Control vs Aggro in Stoicheion
DISCLAIMER: You’ll need an understanding of how to play Stoicheion to fully enjoy this article. Feel free to share it with the Magic the Gathering players in your life too.
As far as breeds of board-gamers go, I come from a background of Magic The Gathering. I won’t say that I was raised in that sphere, I’ve only been playing for just under 4 years or so. And truthfully Pokémon was my TCG of choice as a child, but that’s not to say I particularly knew anything about how to play the game until recently. With that said, Magic was my entry-point into the wider tabletop gaming world, and it’s colored a sizeable portion of my understanding of how strategy card games function.
Now, Stoicheion is a far cry from the mechanical complexity of Magic. Although Stoicheion does have almost double the colors, it lacks the deck construction mechanic and decades of card effects that form into an entire ecosystem of heady rulings. But across Magic’s many formats and set releases, the ways in which players build decks have converged on several principals. Of chief interest to us is the line between Control and Aggro decks.
MTG’s Color Pie (Credit Here)
The playstyle of a Magic deck is tailor-made by the player, but often limited in support by the color pie: Magic’s mechanical division of powers. Each of the five colors possess unique philosophies about, well, everything, and when designers translate that into text on a card, certain colors will lean more heavily into some mechanics than others. White is good for life gain and token generation, while black has excellent recovery cards and tutors. And of course, Green makes big creatures. The result is that, as blocks of cards are released, the decks that emerge from a given color or color combination will tend to act in similar ways to the same-colored decks of years prior. Exact goals will vary, but you will expect that the red decks are focused on fast damage and broad destruction, while blue decks play slower tempo’d counterspells and resource advantage cards. So on and so forth.
That fact of color identity heavily determining playstyle was something I carried into Stoicheion in much more solid terms. Each Element has only one ability associated with it and it alone, and its neighbors are always the same, meaning players are confined to a single set of options at any given point on the Leyline (ignoring Continuum.) You may not be in the same situation every time you land on Torrent, but you’ll have the same toolset each time, likely leaving each element with an optimal way to play.
In any game, over time, players will find the optimal play-patterns and their relevant counters. Metagaming is an important appeal to the experience of modern strategy games. And in Magic, three main playstyles emerged. On one end, there are Aggressive, or Aggro decks. “Red-Deck-Wins” is the archetypical example. They hit hard and fast before you have a chance to mount any sort of defense. The entire point is to quickly convert all available resources into direct damage to the opponent. But they lose steam if the game goes too long. On the opposite end, Control decks like the infamous “Lantern Control” are the turtle to Aggro’s hare. If they can successfully survive and counter any threats with their impressively condense toolbox, they’ll lock their opponent out of most available avenues for progression, vulnerable to an agonizingly slow kill. It’s a scale of damage vs denial.
Now, somewhere in the middle is the third position: Combo/Mid-range decks, the hybrid approach. Their creatures are often slower but hardier than Aggro, and their spells are less oppressive than Control, but the result is that they have more viability in outlasting an Aggro deck’s assault or to break through a Control deck’s walls. No one approach is foolproof; the results of the match between an excellently constructed deck of a given archetype comes down more to player skill and card RNG. But there are three identifiable blocks of strategies that exist on a somewhat linear scale. Now where have I seen that before?
Oh right. The Leyline exists on a mechanical axis of aggro vs control as well. In the top section, Ignition’s burn and Maelstrom’s card stealing abilities are straight out of a Red deck’s Aggro playbook. Relay takes a subtler approach by accelerating cards to you, without changing much about the board state. At the bottom of the Leyline, Absence directly bars players from using certain abilities, while firmament locks down a threatening opponent. Continuum embodies that idea of “I always have an answer, if I can just draw into it” that Control decks so often play with, although it does look a lot like some red exile-and-cast effects. And in the middle, our Midrange takes shape by borrowing from both sides. None of its 3 abilities are particularly aggressive or controlling, but they help a player gain access to both options by literally bridging the divide. Torrent is a “ramp” effect that makes cards available faster, while Catalyst is the sole method of discard recursion. And there’s little better than Moment for helping get direct access to the position you need.
Now, the Leyline wasn’t necessarily constructed from the beginning with this scale in mind. It’s something that emerged as the game developed to help guide player choices. And given the differences in gameplay goals between Stoicheion and Magic, it’s not 1:1 either. But it’s an aspect of these games I felt was worth highlighting in this post, if for nothing but insight into the design process.
