Someone on Reddit posted a very neat table I hadn’t seen before.

Clock Redundancy Proactivity Deck Type
Fast Low Threats Combo
Fast High Threats Aggro
Fast Low Answers Stompy
Fast High Answers Tempo
Slow Low Threats Ramp
Slow High Threats Midrange
Slow Low Answers Prison
Slow High Answers Control

I think this “Archetype Cube” is a really helpful framework for thinking about decks.

Some people describe burn as a combo deck where the combo is resolve 7 spells. Well that is exactly what this “cube” predicts; as you make a combo deck more and more redundant it becomes an aggro deck. And as you make an aggro deck more and more explosive it drifts towards combo (like madness).

Combo and ramp aren’t often thought as doing the same things, but S&S and 12post are both trying to put a big dude into play. Just one chooses to do it fast and one chooses to do it in a more inevitable way.

The author thought that the stompy row doesn’t actually exist, but I think it is a good discription of red prison’s plan. Rather than trying to be inevitable after playing a hate piece like lands, it just tries to end the game as fast as possible. Or you can think of it as a low redundancy delver; instead of disrupting with generic cards like daze your are disrupting with specific cards like blood moon. Or the reactive version of combo: instead of assembling enabler plus wincon your are trying to assemble relevant hate piece plus threat.

If you combine this with the “metagame clock” you can describe shifts really clearly in my opinion. Red prison dropping moons for more threats is it shifting from stompy towards aggro (to be better vs control at the cost of its combo mu)

The “bigger delver” thing you see is tempo shifting up the edge to midrange to beat the mirror.

It also lets you describe decks that are usually difficult to classify. Goblins is threat dense, generally fine to go slow, and has a high variance in cards (aether vial and lackey are completely different from muxus and ringleader). A lot of people would describe goblins as midrange or control, but this classification would be as combo-ramp. And on reflection, the play style is closer to amulet Titan than Jund or Standstill.

Thoughts? disagreements?