What the hell is aggro-control anyways ?

If you think you know tell me, cause it’s not like the internet seems to agree on any solid definition. In fact there’s surprisingly little articles about it, for a macro-archetype.

According to gamepedia : “An aggro-control deck’s game plan is to play enough creatures to kill the opponent in a reasonable number of turns (e.g. a “five-turn clock”), then protect those creatures through disruption for that many turns to win the game.“

Gavin Verhey is on board with that version : “The goal of an aggro-control deck is to create a clock on your opponent that you can back up with disruption. Usually the clock is in some form of creature-based assault but it can really be any source of inevitability. For example an untouched planeswalker will often close up the game just as well.“

Those two sources seem to agree, but PVDDR has another point of view, and I happen to give the guy a lot of credit : “The reason aggro-control decks are so good is that all the cards in it are flexible, and they work well in whatever strategy you choose for that particular game—when a control deck is forced to play an aggressive game, for example, then half of its cards are not doing what they are supposed to do; if you must pressure your combo opponent before they go off, then the nine removal spells in your deck become blanks. With Aggro-Control, that doesn’t happen—your cards are not specific in the way that Steppe Lynx attacks and Wall of Omens blocks, the way Lava Spike deals damage and Healing Salve gains life. They’re good in any situation, and that gives you flexibility to play whatever game you want.“

The point he makes about (not) calling an aggro deck with counterspells an aggro-control deck did hit right home for me (I was uncomfortable calling my winning deck from the 94 Paris tourney in May an aggro-control deck). So there are at least two very different view of what aggro-control is : either some aggro creatures backed with some control element (typically counterspells), or a deck of flexible spells, most of which can play both an aggro and controlling role.

The Gwendo deck

Since the first definition is disputed, and not particularly hard to implement, I decided I’d try to see if it were possible to do something that would satisfy the second, purest acceptation of an aggro-control deck in Old School.

There are great counterspells and disruption in Old School, so that wouldn’t be a problem. The difficulty would be in finding enough creatures that could both aggro & control. I already knew that Hypnotic Specter and Orcish Artillery were great old school creatures that would fit the bill. That’s not enough. The card that made me think it might be doable, you might have guessed, is Gwendlyn di Corci.

Gwendlyn is quite the underrated card : at 3/5 it can block an Erhnam all day, and make weenies stay at bay. It’s ability is that of a Disrupting Scepter, a card that, like Jayemdae Tome I find quite mediocre. But not only can Gwendlyn attack, it also costs 0 to activate. So here’s a possible scenario : The Deck player plays a Jayemdae Tome, activates it each turn, using a lot of his mana, I play a Gwendlyn, nullify his card advantage, with all my mana available. Of course they discard their worst card and keep the best, oh no wait, they don’t, they discard at random dammit! Still you can’t hope to play that game for long, but attached to a creature that dies to neither Bolt nor Psi-Blast, that’s very fine. An aggro-control deck isn’t supposed to stay the distance with a good control deck anyways.

The Artillery is a powerful aggro-control card capable of dealing 2 per turn against a control deck, and a major annoyance to weenies. With the timewalking Old School 95 rules, while the reduction in cost is sometimes appreciable, the most important is that at only one red in the casting cost it becomes much easier to integrate in multi-color decks.

We already need 2 blacks quite early on for the hyppies, and also for Gwendlyn, so it’d be hard to ensure 2 red for the artillery. With BB locked in, Hymn to Tourach rather than Counterspell as the flexible control card is the logical conclusion. Is The Rack an aggro-control card ? Maybe it is. After all it tends to make people keep cards in hand instead of playing them (control), which as a bonus makes your forthcoming Hymns live, and it hits hard in such a deck with a megaton of discard (aggro), it also has “haste”, which is critical in racing people.

Another crucial aspect of the deck is that it plays neither white nor much Arabian Nights cards. That means I can benefit from some of the most busted sideboard cards : Gloom and City in a Bottle. It would be hard to do a competitive aggro deck respecting those restrictions, but for an aggro-control one that seems to be a very attainable goal. While Consulting for a card you only have two of in your deck isn’t great, it’s a bet I’m willing to do when the payoff is something as busted as CiB. Also, maybe I should just get a third one..

I tested the deck and it seemed to do well : that is, like all the best 95 deck I know, it beats a lot of top decks, and lose to a few. Which means that in “95” we have another competitive macro-archetype. (I wouldn’t waste a chance to say how balanced and interesting the format is, you can count on that !). I was ready to play it in our monthly online Old School 95 tournaments.

