A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, part 25: What if role assignment doesn't matter?

21 May, 2025

Faeries was the dominant deck in Standard from the release of Eventide through to the release of Shards of Alara; one of the most dominant Standard decks ever.

It's impossible to talk about the history of aggro-control as a Magic deck archetype without talking about Faeries. But also: faeries has made it impossible to talk about the the history of aggro-control as a Magic deck archetype.

What, exactly, is aggro-control?

In the last chapter, I described the emerging midrange deck archetype. These decks are beatdown decks in the sense that they want to win by attacking with creatures, but they're not like a conventional aggro or beatdown deck in the sense that they're not trying to present the most efficient threats possible. Instead, they follow a 'disrupt then deploy' play pattern: spend the first turns of the game accelerating mana or disrupting the opponent's plan, then dominate the midgame with three- four- and five-mana plays that generate on-board card advantage.

Like midrange decks, aggro-control decks play a mix of disruption and threats; like midrange decks, they tend to play a controlling role against aggro and an aggro role against control.

The difference, then, lies in approach and deck construction. An archetypal midrange deck focuses on powerful value-generating cards at the 3- and 4- mana slot, which hope to put enough pressure on control while going 'over the top' of aggro. The name of the game is card quality and, especially, value.

Aggro-control decks, by contrast, tend to be much leaner; they're made up of efficient aggression backed up by efficient disruption, and they especially prize cards that can be either or both.

It's more a question of philosophy and how you optimally play a deck than what's in it. A midrange deck is explicitly an in-betweener, a jack of all trades that attempts to generate a lot of excess value in hopes that this makes up for not having the most focused gameplan. An aggro-control deck does have a focused game plan; it controls the game to drive it towards the same winning game states, over and over again.

A card like Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is an archetypal midrange card; it generates card flow, mana, and a body all in one package. Creating value in all sorts of different directions makes it good in almost any game state.

A card like Delver of Secrets is an archetypal aggro-control card; it's only good in a very specific subset of game states; specifically, it's good when your opponent is on the back foot reacting to an oversized 1-mana flyer. But the decks that play that card are engineered to create those game states very consistently.

An ancient truism (originating with Mike Flores' classic article Who's the Beatdown) is that 'misassignment of role equals game loss'. That is, you need to know whether you're the attacker or defender in a given matchup or in a given moment.

But a feature of aggro-control decks – or at least really good ones – is that they bend the game to their whims; they can be seemingly on the back foot, playing a controlling game – and then, suddenly, at instant speed, they turn the tables and become the aggressor.

In the context of Standard, aggro-control decks have only sometimes been good. Most often, the aggro-control archetype takes the form of 'tempo decks'; ie, decks that plan to play an early threat and then use soft disruption like bounce or 'soft counters' (eg, Mana Leak) to waste the opponent's turns until they win.

These decks often lack the tools to fully commit to a control plan; they can't really win in the late game, and they don't pivot as fluidly between the aggro and control plans. Because their disruption is generally lower quality, they can be left spinning their wheels if they don't actually have the pressure to back that up.

However, a couple iterations of aggro-control in Standard have had such a dominant power level that they warp the way the archetype is discussed. Sometimes, the term 'aggro-control' might be reserved for those powerful decks, with other similar decks referred to as 'tempo' or 'disruptive aggro' instead. Sometimes the term 'hybrid control' is used. Sometimes they're treated as sui generis events. Faeries is one such deck.

What sets those two decks apart isn't just the extreme power level of their early threats, but the way those threats operate. They aren't just clocks that progress the game for the aggro-control player; they're powerful engines that take over the game completely. They generate value, card advantage, and board position all in one.

Typically, aggro-control decks struggle against decks with a lot of creature removal; playing an early oversized threat only does so much for you if your opponent has more kill spells than you have counters. But the very best aggro-control decks get around this equation by playing threats that are difficult or impossible to answer one-for-one with a creature removal spell.

For Faeries, that card was Bitterblossom.

A Bitter Pill

Bitterblossom is a messed-up Magic card. To emphasize the place it occupies in the competitive Magic imagination, when the Modern format was created (just a few short years down the line in 2011), Bitterblossom was on the initial format banlist, even though it was never banned in Standard.¹

The thing that makes Bitterblossom so powerful is that it lets the Faeries player make all the decisions. Consider these two cards, both clear homages to Bitterblossom, that were printed in later sets.

Both of those cards drew Bitterblossom comparisons when they were printed into Standard. They both add 1 power to the board, every turn, for 1 life. And yet neither card has had a similar impact. It's true that the power level of Standard is higher now, but there's more to it. Both of those cards are missing something critical that made Bitterblossom such a force.

