Hello, fellow RoyalRoaders, and welcome to Deck of Dogs! This fiction is meant mostly for people familiar with card games and their terminology, but, in case you are not familiar with them, a few concepts will be explained here. If you don’t think you will need this index/glossary/whatever, feel free to skip to chapter 1.

First of all, let’s explain a few terms that we will be using often. These are Aggro, Midrange, Control and Combo. When we use this words, we talk about playstyles, we are putting hundreds of different decks that play similarly in neat boxes that allow us to better define their general weaknesses and strengths.

Aggro: The deck is fast, filled with smaller units. They have an explosive start, but the flame that burns twice as bright… This kind of decks generally need to close out the game in those early turns to have a chance at winning and are bad at recovering a lost board.

Control: the other end of the spectrum, control decks aim to survive long enough to play fantastical or flashy win conditions, or just make the opponent surrender… or kill them slowly while not letting him or her play the game. Control is, therefore, often hated because of how the decks drag on and on the games while, basically, not letting their opponent enjoy the game. These decks often require extensive metagame knowledge to be played optimally.

Midrange: These decks aim to play units on curve. They have a healthy mix of early and late game threats and control tools. This, in turn, makes them slower than agro decks, but still faster than control. While (depending on which card game we talk about. Sometimes, the power scheme is inverted) aggro can often kill Control before it stabilizes and takes ownership of the game state, midrange may have problems doing so. Midrange is worse than control in late game, and worse than aggro in the early game, but if it can win the board, it has very powerful tools to dominate that game. In resume, they try to play control when they face aggro, and they try to play agro when they face control.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Combo: These decks generally are a variant of control decks, whose win condition allows them to assemble a winning game state in one turn thanks to powerful interactions between the cards of their own deck. Depending on the nature of said win condition, they can be a nightmare for slow control decks to beat.

Which archetype is stronger and if there are or not other archetypes depends heavily on the nature of the game and the particular moment in that game’s life, but this is a basic definition of how they work on most (real) collectible card games.

Now, with that done, let’s define some terms, not in alphabetical order because I will be probably adding more as I realize they need to be explained:

Cantrip/floater: The card replaces itself somehow after being played, improving your game state without giving up Card Advantage.

Tutoring /searching: Drawing a particular card from the deck, or cards from a limited pool. Basically, a tutor is a card that draws you another card with reduced randomness, compared to drawing from the top of your deck.

Mill: Sending cards from a deck to the discard pile (In DoD, the Rainbow bridge).

Resources: Cards and the things you need to play them. Basically, cards are resources because you need to have them in hand to be played, and they generally consume some sort of mana or once a turn thing to be played (In MTG, you turn lands horizontally to generate mana for the turn. In Yu-Gi-Oh! the non-card resources are the Normal Summon, at 1 per turn, and life points)

Dust: this term comes from Hearthstone, where you can exchange cards you don’t want for arcane dust to craft cards you do want. The term used is game dependent, and generally makes reference to the resource obtained from breaking cards down. Most online card games have a similar mechanic.

Booster: Card pack.

Goldfishing/playing against a goldfish: Decks that achieve nothing in the board nor seem to be disrupting their opponent plays.

Tempo: play style that aims to use all or most of his resources turn to turn in the most effective way to develop a board. It’s a “substyle” of midrange.

Burn: A deck that aims to win by doing most or all of its damage with effects and spells, instead of attacks.

And I think that’s all for now, feel free to suggest any addition to the list, I am open to add them for the sake of clarity.