August

Match 1 vs. Tuyen Tran (NecroDream)

1-0

Match 2 vs Shawn Pake (Deadguy Ale)

I managed to misclick and didn’t record it. Not that there was much to miss though. Got lucky each games, LoA + Ancestral Recall + Time Walk game 1 I think. LoA or/and big Mind Twist game 2.. On top of that Shawn has an unpowered deck. I didn’t feel exactly proud.

2-0

Match 3 vs Olga Dushina (BRW)

3-0

Match 4 vs Jeff Watkins (Reanimator Special)

4-0

Final vs Olga

Sorry I forgot to turn the recording of my mic on. Game 1, turn 1 Mox Jet Hymn. Game 2 she has an early LoA, but I consult for Strip Mine. She doesn’t attack with her Black Knight into my Hypnotic Specter held at bay by her Spirit Link and lack of cards in hand.. She plays Necropotence for the first time in her life. Lucky you Olga ! And lucky me that you didn’t play it optimally.

5-0

SEPTEMBER

Match 1 vs Jack Lumber (RG beats)

Jack plays some Ice Age cards which makes me quite happy, I see some Orcish Lumberjacks. Unfortunately those aren’t always gifted with an accompanying forest, but they’re still a high potential card. Much more reliable are Tinder Walls, but I don’t remember seeing any. Anyways, he plays a fast deck and I end up siding the Hymns out. In come the City in the Bottle, for naught, but still.

1-0

Match 2 vs Jeff Watkins (Merfolks)

Against Merfolks, the Orcish Artilleries finally get their 15 minutes of glory, controlling his creatures, and preventing him from successfully resolve his Unstable Mutations. Phantasmal Terrains didn’t do enough and that was it.

2-0

Match 3 vs Olga Dushina (RG Berserk)

Game 1 I annihilate her hand with a Hymn and a Mind Twist, but she has already too much on board. I side the hymns out, play a turn 1 LoA and Olga is nice enough not to play several Strip Mines, so I steal the game. Game 3, Lotus + Twist turn 2.. and she’s not done for, in fact that last game is a good example of Gwendlyn’s versatiliy, sometime feeding the Racks, sometimes standing as a big wall to her army of little guys.

3-0

Match 4 vs Shawn Pake (RG aggro)

And a third RG aggro deck in 4 matches.. I keep some hymns in this time though. I finish with a City in a Bottle to try to convince me that they were worth it, but really didn’t need them.

4-0

Match 5 vs Tuyen Tran (RUG aggro)

LoA turn 1 and ohh an oponnent who plays only 1 Strip Mine, and doesn’t use his Chaos Orb on my library. Well.. thx Tuyen ! Game 2. I get crushed by sizeable Arabian nights creatures. Game 3 I can finally get a City in a Bottle via Demonic Tutor. It kills my City of Brass, but it kills his Kird Ape, along with its Unstable Mutation and his Erhnam Djinn, so the thing is sort of paying off, at last. He misses a Chaos Orb flip, so he loses.

5-0

Match 6 vs David Craig (Good Stuff Fatties)

His kids are around and he’s more used to that kind of noises than I am so he wins.

5-1

Final vs David Craig

No kids this time so I win.

6-1

CONCLUSION

While the deck did great, and won both tournaments, it’s not like everybody is ready with polished 95 decks. Ice Age cards slowly make their way to the lists, and it’s just a beginning. After a while it seemed clear that the Power Sinks weren’t pulling their weight, they were more of an embarrassment really, and I would sideboard them out almost every time. As for Hymn to Tourach + Demonic Consultation they’re certainly the driving force of the deck. But I sided the Hymns out regularly, simply because the deck isn’t super fast, and many opponents dumped their cards fast and were living off the top of their decks anyways. So far Demonic Consultation seem to me like a card that should go in almost every deck, to the exception of super slow, super fast and recursive decks. But it’s not clear that it’s broken, and it’s a sort of safeguard against control dominance, which I think at that point is a good thing. But it’s not at the top of my watch list for no reason. I don’t like the idea or restricting HtT, and the DC+HtT combo has its shortcomings (like being quite dead cards in the mid to late game), and there are decks that don’t care much about discard, when then don’t welcome it (reanimator).

As for Gwendlyn, I played both tournaments as if its ability was that of a disrupting scepter, letting people discard their worst card instead of a random one 🙂