Bitterblossom tokens can block, and they enter play as discrete 1/1s. Both of these factors are necessary; they give the Bitterblossom player total board control. Try to race a Bitterblossom and your opponent can block exactly enough to win the race. Playing defense is virtually impossible against a board that goes wide in the air. Bitterblossom isn't an ultimate trump against all creature decks, but it puts the Faeries player so far ahead that a little bit of disruption is enough.

The loss of life may seem like a drawback against aggro, but it's not enough of a drawback. Consider that if you make a faerie every turn and use it to chump-block a 2/2, that's basically the same as gaining one life every turn. In reality, because the tokens can join together or with other creatures to block, Bitterblossom quickly creates board states that are extremely unfavorable to attack into. Meanwhile you're just getting killed in the air by attacking faeries. Even if you have a flying blocker, your opponent is gradually building up inevitability as they put more and more tokens into play.

But Bitterblossom doesn't just dominate against creature strategies; against control, it acts as a very powerful threat. It's cheap, so it gets in under counterspells. It's not a creature, so it dodges most conventional removal.

Bitterblossom's position in the Lorwyn-era metagame is kind of an ironic twist; this was the debut of planeswalkers. In a way, Bitterblossom is a lot like a planeswalker: it's a permanent that sits in play, generating value turn after turn. But it's so much more powerful than any planeswalker of this era. It's so far outside the realm of other cards in that era in general.

Nowadays, Standard is a lot more used to cheap cards that can generate a constant stream of value.

But that wasn't the case in 2008. Bitterblossom is far ahead of the curve for its era. But, like the more recent examples above, it also benefits from a very powerful shell of cards that work perfectly with it.

A note about unnecessarily confusing terminology

Originally, the word 'tribal' was used in a Magic context to mean mechanics or mechanical themes that care about creature types. Legion block was the original 'tribal block', with cards that cared about goblins, zombies, and so on.

Lorwyn block introduced the Tribal (capital T) card type to the rules. Tribal as a card type doesn't do anything on its own, but it allows noncreature cards to have creature types. As such, the original printing of Bitterblossom has the type line "Tribal Enchantment – Faerie"; for the purposes of all cards that care about Faeries, Bitterblossom itself is a Faerie when it's in play or anywhere else.

However, years later around 2022/2023, WotC came to the conclusion that their use of the word 'tribal' in this sense was inappropriate. So they changed their internal terminology, and while they were at it, they opted to use different words to mean the mechanical theme and the card type.

In current Magic terminology, 'typal' refers to 'creature type matters' as a general mechanical theme. The card type within the rules was officially renamed last year to 'Kindred'.

In this article, I'll be referring to 'typal' and 'kindred', because if nothing else the split between the two concepts in terminology is useful; but printed cards with the kindred card type say 'tribal'.

60 cards, 25 faeries

This is not the winning list from Pro Tour Hollywood, one of the more Faeries-dominated events of this era. But it's Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa's list, and I've opted to include it be cause he specifically wrote a very detailed writeup of his experience playing it at that tournament.

'Faeries' really is the only name for this deck. Out of the 60 maindeck cards, 25 are faeries. This includes every actual creature, the six creature lands, and the four copies of Bitterblossom. Notably, Bitterblossom makes faeries, but it also is a faerie thanks to the Kindred type.

There are so, so many things about this deck that make it powerful in ways that future decks would emulate, but the full package rarely comes together as well as it does here. First: almost every card in this deck is either an instant or has flash. The deck never really has to tap out except to play its turn-2 Bitterblossom.

This property is incredibly valuable to an aggro-control deck. You want to play counterspells because they're one of the best forms of disruption. But counterspells have a major drawback: If you keep your mana open to play a counterspell and your opponent does nothing – or worse, does something that you can't counter – your mana is wasted.

For an actual control deck, this is somewhat fine; doing nothing is what you want to do, after all. You can just keep making your land drops, keep drawing cards, keep up counters. But an aggro-control deck is much more invested in actually spending its mana. It wants to play its answers but it also wants to deploy its threats, because it doesn't play enough answers to actually sit on them forever. Doing too much nothing will lead to getting overwhelmed later.

But if all your threats are either Bitterblossom or creatures with flash, your mana is never wasted. Opponents are forced to play things into the counterspells; if you don't, they'll just Vendilion Clique you at the end of turn, disrupting you and adding 3 power to the board.

