Back in MY day (playing magic as a child) the term "midrange deck" didn't exist; it was generally called tempo or aggro/control (as in a little of both) and was a very rare deck type that only could exist under very particular circumstances. If terminology changed, that'd be one thing, but I see tempo still in use to describe a distinct kind of deck, and I'm curious what differentiates it, and why this new term now describes a lot more decks in the average meta?
From what I can tell:
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Tempo is very fragile. Aggro starts going on turn 1, but tempo tries to impede the opponent for the first few turns, gain card advantage, and then quickly finish the game. The "tempo" name is meaningful because if you aren't exactly on the beat, you're either too slow or will run out of resources too quickly, so you have a small window in which you're ahead and you must win in that time period.
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Midrange also spends its early game disrupting and removing threats, but it keeps on going as the game goes on. A traditional or more pure control deck wants to fundamentally lock down the game in way that is unrecoverable, but a midrange deck will play more and more powerful cards starting at the midpoint of the game and building from there until the opponent runs out of answers.
Specifically for Magic, my theory is that midrange has become a distinct category because threat cards that exist on the board and actually do things (rather than shutting down everything, like pure control) simply did not exist in early magic and have snowballed in strength and prevalence in recent years. Playing aggro/control used to be fragile because the threats were not very good and did not scale well into the end game. While there still seem to be occasional 'true' tempo decks hanging out, they're rare. Back in the day they were rare because good creatures that could win in the mid to late game simply did not exist, now they are rare because they are common and strong enough to carry a player well into the late game and so most decks don't need to walk that precarious line.
There's a meaningful distinction between hybrid decks that focus on aggro and those that focus on control, but to me it also looks like the terminology changing actually represents a big shift in redesigning the core gameplay to make cards that look big, flashy, and exciting into cards that actually are big, flashy, and exciting.
I don't really have much to add here unless anyone disagrees on this, but when I think about other competitive games (namely fighting games, which are always on my mind) there's a similar way in which some of the archetypes that were defining in one era of design don't really function the same way in another.
So 'midrange' has been used historically to mean lots and lots of things and many players will definitely just lump anything that's not clearly aggro, combo, or control into the 'midrange' category (including tempo and aggro-control decks). It's also the most nebulous category, inherently, because midrange decks are usually 'goodstuff' decks that are just playing the best most efficient cards in the format without a lot of regard for specific synergies or optimizing a particular phase of the game, so what they look like will vary significantly over time.
But the three non-combo archetypes more prevalent in Magic are usually optimizing for different things, and this is what I mean when I say 'midrange':
- Aggro optimizes for speed; it's built to deploy all its resources as fast as possible and then win. A good example of this is that mono-red aggro in Standard right now doesn't play the best mono-red card in the format, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, because that card is just too slow to actually win the game.
- Control optimizes for staying power; it wants to trade efficiently with the opponent's threats and then dominate the late game. The goal of control is to either exhaust or blank the opponent's resources until it can completely take over the game.
- Midrange optimizes for card quality. It just wants to do the absolute best thing it can be doing at every point of the curve, and the curve is usually defined by being a little bigger than aggro so it can go over the top of aggro.
Midrange has definitely gotten more and more prevalent in Standard over the years due to the printing of more and more individually very powerful cards, and especially the printing of value cards that generate lots and lots of on-board card advantage or drastically swing games. Cards like Bloodbraid Elf, Siege Rhino, Questing Beast, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, and so on.
Another factor in the rise of midrange has been that Standard has had better mana bases over the years; in the early days, after original duals rotated out, often you wouldn't even have painlands in Standard and the mana fixing would be very bad. This meant that decks couldn't efficiently combine all the best cards from two or three colors. Nowadays, WotC basically ensures that three-color mana bases are viable in Standard; at times, extremely viable. This means that decks have a broader card pool to build with, which leads to more 'goodstuff' decks emerging. Right now, one of the top decks in standard is playing both Corpse Appraiser (a card that costs UBR) and Invoke Despair (a card that costs 1BBBB).
However, I'd say that this has not happened, mostly, at the expense of tempo; if any archetype has vanished from Standard, that would be combo. Tempo has always been a sometimes thing in the Standard metagame. I think players tend to overestimate how prevalent tempo was in early Magic because Legacy, specifically, has always had a strong tempo component (going back to the Nimble Mongoose decks), and it's easy to assume that Legacy is representative of early Magic. But tempo decks have emerged only occasionally. There is, in fact, currently a tempo deck in Standard that's quite viable.
'Tempo' is another nebulous category in that it really means three styles of decks:
- Decks that play a cheap, hyperefficient threat early on and then plan to time walk the opponent into submission. This is the classic form of tempo as seen in Nimble Mongoose and Delver of Secrets decks.
- Decks that play disruption for the first few turns of the game and then turn the corner extremely quickly and end the game with a hyperefficient threat. This is decks like Murktide Regent in Modern, or the current mono-blue tempo Standard deck built around Haughty Djinn.
- Decks that play threats that are, themselves, disruptive, and so they continuously deploy threats while time walking the opponent to death. This is decks like the blue-white variant of Spirits in Pioneer, which has access to lots of disruptive threats: Mausoleum Wanderer as an on-board counterspell, Rattlechains as a 2/1 flier that also blanks a removal spell, and of course Spell Queller as a very potent time walk effect.
The common thread here is that tempo decks plan to win by blanking the opponent's turns until their threats can get the job done, whereas a midrange deck can trust that its threats are in themselves good enough and a control deck wants to win by actually exhausting the opponent's resources.
Remand is a classic tempo card; all that Remand gets you is a mana and tempo advantage, it doesn't deal with the opponent's card in a permanent way, and so you can only put Remand in your deck if you plan on winning quickly. But also true aggro decks can't play Remand because it's not, in itself, a threat.
Aggro says, "I played out all my cards and you're still holding four of yours, are you dead yet?". Midrange says, "My cards are on average just better than yours." Tempo says, "My turn mattered (I attacked with creatures, got to deploy another threat, etc) and yours didn't."
Aggro-control, meanwhile, is the rarest archetype; aggro-control decks aren't really supposed to exist, and when they have existed, they've usually been too good and resulted in bans. An aggro-control deck is a tempo deck whose disruptive elements are both efficient enough to be tempo plays and permanent enough to enable it to play a pure control role if it doesn't draw into its threats or if those threats get answered. But at the same time, its threats are resilient or powerful enough that it can pressure passive opponents and play an aggro role.
The classic example of a true aggro-control is the Lorwyn-era Faeries deck. Bitterblossom was a card that specifically dominated both against aggro and against control, and that deck was able to back it up with numerous card advantage and board advantage plays. It also had access to Thoughtseize to specifically pick out the few cards that could actually disrupt its strategy.
Faeries led to the printing of cards like Bloodbraid Elf, which was meant to combat it. Bloodbraid Elf in turn led to a new bogeyman in standard (the ur-midrange deck known as Jund), which WotC responded to by printing Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Jace then led to Caw-Blade, one of the most disgusting aggro-control decks of all time, which led to Standard bans and a resetting of Standard power level.
