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This reminds me of the time Adrian Sullivan said that everyone on the whole internet, including all the Magicthegathering.com and Starcitygames.com writers, were wrong and the Orzhov decks (HiH and friends, not Ghost Husk) were not actually aggro-control decks. Apparently some time in the Clinton administration, someone decided to call the CounterSliver strategy (use countermagic as Time Walks by making your opponents waste turns without resolving things and ride efficiently costed creatures cheap enough not to interfere with the countermagic to victory just before the opponent's game ramps up out of your underpowered control) "aggro-control," and everyone who thinks aggro-control can ever describe anything else, such as a deck with discard, lock parts, removal, etc. instead of permission, is a noob in need of a history lesson. In short, it may be an accurate claim according to some rubric but it comes across as somewhat pompous, doesn't really help people play Magic better
No, not a noob. Just someone who is hurting their game.
An easy way to show this, by way of example:
Playing in a tournament, you play against an opponent you don't know who has a new deck that is apparently good. Your friend played against her earlier in the tournament and tells you that your opponent is playing "a control deck". As you look at your opening hand, you decide to mulligan it because it can't win a long game and is too packed with creature elim, but has no pressure of any kind. You find out as the game begins, though, that they are actually playing a beatdown deck and your hand would have been great.
The thing is, operationally, the closest to the opposite of a Midrange deck (like Rock, for example) that you can get is Aggro-Control (like U/G Madness). It won't matter if you are using the wrong terminology if the only people using it are using the same wrong terminology. But, they aren't. Mike Flores, Pat Chapin, Richard Feldman, Zac Hill, and others all use the term properly. If you get sloppy with something like this, you are robbing yourself of access to not only valuable work that might be written, but also to understanding work that is already out there. All the time, it becomes valuable to look to the past when you are trying to solve the future. Misunderstanding something so fundamentally can force you to have to reinvent the wheel. Part of the reason that articles/terms/ideas from the past are important is that we don't have to keep reinventing and reinventing the wheel.
Deck names can matter for purposes of sharing information rapidly ("Lauerpotence" or "SS" or "Manaless Ichorid" all communicate 60 to 75 cards to someone in the know). Ultimately, though, the sphere of these names is fairly small, and variance from "canonized" versions of these lists is a real possibility in a tournament. On the other hand, mistakes on categorizing the Strategic Archetype are much more fundamental and can really cause you to lose games.
It's not a history lesson. It's actively building up your understanding of strategy in the increasingly competitive world of a very complex game.
- Adrian Sullivan
