Ever since the Dark Ages of Magic, there have been decks whose sole purpose in life was to throw twenty damage at their opponent as quickly as possible. Although the term"tempo" was not used in those days, and the concept of building a deck designed to use all available mana every turn didn't come about until Sligh was born years later, the underlying approach has always been the same. Completely oblivious to ideas such as card advantage, the ability to counter others' spells, or even watching their own life totals, these decks focus on one thing: making other people dead before they even have the chance to play their game.

Before I get started, go back and reread"Who's the Beatdown?", an excellent old school Mike Flores article. It only mildly overlaps the concepts I'm going to talk about here, but it's drives home several important points, especially concerning the aggro on aggro matchups. Plus, when compared some of the whoppers that have been at the front of the StarCityGames.com front page as of late, it's a quick and easy read.

Okay, finished? Good. Let's start at the very beginning and link the concepts of an aggressive deck to the concepts of tempo. Then, as a corollary, we can make certain decisions on how to build an aggro deck in any environment based off those rules.

The definition of tempo (as I see it) is obtaining a better board position than your opponent for equal or less mana, ignoring all other factors. If you play and I draw, you do nothing your first turn, I play a Jackal Pup my first turn, then you play a Goblin Masons your second turn, I have tempo advantage. You have spent your second turn matching the position that I have obtained during my first, which is control of a 2/1 creature. Thus, during my turn, I have the options of laying another creature, removing your creature, playing a combat trick, or anything else my devious mind can think of. It is of little consequence that my creature has a damage drawback at this point, since we are both at twenty life. (Note the drawbacks to creatures are not always insignificant; if the drawback will threaten board control, i.e. if I have just played Goblin Cadets instead of Jackal Pup, my board position is substantially worse).

If I do nothing during my turn, I have effectively given up my tempo advantage, as I have done nothing to improve my board position, and I have left two mana unused. It comes as no surprise then, that most tempo oriented decks want to play low casting cost cards, thus never risking giving up tempo in the early game. Since creatures are the easiest way to build board control and obtain early tempo, let's go one logical step further and say that tempo oriented decks want to play with cheap creatures that are as big as possible for their casting costs, or they want to play with the most efficient attackers available.

Now let's talk about the definition of an aggressive (aggro) deck. An aggressive deck plays tempo oriented cards in an attempt to keep their board position superior to their opponent's, thus pressing their advantage in the early game and hopefully killing their opponent before the opponent's superior cards can equalize the board position. Simply put, a fast deck plays with lower cost, lower quality cards than their opponent. The faster deck wants to end the game quickly before the slower deck can get their more powerful cards online. This can happen by either reducing the opponent's life total to zero, thus winning the game outright, or using lower casting cost cards to disrupt the slower deck's higher casting cost cards.

Thus, we can say the tempo in a format is defined not only by the most aggressive cards in a format, but also the speed of the control cards in the format. This was especially evident in the evolution of Onslaught Block Constructed, where control decks dominated the format due to the plethora of cheap board sweepers until the introduction of Goblin Warchief allowed the aggressive decks to again compete.

As the nature of the aggro deck is to be effective in the early game, it can also play cards to"extend" the early game, usually in the form of either one-sided or mutual resource destruction spells. Sligh decks have long taken advantage of cards such as Wasteland and Pillage to set back opponents' mana, so that the early game can go on as long as possible, thus pressing the advantage of the fast, cheap creatures. If I'm playing Sligh and my opponent is playing some control variant, a two-power creature on the first turn followed by a Wasteland on my opponent's land on the second has essentially given me an additional two damage as well as an extra mana to work with, assuming my opponent has no one mana spells that are playable.

Thus not only has it contributed to getting my opponent 10% closer to death for no loss of card advantage, it also gives me a potential extra tempo boost. Although not completely accurate, most would say that in this case Wasteland allows you to perform a"Time Walk," or gives you an extra turn to use your resources while your opponent is stranded with the same unplayable cards for his entire next turn. This is faulty in the sense that you don't really get an extra land drop, meaning that you would be able to further accelerate your tempo by having access to more mana, but as a bonus, if your opponent plays a land-light hand, your Wasteland may completely level his options.

