I've been working on putting together some version of "aggro" for my environment. I roughly envision this as meaning decks that are low-to-the-ground and pressure the opponent's life total. I started the move last September and in the last couple months, I've struck upon 3 themes that I'm more or less happy with:
(1) Aggro decks that are good at the long game
(2) "Cards, not Decks"-based engines, i.e. Ambient Combo
(3) Pressure-Combo hybrids
The first point addresses something I tend to dislike about aggro gameplans: your typical streamlined aggro decks goes all in and you either get there or the opponent stabilizes and you're usually out of gas. So far the most interesting aggro decks in our drafts haven't had this problem - they don't necessarily try to win the game fast, they try to keep pressure on the opponents life total. Then they utilize the natural spell velocity and card drawing engines to keep gas in the tank over long games. I can see roughly four variants for keeping up over a longer game:
I've also been very happy with board-based removal to fight the control game ala
Walking Ballista or
Pia and Kiran Nalaar. This plays out especially well against combo decks with token generators like
Sai, Master Thopterist because you get really engaging swapping back and forth between who needs to be controlling and disruptive and who needs to be on the attack.
Here's a deck I drafted that felt like an aggressive deck but had an absolutely phenomenal long game with a ton of ways to draw cards and individual threats that come back or can be recycled:
The spell velocity plus the possibility for big combo-y +1/+1 counter turns when the pieces came together still feel very much in the spirit of the Mox Cube. But you didn't HAVE to combo to win - more on that later.
The second bullet I've called "Cards, Not Decks" was a nice deck-building and cube design breakthrough for me in trying to make aggro work. I think for aggressive decks, I was designing too narrowly around archetypes like "the aristocrats deck", the "+1/+1 counters deck" but I was having trouble squaring these "aggro archetypes" with the overall theme of the cube. But it turns out by having enough combo pieces that were typically used in pure combo decks you can end up with aggro decks that don't revolve around a particular "theme" per-say, but can still emergently have high-velocity, engine-based game play. Here's a great example one of my drafters concocted:
As a whole maybe it's just a pile of vaguely aggressive and disruptive cards. But during the actual game play, the pilot was constantly finding setups to suddenly gain a lot of advantage all in one go.
Chainer, Nightmare Adept plus
Experimental Frenzy, for example, complement each other in delightful way. So do
Grafted Wargear,
Midnight Reaper, plus tokens. The deck wasn't necessarily a "sacrifice deck" or a "discard deck" as a whole, but since these themes are integrated throughout the cube it consistently turned out that whatever particular combination of cards he happened to draw, there was some unusual gameplay angle to chase after. I guess this is the beauty of cube but I'm pleased that the result still feels true to the Mox Cube ideals.
Lastly as with "artifactifying" an existing archetype to make drafting more flexible and dynamic, I think there's natural cross-pollination between combo and aggro archetypes. Except here I think the cross-over is a considerable upgrade for the combo decks. Playing an all-in combo deck can sometimes mean if you can't go off you can't really do anything. But if you can combine a combo-finish with individual pieces that just happen to pressure their life total then you always have a nice backup plan. E.g.
Guttersnipe, prowess creatures, and burn in a Red-Blue deck that could either play storm or tempo. Or consider a Green-White deck revolving around going infinite with cards like
Kor Skyfisher,
Cloudstone Curio, and
Earthcraft. If you can ramp out a lot of small creatures fast, then if they disrupt your combo with
Duress you can still beat them to death the old-fashioned way. I hope the ambient combo pieces can make the aggro decks more fun, but vice-versa for making certain combo decks less brittle.
As an example, here's a very much all-in version of Boros Teshar I drafted last week:
The deck is ALMOST an aggro deck. It's low-to-the-ground and could easily play 15 lands. But because I focused on trying to make the combo more consistent it wasn't actually possible in practice to pressure the opponent's life total. In fact, if they managed to nix too many of my key pieces like:
Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle,
Scrap Trawler, and
Goblin Bombardment I just straight up couldn't win. Here was a chance to compromise a tiny bit and pick up some beaters like
Porcelain Legionnaire or
Arcbound Ravager which would still synergise while opening up new avenues of attack. I'll keep this in mind in the future.
I'll conclude with a deck from out last draft - the first time anyone has tried to build Mono Red. They narrowly eeked out a first-place finish over GB Griselbrand-Oath in a tense 3 game match. Very dope.
