movement. Those are straightforward enough, I think. Economy is trickier though. "Resource" immediately brings to mind meter, but you can't really play most fighters with a mind for just hoarding a bunch of meter and dropping it all at once to secure a win. Most meters max out quickly, which encourages you to spend frequently so you can start gaining again. Instead, I think economy would be best understood as a vortex character. If economy can be thought of as accruing a favorable board state, then the equivalent in a fighter should be to seek interactions which lead you to advantageous positions repeatedly. Typically that would be looking for hard knockdowns, which put your opponent in a situation where they're lying on the ground and have very few options to react to whatever you do next. Vortex characters are good at finding knockdowns, then doing something that's difficult to deal with that leads into another knockdown. You might even be sacrificing combo damage for the sake of ending in a knockdown, because setting yourself up for success in the next interaction is more important than the immediate reward of more damage. You maintain the "resource" of a favorable position.

This is the best video I've seen in this channel, and the bar was high! This is clear and fundamental knowledge that clarifies everything else about design. Thanks!

Hahaha funnily enough just saw CGB explain the Mirrodain problem to Raran which was hilarious to get a history refresh to then see it come to life.

Thanks you guys fortalking about that It's making me think about my own work a little bit better

I've been playing magic for ten years. You two are not enraging magic players, you are argueing how strategy games have aggro, midrange, and control strategy built within them. I've also seen as a triangle.

Great series of discussions

I love this topic. Specially for RTS, where it's so explicit and you get to be a lot more granular with where you stand in that spectrum in any given game. And even in different parts of the same game, if some power spikes are game-warping enough. You get entire story arcs in Broodwar matches sometimes.

This is an underrated channel for magic players.

Very good video, im gonna think and playtest quite a bit to figure out how this applies to the tcg im currently designing

The analogy even applies to games as “simple” as monopoly

I’d definitely like to see more on the circle in the future.

Have you guys ever tried "Twilight of the Gods"? It had... an interesting take on the resource conundrum. Basically any card can be a resource (and there's 3 levels of them), BUT you can't play your cards as resources - you have to trade/steal them from your opponent and those become your resources.

hi! i’ve been watching a lot of your videos recently and i especially appreciated this one because of how it was focused on a more general game design concept. i’m currently designing cards for a ccg that i’m making as a casual personal project, and i’ve always been very interested in game design theory as a whole. i wanted to ask if you could elaborate on one point you mentioned: that card games without resources in deck (in other words, providing the economy automatically for the player) subvert the economy part of the circle. this brings to mind hearthstone for me, but you could use any card game that fits this as an example. are there any specific examples of issues in card games you could point to that stem from this subversion in economy? for example, maybe you could make the argument that aggro / combo / “rush” decks are more dominant in hearthstone because of the perfect mana, whereas “economy” decks might struggle more to get a place in the meta. this in particular is something that i’ve personally noticed, and i think it might be tied to the strategy circle. i was just wondering because hearthstone was the first card game that i ever played, and that caused me assume that perfect mana was the standard or norm for card games. this video made me reconsider my perspective on that, and i’m going to spend more time thinking about the tradeoffs between in-deck resources and automatic resources. this is an especially important concept to me because my card game uses the same automatic mana system that hearthstone does. thank you so much!

As someone who only recently got into the deeper design behind Magic as a game, I want you to know I could follow along decently well. I feel y'all did a good job making it clear.

Following up on the call to action - this rules! Love your vids

I don’t understand how this system applies to games where one player winning is tied to the other losing (say, a pvp total war battle). But I could see a modification where economy is building your possible action space, rush is spending that space to win, and defense is protecting that possibility space

I like this circle but also have some considerations: - Pure combo decks (OTK, 1TK, 2TK, etc) also mostly fall into the "Rush" category. - I disagree with the idea of redundancy being a "Rush" thing. Redundancy is a quality in general, any deck needs to be consistent to work. In Magic, it can be achieved by having multiple copies or by having tutors or more card draw. - An interesting situation arrives in games like Age of Empires 2, where most rush strategies send units to stop the enemy economy on their tracks instead of winning on the spot, so they could be considered a double defense/rush win against an economy strategy.

I wonder now and I will keep this in mind: Should I not violate these three ideas in designing my card game? I suppose it is clear and easy to understand what the cards are trying to do and that's why it's a good idea. Thinking back, many of my fav decks fall into these archetypes. Great vid!