Mana acceleration is another way to gain tempo. If you have more mana available to you in the early game than your opponent does, you can gain tempo advantage. Let's take the old staple Dark Ritual as an example. If I lay a Swamp and play a Carnophage, I have a good tempo boost right out the gates, but one easily negated by cheap removal. However, if I play a Dark Ritual during my first turn and play Carnophage followed by Skittering Skirge, my opponent is on a four turn clock. By playing a Llanowar Elf during the first turn, I've just allowed myself to gain tempo by playing a three mana creature or effect on the second turn instead of limiting myself to the two-drops in my hand. In this sense, you are cheating on the mana curve by not limiting yourself to the one land (and therefore one mana) per turn rule that binds most decks. If the mana creature can also attack for any significant amount of damage, so much the better.

So let's boil all the mumbo jumbo I've rattled off in the last two paragraphs to three clear, distinct rules for an aggressive deck:

1) The aggressive deck wants to play cheap, high powered creatures as quickly as possible.

2) The aggressive deck wants to neutralize opponents' cards that will stand in the way of keeping tempo on their side, slow them down with disruption, or accelerate their own mana curve.

3) The aggressive deck wants to play cards that provide a comparative advantage to control cards in the environment.

Note that only one of these three rules does not define the aggressive deck in terms of the decks that it will be facing. No deck exists within a vacuum, and while this rule may be more evident with decks that have many reactive cards, it is still a hard and fast rule for aggression. The aforementioned Goblin Cadets are a perfect example of this, as they are excellent creatures for a budget aggro deck in Type I, where most decks play few to no creatures, yet are almost unplayable in a more creature-packed Extended environment.

Let's look at some of the more successful aggro decks in the past, and see how and if these rules seem applicable to them:

Stompy - Toby Tamber - GP Kyoto 2000
4 Elvish Lyrist
4 Quirion Ranger
4 River Boa
4 Rogue Elephant
4 Skyshroud Elite
4 Vine Dryad
4 Wild Dogs
3 Bounty of the Hunt
4 Briar Shield
4 Land Grant
4 Rancor
3 Winter Orb
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
10 Forest

Popular decks in the environment: Necro-Donate, Sligh, Oath of Druids

Stompy is perhaps the epitome of Rule 1 in terms of aggression. Between Vine Dryads that effectively have Haste when cast during the end of your opponent's turn, and twelve creatures that have a power of two or greater that can be played on turn 1, creature effectiveness is maximized with Green. The focus of this particular breed of Stompy is to kill your opponent as fast as possible to the exclusion of anything they might play. Add a big check mark to rule 1 here.

Due to the extreme focus of this deck on getting the greatest power of creatures out as early as possible, there are only three Rule 2 cards here, and they are the Winter Orbs. This Stompy deck can do just about anything it needs to do for two mana, and will never need more than three mana in a turn, thus the Winter Orbs will undoubtedly disrupt the opponent more. Against Necro-Donate, this was especially important, as it confounds their ability to play both Illusions of Grandeur and Donate in the same turn, and makes it difficult to pay Illusions' cumulative upkeep costs. Against other aggro decks that sideboard in Cursed Scrolls, the activation of the Scrolls becomes unwieldy under an Orb as well. In reference to Flores' article, the Stompy deck will generally remain the aggro deck no matter what, and challenge the other deck to mass kill its superior creatures before they can win.

Stompy's Rule 3 approach is an unusual one for aggro decks. Whereas Sligh would tend to employ Haste creatures and creatures such as Viashino Sandstalker that return to hand every turn to combat Oath of Druids and removal, Stompy uses creature enhancing spells. Both Bounty of the Hunt and Briar Shield act more like direct damage to the opponent, since it has no way to recover from mass creature removal. Against direct damage mass removal, it's possible a defensive Bounty of the Hunt can also save your team, though this is rarely a consideration. The one metagame card that this deck includes is the Elvish Lyrists, which stops Necro-Donate from winning as long as it is active, and can occasionally destroy an Oath of Druids, from which of course there is very little escape for this deck.

