When Elder Dragons met the Archetypes

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Easter break is over, so how about a new post-series? The title my have let some of you think of something like this:

*Random Tekken Battlemusic starts*

VS

While that might be an interessting thing to watch, it is not the topic of todays (and other days) post(s). The things I want to talk about are the so-called archetypes a deck gets categorized in like "Aggro", "Control", "Combo",... the list goes on and on.

When I started playing Multiplayer-EDH after a time of very competitive Standard and Legacy play, my deckbuilding was kind of wierd, since I tried to mimic strategies from those 60-card formats and port them to a 100-card-singleton format. When that didn't work with all archetypes I said to myself: "Archetype XY simply doesn't work in a format like that." And while there are definitely some more favored Archetypes in EDH, I was forgetting one thing:
The definition of anything is only applicable on the environment it is defined on/for, just like a really good NVidia graphics driver won't work for a ATI card.

What I am trying to say is that in order to build a deck of a certain archetype in any format, the first thing you need to do is to reduce it to its main characteristics rather than a set of cards or a ceratin number of turns in which you need to establish a certain board/game-state. For example while in Standard a Combo-deck that can go off consistantly on turn 6 is probably a big meta-game factor, in Legacy that same speed would be about 3-4 turns too slow (= unplayable), even if it had a 100% rate of going off by then.

Our beloved EDH-format is no exception to that, and still people seem to ignore that, playing mainly archetypes that are portable to a certain degree or even get better because of the format being slower than any other format. On the bright side, people also seem to enjoy EDH-specific strategies, but those people are mainly long-time generals rather than those retired Legacy-privates that want to put their Force of Wills to some good use. In this series I want to adress people who are eager to try out new ways of EDH like getting more aggressive or play more spells rather than creatures but don't have the experience or knowledge to do that sucessfully.

Enough with the blabbering, lets start with the first archetype I want to get more detailed on...

...next post (simply to keep thing organized)