The Top 20 Most Popular Deck Archetypes in Magic: The Gathering’s Commander Format

As I’ve mentioned, keeping track of the meta is important for control decks so they can understand what they’re fighting against and make sure they’re using the best control cards available. Arena Tutor’s metagame explorer is great for research purposes! The tool compiles the best decks in the format so you can easily see what’s winning and find plenty of exciting new deck ideas.

Lands Matter

In general, Midrange decks have a little bit of everything from control and aggro but don’t have a lot in common with the synergy-based combo decks. Aggro-control decks depend on a combination of cheap, instant-speed interaction and threats that can get played around those spells. The typical weakness of a creature deck with a bunch of countermagic is that it conflicts with your mana. If you cast a creature spell on your turn, you can’t hold up mana for your counters.

Card Draw

This deck has lots in common with the Azorius control list we just looked at. There’s plenty of cheap interaction and planeswalkers for a long, grindy game, but it does a much better job than the control lists of playing to the board and asserting itself in the early turns. This is a great example of a midrange deck that leans towards the more controlling end of things.

They both share inevitability but in distinctly separate forms. Understanding how you’ll win informs how you want to control the game. For example, a control deck topped by Hullbreaker Horror might let a few smaller creatures, especially tokens, run around unchecked since you can control the board with the Horror. If instead you’re looking to ultimate a Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and continually tuck it to win the game, you’ll want absolute control. The biggest distinction between control and other archetypes is that it wants to control the tempo and win the late game.

We can see the control influence with cards like Lightning Bolt and Force of Will, and we’ve got some of the best aggressive creatures ever printed, like Dragon’s Rage Channeler and Delver of Secrets. Nevertheless, Combo is an excellent deck archetype for those who like to master a single skill. The weaknesses and strengths of this style are entirely based on what kind of combo it’s trying to pull off. You’ll have to learn about it based on which combo you go for. Many decks have smaller, combo-like interactions between their cards, which is better described as synergy. Queues are events that start immediately when enough players have joined.

In some formats, the best thing a control deck can do is lean into a more controlling midrange deck and use some early threats to help stabilize itself. You have the cards to play a turn-4 Supreme Verdict into a turn-5 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. Since you’ll tap out on those turns, you may want to use your Absorb on turn 3 to use your mana every turn since it’ll be a while until you can hold it up. This might not be true for a Make Disappear you can hold up with Teferi untapping lands.

Control Decks on MTG Arena

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A Magic Archetype is a recurring deck or strategy with many possible variations.[1] Archetypes are defined when they have been prevalent in several tournaments and have showed results repeatedly, Top 8 or higher. They should also be an idea that is playable in many formats, rather than just a pile of cards that wins. Traditionally, the three essential types of Magic decks are control, aggro and combo.[2][3] Each of these has many variants. The best way to beat a control deck, especially in the first game before sideboarding, is to take them out before they take control. Pressuring the board is simple; throw what you can at their life total. Aggressive decks tend to be very good against control because they can slip under the control deck’s defenses before the board can stabilize and finish things off with burn.

Each of these 4 categories would ideally occupy around 25% of a given metagame. In Hill’s definition, Aggro refers most specifically to the fastest creature decks built to punish slow starts, ponderous Control decks, and aggressive decks who’ve substituted out damage for disruption. Midrange decks in this definition are slower creature-based decks who trump the speed of fast aggro with better quality from their somewhat more expensive spells.

He likes his cards to be impressive, and he enjoys playing big creatures and big spells. The tools available to an archetype will change more between formats than the ideas of the deck. Combo decks are a bit of an exception to this rule because they’re often hyper-specific, but most of the decks on our spectrum play out similarly. This is part of why it’s so important to understand the basic deck archetypes.

Aggro decks are full of cheap creatures and spells and have a low land count that facilitates playing spells as quickly as possible, ensuring they have the critical mass of damage needed to take an opponent out. This name of this archetype is a misnomer, as there is rarely an “infinite” loop in Magic, such loops end in a tie. Instead, these decks are often made of a combos edh few combo pieces, that will guarantee either a win or the time to do so. In addition, these decks often include tutors, card draw, and enough removal to ensure that it will stay in the game long enough to combo off, and win. These decks tend to be slower, but when control elements are added, they can do very well. Examples are the Vintage Bomberman deck, and the Standard Reveillark Combo deck.

Aggro is the simplest of the deck archetypes, but it’s also the most reliable and consistent. Aggro aims to either overwhelm opponents with threats or deal consistent damage that opponents struggle to deal with profitably. Their methods of removing creatures or preventing damage should, ideally, be more expensive or unwieldy than the threats themselves.

Control decks play a lot of card advantage spells to ensure they are ahead of their opponent. Control is explicitly a late-game deck that intends to stretch out the game as long as possible. This is another vital piece of control decks, right after threats. This is another reason to look at playing multiple colors, if the mana supports it, of course. If all the good card draw is at sorcery speed like Ancestral Reminiscence, Night’s Whisper, and Sign in Blood, that makes countermagic a bit more awkward and could mean you want to lean towards a tap-out control build. You’ll find that control decks are often blue with another color or two.