Going to the other extreme, the Onslaught Block Goblin deck is an excellent example of how sometimes an aggro deck can be carried to success by a reliance on Rule 3. Here's a sample decklist:

Goblins - Matt Severa - GP Detroit 2003
3 Goblin Burrows
21 Mountain
4 Clickslither
4 Gempalm Incinerator
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Siege-Gang Commander
4 Skirk Prospector
4 Sparksmith
4 Shock
4 Goblin Sledder

Popular decks in the format: Mono-White Control, W/R Astral Slide and Control, Form of the Dragon

With a good portion of creatures in the three or more mana category, Onslaught Block Goblins is not yer daddy's aggro deck. However, the deck was able to get off to surprisingly fast starts at times. Due to the mana producing abilities of Skirk Prospector and the ability of Warchief to"produce" a mana for every Goblin you want to play that turn, not to mention granting haste to your hordes of Red men, goldfishing on the fourth turn and occasionally the third was a very real possibility. Let's see how the three rules I've deviled up apply to this deck.

Rule 1 is applicable, but only due to Skirk Prospector and Goblin Warchief. To anyone who has ever played this deck and has not seen one of these two cards in their opening hand, this becomes very apparent. Goblin Piledriver is a creature whose power can become very high when attacking, and Goblin Sledder is cheap, but Siege-Gang Commander and Clickslither break the mold of typical weenies, and are way better when powered out on turn 3 or 4 by the two mana producers in the deck. So the means by which this deck achieves effectiveness is actually through mana acceleration, and not in the typical Sligh manner, which consists of powering cheap creatures through the Red zone and into your opponents face through burn. Near the end of the block season, some decks were actually taking the Shocks out of the deck for maindeck Sulfuric Vortexes as anti-control measures. This was partially a metagame choice to combat all the Silver Knights out there, but partly just the natural progression of the deck evolution, as aggro-control decks do tend to have problems with control, if the game goes too long.

Rule 2 is present, but only in terms of creature control, which is consistent with other mono-Red decks. Sparksmith, Gempalm Incinerator, and Shock are twelve of thirty-six action cards, totaling about 1/3 of the deck. While this is a little low for a typical mono-Red deck, considering the creature oriented nature of the build, it seems about right.

Rule 3 accounts for a great majority of the deck design as it appears above. Two notable and excellently themed cards were excluded from the final version of the Goblin deck due to metagame considerations: Blistering Firecat and Goblin Goon. Silver Knight, and to a greater extent the existence of Mono White Control decks, destroyed the effectiveness of both of them. Because Silver Knight could effectively block the 6/6 monster in the early game, Decree of Justice could render it impotent in the late game, Goblin Goon was never as good as it could have been. Clickslither, with its ability to get huge and trample right over the hapless (but inspired) Knight, won out as the damage forcing card of choice.

Likewise, in a format where it was very easy for White to gain back six life for 2W at instant speed, not to mention Knights staying back at every turn, Firecat was never really in the running either. It also didn't help that neither creature could attack a player with Form of the Dragon down, nor were they anything gamebreaking against any other decks in the format.

Now that I've hopefully set some ground rules for aggressive decks, let's see how we can apply these theories to the new fledgling format that will be upon us before we know it: Mirrodin Block Constructed.

Since there are no two power creatures for one mana in this format, let's focus on some of the creatures that can either get us mana by the second turn, or are two or more power and can be played by the second turn (I make this differential because of Affinity and the monkey wrench that little ability throws into the gears).

