How do you tweak a removal section to buff or nerf certain kinds of decks? There are some obvious answers--Wraths support control decks and creatures with ETB triggers support midrange decks--but removal designed to slot into aggro decks has been harder to pin down for me.
There are, of course, some obvious suspects. I've collected a dozen of what I think are archetypal removal spells across a number of colors for each major archetype. I'm not going to include a lot of duplicates (e.g. both Wrath of God and Damnation) because we're all reasonable people who can extrapolate generally. Please note that for the purpose of this list I'm not choosing things that a deck would "like" to have, but rather the cards that they will wind up with disproportionately due to other decks not wanting them, which I'm terming "preferential wheeling."
Aggro:
Midrange:
Control:
(ofc this is just my opinion and maybe some of these are better suited to other categories, please feel free to quibble/help me become a better magic player by pointing out if some of these classifications are unhelpful/inaccurate. Some of these preferences are also a lot weaker than others, i.e. control will never want a Frost Trickster but something like Seal of Fire is only mildly dispreferred by aggro decks due to stiffer competition in the one-drop slot that generally wants to be occupied by creatures.)
This is all well and good. It's intuitive that aggro decks will preferentially wheel removal with heavy non-mana costs or removal that is only tempo-based, midrange will preferentially wheel removal strapped to larger creatures or removal requiring some synergy to bring online, and control will preferentially wheel wraths and removal with extra value stapled to it. However, what do we do with things like Lightning Bolt or Council's Judgment, removal pieces that are speaking considered "generically strong?" Are these just a free-for-all, with all decks fighting over them? If so, that does interesting things to a draft and should be paid attention to. (IMO the key to a superior draft environment is balancing picks that the majority of people [4 to 6 in a given pod of 8] fight over and picks that a much smaller subset, maybe two or even just one person are interested in).
Taxonomies are not always helpful, but for the purposes of changing balance within a cube I'd suggest the following for "generic" removal: more-aggressive decks will be happier with higher-cost removal than control decks and vice-versa, if only because of when they want to deploy their threats. Aggro decks want to play their threats and then kill whatever roadblocks come up, whereas control needs to buy time to stay alive to get heavier investments bearing fruit. Midrange, always the bugbear of these types of analyses, sits in the middle of the two, able to play a little of both sides, but tends to prize efficiency per mana spent over all else so as to squeeze as much possible out of each cardboard rectangle. they can get their grubby little mitts on. In a concrete example, what does changing Lightning Bolt to Lightning Strike or vice-versa do to the aggro/midrange/control balance? I think that Bolt favors control whereas Strike favors aggro. However, mana efficiency is far from the only lever on generic removal spells, so this isn't the end-all be-all. That said, I think it's one we can mostly agree on.
Enough pontificating from me. What do you think makes removal especially good in aggro decks as opposed to midrange or control decks? What are your favorite removal cards for aggro decks and/or other kinds of decks? I'm know we've had parts of this discussion before, but I'd like to get it into one thread.
Literature keywords searched: "aggro" + "removal"; "support" + "aggro"; "removal" (titles only)
There are, of course, some obvious suspects. I've collected a dozen of what I think are archetypal removal spells across a number of colors for each major archetype. I'm not going to include a lot of duplicates (e.g. both Wrath of God and Damnation) because we're all reasonable people who can extrapolate generally. Please note that for the purpose of this list I'm not choosing things that a deck would "like" to have, but rather the cards that they will wind up with disproportionately due to other decks not wanting them, which I'm terming "preferential wheeling."
Aggro:
Midrange:
Control:
(ofc this is just my opinion and maybe some of these are better suited to other categories, please feel free to quibble/help me become a better magic player by pointing out if some of these classifications are unhelpful/inaccurate. Some of these preferences are also a lot weaker than others, i.e. control will never want a Frost Trickster but something like Seal of Fire is only mildly dispreferred by aggro decks due to stiffer competition in the one-drop slot that generally wants to be occupied by creatures.)
This is all well and good. It's intuitive that aggro decks will preferentially wheel removal with heavy non-mana costs or removal that is only tempo-based, midrange will preferentially wheel removal strapped to larger creatures or removal requiring some synergy to bring online, and control will preferentially wheel wraths and removal with extra value stapled to it. However, what do we do with things like Lightning Bolt or Council's Judgment, removal pieces that are speaking considered "generically strong?" Are these just a free-for-all, with all decks fighting over them? If so, that does interesting things to a draft and should be paid attention to. (IMO the key to a superior draft environment is balancing picks that the majority of people [4 to 6 in a given pod of 8] fight over and picks that a much smaller subset, maybe two or even just one person are interested in).
Taxonomies are not always helpful, but for the purposes of changing balance within a cube I'd suggest the following for "generic" removal: more-aggressive decks will be happier with higher-cost removal than control decks and vice-versa, if only because of when they want to deploy their threats. Aggro decks want to play their threats and then kill whatever roadblocks come up, whereas control needs to buy time to stay alive to get heavier investments bearing fruit. Midrange, always the bugbear of these types of analyses, sits in the middle of the two, able to play a little of both sides, but tends to prize efficiency per mana spent over all else so as to squeeze as much possible out of each cardboard rectangle. they can get their grubby little mitts on. In a concrete example, what does changing Lightning Bolt to Lightning Strike or vice-versa do to the aggro/midrange/control balance? I think that Bolt favors control whereas Strike favors aggro. However, mana efficiency is far from the only lever on generic removal spells, so this isn't the end-all be-all. That said, I think it's one we can mostly agree on.
Enough pontificating from me. What do you think makes removal especially good in aggro decks as opposed to midrange or control decks? What are your favorite removal cards for aggro decks and/or other kinds of decks? I'm know we've had parts of this discussion before, but I'd like to get it into one thread.
Literature keywords searched: "aggro" + "removal"; "support" + "aggro"; "removal" (titles only)
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