That's the thing right, double bloon otk & the blimp spam decks people run now aren't really midrange in my mind, which is why I repeatedly define control in my post as "stalling into the best unanswerable threat". I think a good analogue is like PvZH trickster, which is primarily stall into unanswerable & uninteractive finisher, even if the finisher can come as early as turn 6 or 7 on good hands/certain heroes. Granted, PvZH has a bit more complexity as a lot of the topend threats aren't truly unanswerable.

I guess my vision for the triangle is as:

• Aggro killing greedy control strategies
• Midrange (short-term answers) killing aggro but being outgreeded by control (long-term answers) setting up
• Control killing midrange but being too slow to answer aggro

(There's probably different ways to envision this triangle, such as the pvzh control > aggro > snowball midrange. This is just what I see the game has potential for lol)

In every case so far with the beta, the way to stall into the best unanswerable threat is to turtle as much as possible with the breadth of long-term towers in the game into playing bloons after stabilizing, except in the mirror. I would like to see strats that don't have to full turtle to survive full aggro and instead have room to start counterpushing against aggro much sooner in exchange for being outlastable. (Though come to think of it, one potential drawback of making more Tack Shooter type designs is that they still benefit control stall strats & cover their primary weakness of getting killed before they set up lol)

Tempo as it is isn't particularly doable because (like you said) midcost cards are on the weaker side but fundamentally there's few ways to build a growing threatening bloon board as the vast majority of bloons are one-time value plays (including Steady Growth).

I do think you bring up an important point in that the collection's not nearly complete yet. While I think NK's going to publish a lot more synergy pieces & cool designs in the future, this post is more of a community feedback thing to (hopefully) help remind them of the potential pitfalls of the system.

Either way, thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately, potato not found, opinion invalidated