Tel-Jilad Chosen, Alpha Myr, all of the mana producing Myr, Vedalken Engineer, Chrome Mox, Slith Firewalker (because he will often be unopposed and become a 2/2 at the end of your second turn), Frogmite, Drooling Ogre, Viridian Zealot, Leonin Shikari, Leonin Skyhunter, Auriok Glaivemaster (due to Lightning Greaves or Bonesplitter), Auriok Steelshaper (due to Bonesplitter), any one-drop with Bonesplitter on it.

Wow, for a complete list of beatdown creatures through two sets, that's a very small list. Note immediately how we can see trends, however. Tel-Jilad Chosen and Viridian Zealot work together (sort of), all of the White weenies go together and happen to get better with the same equipment (Greaves and Bonesplitter) and Frogmite obviously combos with the Affinity theme. Most mana acceleration cards are set at a minimum of two mana (including the Talismans, which I have not listed), so while we cannot discount them entirely in this theoretical tempo deck, we'll have to take them with a grain of salt. Chrome Mox is thus significantly faster than any other mana acceleration in the format, and we should do a double take and heavily consider this in any aggro deck that can support the loss of card advantage.

This rather broad range of cards, as discussed above, includes discard, resource denial, and permanent removal. In this case, we can double up on the last two, as any card that will destroy artifacts should be able to destroy land, as we can assume at least Affinity (and possibly several other decks), will include artifact lands in their decklists. And the card pool without any artifacts at all is so shallow as not to be considered feasible, so any artifact destruction can be considered conditional removal, if not a Desert Twister at times.

Since (obviously) the cards should be as cheap as possible, I will only include those cards whose mana costs are three or less, and if they are permanents, whose costs to then destroy an artifact are three or less.

Echoing Decay, Oxidize, Viridian Zealot, Echoing Ruin, Goblin Archaeologist, Echoing Truth (I will count bounce... again with a grain of salt), Purge, Blinkmoth Well (possible Rishadan Port effect), Viridian Shaman, Fractured Loyalty, Domineer, Tempest of Light, March of the Machines*, Necrogen Mists, Annul, Electrostatic Bolt, Deconstruct, Shatter, Shrapnel Blast, Terror, Turn to Dust, Wail of the Nim, Detonate, Molten Rain, Wrench Mind, Pyrite Spellbomb, Aether Spellbomb, Pulse of the Dross, Barbed Lightning, Dismantle.

Of these cards, five are Green, eleven are Red, five are Black, five are Blue, two are White, and one is colorless. Just by cross referencing this list against the first list of cards, we can make certain observations regarding early game potential among color combinations.

Green is most efficient at destroying artifacts with the least loss of tempo. It has good creatures that incidentally destroy artifacts on their way in, or on their way out.

Red's creatures are less efficient than they've been in some time, with the only exceptional one needing double Red to cast early. It ranks in second for artifact removal. The direct damage spells are fairly efficient, doing four and five damage for one and two mana respectively.

White weenie decks, if viable, will need Greaves and/or Bonesplitter as support cards. The creatures are exceptionally big and/or evasive for their mana costs. No way to destroy artifacts outside of Purge/Altar's Light makes it possibly want to pair with Green or Red.

Blue has four two-drop cards that produce mana: the two Blue Talismans, Vedalken Engineer, and Silver Myr, making it the best mana acceleration color. Its weenies are non-existent, so it should look for some way to power out big artifacts that might be creatures. Unfortunately, this bleeds over into the realm of aggro/combo or just plain combo, so this will have to be addressed in another article.

Black's discard is awful, expensive, or uncontrollable. Its weenies and mana acceleration are no better than any other color's, and its removal is less effective in a format with so many artifact creatures. If this color is viable, it's viable as a splash color or a control color only.