This deck is so powerful because so many of its cards double up on roles. Bitterblossom is both a powerful threat and a powerful control tool, but so are most of the creatures here. This is where the typal mechanics really come into play. Spellstutter Sprite is very nearly the deck's best counterspell, by virtue of how well it interacts with Bitterblossom – counting both the tokens and the enchantment itself. You can even tap a Mutavault to activate itself to have an extra faerie on the board, if need be.

One of the few non-Faerie cards here is Ancestral Vision, which is probably as important to the deck as Bitterblossom itself. Powerful blue card draw spells have existed throughout Magic's history, but few of them are as powerful in aggro-control as Ancestral Vision. Here, it leads to the deck's most disgusting draw: turn 1 suspend Ancestral, turn 2 Bitterblossom.

At the point you've let your opponent untap with a Bitterblossom and a suspended Vision, what exactly are you supposed to do? Their odds of having a counter in hand are pretty high. Normally, there are two ways of playing around counterspells.

You can wait – wasting the opponent's mana, making your land drops, and moving the game towards a state where you can overwhelm their counters by casting multiple spells in a turn. Or you can cast your spells into the counterspells, hoping to run them out of counters so you can resolve something later. Crudely, it comes down to whether you think you can pressure the permission deck's cards, or their mana. Knowing when to do either is a major nuance of playing Magic at a high level.

But the Faeries deck punishes both strategies. Like all aggro-control decks, it's backing up the permission with pressure; you can't do nothing. You'll just die to the Bitterblossom, nevermind their flash creatures in hand. So you play into the counterspells, right? They still get ahead on board because eight of their counterspells are creatures or tempo plays; and then Ancestral Vision comes off suspend and they draw three cards without having to spend any real mana doing it.

Bitterblossom creates the faeries deck in that it's the glue that incentivizes players to build this specific creature base, with Scion of Oona and Mistbind Clique as major threats. But Ancestral Vision makes this a dominant deck by giving it a potent draw spell that does fit very naturally into an aggro-control strategy.

So you can't race, you can't control it, and you can't out-value it. How, then, do you beat Faeries? Many players came to the conclusion that you just don't. As Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa wrote in his tournament report after Pro Tour Hollywood in 2008:

As soon as Shadowmoor was released, I started building Standard decks and playing Magic. It was clear the deck to beat was Faeries, so everything I built I tested against Faeries first. And I couldn’t beat it. Ever.

I tried aggro decks. I tried control decks. Most of my decks were geared towards beating faeries — they’d have multiple Crovaxes, Pacts of Negation, Cloudthreshers. The only deck I found that had a good game versus Faeries was Merfolk, but that wasn’t even very good after sideboarding, and it’s just worse than Faeries versus mostly everything else (that was before the seven-removal version came out, by the way).

And yet – Faeries wasn't unbeatable. It didn't win Pro Tour Hollywood; and while it did win Worlds, it had significant competition in the top 8. Part of Faeries' mystique is its actual tournament results, but part of it was just the sense of utter powerlessness that the deck instilled. It didn't have a clear weakness like a classical aggro or control deck. There wasn't an obvious way to attack it in the metagame.

When the deck had its most powerful opening hands, it was extremely easy to feel like the game was over on turn 2 – but you still had to go through the motions of trying to cast spells only to get them countered, of untapping only to see the dagger – a Mistbind Clique, a Cryptic Command tapping your board – drawn off your opponent's Ancestral Vision.

In 2012, four years and several Standard formats after Pro Tour Hollywood, Paulo wrote:

The way I see it, there are far less aggro-control decks than any other kind. In fact, in recent memory, I recall three decks that I would call “aggro-control” – Faeries, Caw-Blade and Delver.

Paulo then goes on to explain that while those decks are rare, it's still worth learning how to play them – because when aggro-control is good, it is the best deck you can possibly play.

I don't know that I agree with Paulo's assessment; I think that in truth, aggro-control is a fair bit more common than that, but those three decks represent particularly strong iterations that kind of broke out of the limitations of the archetype.

Aggro-control is a hybrid archetype, and so it needs cards that are true hybrids – threats that also disrupt. Truly great aggro-control decks cheat the normal math of deckbuilding with cards that count as more than one thing. Spellstutter Sprite is both a creature and a counterspell. Mutavault is both a land and a creature. And Bitterblossom is everything – a threat, disruption, and a faerie.

Next time

Faeries' dominance has been exaggerated over time; not everyone in this era of Magic was sleeving up 4 Scion of Oona and 4 Mistbind Clique every tournament. Next time, I'll talk about Faeries' competitors.

#Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame #Magic: the Gathering