Editing Magic: The Gathering Gameplay Principles (section)

==Deck broad archetypes==
These five are the following broad archetypes that most decks go into. A deck might contain elements of more than one of these archetypes.
aggro, burn, midrange, control, and combo:
* Aggro: This deck is aggressive, consistent, and tries to win the game quickly mainly with creatures. If it doesn’t, it will probably lose.
* Burn: Like aggro, but mostly direct damage spells to the face rather than cheap creatures.
* Midrange: This deck runs mana acceleration early game and big creatures mid to late game. Or alternatively it is halfway between aggro and control.
* Control: This deck stops other decks from doing what they want to do, typically until they have enough mana to play their win condition cards (of which there are typically very few). It then continues to use its control cards to protect and/or support its win condition.
* Combo: This deck attempts to use cards that have such strong synergy it will likely win the game, if the combo is assembled. As such, they are typically vulnerable to disruption. They aren’t the most consistent deck and often use cards like serum visions to make themselves more consistent. If they are too consistent and fast, expect a ban (unless maybe it's vintage).


There are also some smaller archetypes that revolve around these:

* Tempo: An aggressive deck that tries to disrupt the opponent while being aggressive (attacking their hand, countering their removal spells, killing their blockers etc.) More likely to be the control deck in some matchups such as against more aggressive decks.
* Prison: Like a control deck but tries to proactively prevent the opponent from doing things rather than react after they have done the things. Often involves "lock" pieces (permanents which make it very hard for the opponent do do things by making their spells cost more, countering their spells when they play them, attacking their mana, attacking their hand so they don't have threats in hand, etc.). These are the kind of decks people are most likely to [[Rage| hate with the burning passion of a thousand suns.]]
* Ramp: Tries to get a lot of mana a lot faster than it's supposed to, then play really big things. Often in either green or colorless (green has spells that put lands on the battlefield, and most of the broken ways to shit-ton of mana give you colorless mana). Ramp can sometimes be a form of control or midrange if just ramping isn't fast enough.
*Dredge: Dredge is Dredge. To be more specific, Dredge abuses the fuck out of the graveyard with self-mill through the dredge effect, reanimination, flashbacking spells, cards in graveyards having effects, and swinging for the win with a sudden horde of graveborne nasties.