This is obviously benchmarked against the best control cards in the format. Let's have a look at these cards, and to make things easier, we're going to group them by similar traits, i.e. Removal, Mass Removal, Problem Permanents, Permission:

Removal: Echoing Decay, Oxidize, Viridian Zealot, Echoing Ruin, Goblin Archaeologist, Purge, Viridian Shaman, Domineer, Electrostatic Bolt, Deconstruct, Shatter, Shrapnel Blast, Terror, Turn to Dust, Detonate, Pyrite Spellbomb, Aether Spellbomb, Barbed Lightning, Dismantle, Consume Spirit, Screams from Within

What this tells us: Removal is heavily favored against artifacts (again, obviously). Between the Red and Blue Spellbombs, Bolt, Echoing Decay, and Terror, there are lots of cheap, splashable removal spells that will kill non-artifact weenie creatures as well. Screams from Within is remarkable against a field of one toughness creatures. Against this particular field of removal, it seems White probably has the best chance of having creatures survive, especially if Greaves hits the board.

Mass Removal: Oblivion Stone, Solar Tide, Flamebreak, Wail of the Nim, Soulscour, Furnace Dragon

What this tells us: Besides Oblivion Stone, these cards are either unspectacular or unsplashable. Until the opponent reaches eight mana, Oblivion Stone takes two turns to be able to do its thing, and is completely vulnerable to artifact removal until that time. Thus we can conclude that pure control decks will likely be no more than two colors in order to play the global sweepers they want, and in all likelihood they will be one main color and a splash. One important last note about Oblivion Stone is that it will clear all nonland permanents away, not just creatures. Thus the decks that play it will probably rely less on Talisman/Myr acceleration, and if anything, will play Extraplanar Lens or Cloudpost as their means of acceleration, as their land effectiveness is increased by each of those cards.

Soulscour interacts in an interesting way with Extraplanar Lens in that, while your Plains go away (and all you will play is Plains in that deck), the Lens remains out there, acting as a Mana Flare for your newly played lands. Furnace Dragon has a love/hate relationship with Artifacts, but to minimize your losses, it also comes into play best off a Lens. (Note to self: Get Lenses before block season while they're cheap).

Problem Permanents: Platinum Angel, Grid Monitor, Extraplanar Lens, Chalice of the Void, Culling Scales, Luminous Angel, Chittering Rats

What this tells us: Extraplanar Lens will allow mono-colored control decks to accelerate to high amounts of mana by the mid game. Chalice of the Void is control's weapon against a particular mana cost. Expect this to be set at two most of the time, as that seems to be a fairly key casting cost to most of the utility cards in the set. Grid Monitor and Platinum Angel, while artifacts (and thus theoretically easy to remove), do otherwise present problems for an aggro deck. These two cards, if played by control, seem like a pretty good reason to maindeck at least a few Purges in a white weenie deck. Chittering Rats is much akin to Phyrexian Rager, a perfect card for control as it gains card advantage by hopefully trading for a beatdown creature. Luminous Angel and Culling Scales are metagame choices and I'll leave it at that.

Permission: Assert Authority, Override, Annul, Last Word

What this tells us: Blue in inextricably tied to artifacts. Two of Blue's counterspells, one of its two hard counters, is dependant heavily on however many artifacts the Blue player controls. You will be able to slip low casting cost spells by Blue, especially if they are not enchantments or artifacts. In addition, a healthy amount of artifact removal in the sideboard will not only destroy Blue's resources, but if provided early enough, will also remove any counter power.

Based off all these conclusions, it appears that some version of mono-White with equipment will be a successful aggro deck in this environment. Depending on the success of Affinity and any potential Vedalken Engineer combo decks that surface, Green/Red is also an option. Black appears, much like Odyssey Block, to have a mono control deck just waiting to be explored. Red appears slightly geared towards control, although it remains to be seen just how effective its cards end up being.

Time will only tell if these conclusions are correct. Regardless, I hope this brainstorming session has yielded some sort of information regarding tempo-based decks, the theories behind them, and the ability to predict potentially successful ones to metagame against or at least playtest.

Signing off,
Tybuc

* My one exception to the rule, since this is a permanent answer to destroying all Artifact Lands, as well as making all your non-creature artifacts into creatures. Thus it is multifaceted and deserves inclusion, as obviously as Armageddon did in White Weenie decks.