There's an old article that I read titled "What I know about Magic: the Gathering" by Douglas Buel (dbuel) on BoardGameGeek that echoes your point on the three parts of the circle, though in that case the three types of deck dbuel identifies are Aggro, Combo and Control (which is a seperate axis from the other two), with Midrange and Aggro-Control being derivatives of the Aggro-Control Spectrum. I would suggest reading it since it's very much in line with your observations In that vein, I feel you didn't touch on how most "Economy" strategies are also combo decks since decks like Storm are in essence game plans to generate either infinite or functionally infinite mana. In your example of Affinity, like you said it is an aggro deck, but the mechanics of the deck are closer to a combo deck based on synergy than on anything resembling an efficient mana curve. This also puts decks like Elves and Tron in this category, because the main strategies of those decks are all about breaking the established rules of magic in regards to mana progression.

Thanks for the video!

I’d love to hear how this sort of strategic philosophy applies to a bunch of other card games or even stuff like board games or Mobas, even single player games with character customization.

1. Principle of Fire 2. Card Advantage 3. Tempo (as a concept not archetype)

I like to think about "aggro" and "control" as relatives. No deck IS aggro. Aggro is something that a deck is in a given match. The player doing the agression in a match is being the aggro, and the player on the receiving end is being the Control. If you construct a deck to be agressive by default, but in a given match you end up on the control position, you should adjust your mindset. If you keep trying to be aggro, you will end up being out raced and lose. Same thing for a more controly deck that dont adjust itself to take on the agression when it should. Understanding this relative position and learning to adapt is what separare the great players from the masses hehe PS: Curiously, Kemet has 3 colors. Attack, defense and economy. At least until they added a forth in a expansion hehe

This is interesting to me, because normally when I think about Magic's different archetypes, I think about a triangle of aggro, combo, and control, with midrange being kind of in the middle. And most other archetypes are some mix of the two, for example tempo decks being aggro/control, storm being aggro/combo, and lantern being combo/control. Aggro tends to beat control, control tends to beat combo, combo tends to beat aggro. Midrange is distinct in that it plays for flexibility, so it tries to shift to aggro to beat control, and control to beat aggro. I don't know if I'd really call it defense, though? Since it doesn't play defense that much more than other lists. I actually think one of the distinctive things in Magic is that there isn't really a defense archetype? More that there are individual defensive cards people slot into decks regardless of whether they're rush or resource. Tons of aggro decks play Bolt, or Thoughtseize, or Fatal Push, for example. Even the most aggro deck I can think of, Legacy Storm, still plays counterspells and Veils for defense. Even prison decks like Lantern usually end up winning by either making the opponent lose the resource game, or by aggro-ing them out before they can recover. That probably has something to do with why sideboards are such a distinctive feature of Magic, TBH, since that's where most of the defensive deckbuilding goes for basically every archetype.

When I first learned about "the StarCraft triangle", I tried to apply it to everything, and found that it didn't always fit nicely. However, one time I found it illuminating was with the 1v1 puzzle game Puyo Puyo. Matching puyo to make chains is the only action. It both attacks your opponent and defends you from their attacks, so it seemed like just a bigger-number contest at first. The exponential scaling makes long chains strong, so just build big and fire second, right? However, in high level play, you see small, inefficient attacks mixed in while players build up resources for their big attack. A successful small attack can seal off an opponent's resources long enough to use the rest of yours without threat of a counterattack, winning you the game. Rush strategy found! But where's the tradeoff? A chain meant to rush could instead be extended for the late game, right? Would defense just be the same as attack? Not quite, because of some details in scoring and time. A 2-chain is weak, and can be a big waste for how little it slows the opponent. A 4-chain completely unblocked is nearly impossible to come back from, but gives the opponent a lot more time to react and build a suitable counter. The attacking solution is "power chains". Adding more puyo to each chain link adds damage, though less efficiently than using the same puyo to make more links. A power 2-chain can be a threatening rush, but uses board space inefficiently if you convert it into your late game long chain. You could defend with a similar attack, or do so more efficiently with a 3 or 4 chain, since you don't care about the speed. Distinct defense found! But how do defense and econ differ? It comes down to how quickly you can activate that defensive 3- or 4-chain as you're building up. A single-player strategy may use the pieces and board space very efficiently, but have long stretches of time where it can't construct an appropriately sized subchain. A defensive strategy accepts oversized chain links and imperfect space usage in order to stay close enough to safety to react in time. These are general descriptions, but in practice, a skilled player can sometimes extend their planned 2-double efficiently or find an incidental 3-chain attack while just trying to build their main chain. High level matches are a great watch as you see players constantly shift their playstyle to match their opponent's options second to second. You can really feel the triangle, or circle as it were.

