Quote Originally Posted by Lemnear View Post
I guess there is much space for interpretation if he says that aggro can kill turn 5 and he don't want their assault killed by a sweeper turn 4 while the #1 spot removal hero's downfall costs 3 in a world of powercreep within the creature cardtype. They don't want the race to turn 4 anymore, fine. The Problem is that spot & conditional removal is so underpowered to fill the gap they are about to create. I'm hoping to be proven wrong soon and that the easy and obvious solution is not to play creature-trumps yourself. The fact that he was trying to directly link a resolved turn 4 sweeper to the automatic loss of the Aggro deck was plain hilarious.
Well consider the math that goes into dealing 20 by the time the control player lays that 4th land. If you're incredibly aggressive (talking Standard here; Legacy is full of stuff that lowers the fundamental turn significantly) you have to deal, on average, 5 per turn. This assumes you're on the play; on the draw, if we're strictly talking about getting the other player to 0 damages, that's 7 damage per turn (rounded up, because 6.6... is dumb).

I mean the turn 4 WoG is a much bigger stumbling block than it seems, because it pushes *both* players to play the long game, which control is suited for and aggro is typically not. The old adage about not over-extending into Wrath was always a double-edged sword; you're sacrificing board position for the ability to recover successfully from a wipe, but you're doing so to the detriment of your own plan, not to the advancement. I mean yes, we could talk about building against that expectation, but then we're talking about everyone building for the mid-to-long game because the short game is occupied entirely by decks the article doesn't even cover (combo, SnT/Reanimator-style decks, etc). That sucks. It sucks because without a legit, non-combo blitzkrieg strategy in the game there's nothing to keep everything from bowing to control's idea of tempo; every matchup is "the control deck either did, or didn't maintain tempo." Boooooo. That's astoundingly bland. (It's probably also a bit of hyperbole, but I'm trying to avoid the idea of changing all decklists to match a metagame because then the conversation just rabbit holes ad strawmanium, and that's useless.)