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.