You're very focused on the circle but you aren't thinking about the interior, jund is a central strategy that trys to adapt to it's opponent. It would rush control, or defend against rush, while trying to grind advantage. Especially in a game like magic with such a huge volume of effects doing all 3 is very likely, it's how much of each you are doing. Jund is a great example, modern jund can have no spells costing over 2, most of which trade 2-1 and has a high amount of removal. It's not as agro as mono red swiftspear burn, it's not as defensive as a mono black control, it's not as economy as mono green ramp. But it combines them all and flexes to it's opponents weakness.

So this idea is further expanded upon by Chapin's Array. Breaking down MTG decks into different parts of the clock.

I love Stax, but never liked the design of Lodestone Golem. It just does too much, it is already a solved puzzle out of the box. It is aggressive (rush) but also taxes your opponent which has the double effect of defense by suppression and economic gain through relative ressource advantage.

Where would you place jund in the circle? I always thought what makes jund a deck is all the 2 for 1s, so I'd be a economy deck. But you mention midrange to be somewhere in between rush and defence, which also makes sense. I'm confused :p

Great video to think about my deckbuilding. Why not call it the strategy triangle though? I mean, you have 3 angles...😂

W00t! First upvote and first comm.

Attack is trying to win, defense is trying to not lose, economy is gaining resources to do either.

Nice

As a magic player, I am confused and enraged.

I did one of those

I like and subscribe

I think it's great you analyze game design through something popular like MTG. It's the first tcg and the best one, what are you supposed to do? Talk about ygo? Lmao I mean I guess you could if you were describing what to absolutely avoid.

and then there's yugioh, where a deck is considered non-competitive, if not downright bad, if it doesn't excel in all 3.

Aggro is cheap to netdeck in most MTG formats due to the usual low average card rarity, that is a large part of why it spikes early. There is a reason Aggro really appeared slightly later than Control or Midrange, you need the resource distribution curves and card power tradeoffs to be well understood to design it in the first place. Funny enough, Control will probably take over MTG's Standard format (even more than currently) immediately at the next (Summer 2024) rotation: Aggro is losing most of its core cards and B/UB Control is losing little of value. It is the one where you don't need to know how to handle the new environment this time. Personally I think along a three axis cube when considering design: Aggro-Control on one axis with Isolating-Combining on the other and Economy filling it out. The first axis is about how the build focuses on attack or disruption. The second axis is how much your cards interact among themselves, the stereotypical control player view of what RG Stompy does (burn cards and vanilla creatures only) on one end and the crazy 10 card combo for instant win stuff on the other. The third axis of course is how much effort is being put into generation of resources over time. Every build option fits somewhere in that space. Of course the specifics change depending on the game: lack of effective resources is why Yugioh basically does not have a rush strategy any more for example. And yes, Thoughtcast was more of a problem than Ravager in that silly deck. You thought they were finally out of steam then suddenly they have everything they need again for exactly... U mana.

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“Every strategy needs a weakness” So here is my problem: what is the weakness of landfall and lands decks? Their economy is to grow mana and sudo draw it out the deck. They profit in many ways but in commander it’s taboo to mass land destroy (MLD). Using up slots in my deck construction to ward off in suboptimal ways extra land drops is a real bummer. There is no feels fair situation. It’s one way or another. Commander is plagued with such problems and I’ve played against enough decks to see the ramp ones usually take the win. The problem also is that it’s hard to convince the table to turn on someone who has no creatures in play but 9 lands on turn 5. Usually they players threat asses based on creature and no land permanents on board instead and let the lands players run away with a win.

I was halfway through writing my comparison to starcraft in my head before you mentioned it lol. But I've got nothing better to do so I'll just expand on some ideas. "Defense" probably makes people think of things like stationary towers or w/e in various rts games, but it also relates to what type of offense you run. One way of breaking down unit composition (that im stealing from day9) is the idea of "mobile" units vs "powerful" units. Mobile units are hasty ones; they pose an immediate threat, trading efficiency for speed. Likewise powerful units are the opposite; think siege tanks. Defense in this way doesnt need to mean strictly defense-only tools. Defense can just mean a unit who is designed to trade immediacy in threat level with resource efficiency. This trade is what causes you to lose to economy; my zerglings wouldve ran that guy over before you even crossed half the map with your siege tanks. Likewise a 4/5 with vigilence is probably way less raw offensive power than what you'd get spending the same amount on 2/1s with haste, but it gives you both a resource advantage and inevitibility against a deck whose power caps off at 3.