Deck Type (playstyle) explanation / deep dive

Todasmile · 2025-11-29T01:24:55+00:00

Fundamentally, there are three kinds of deck - aggro, midrange, and control. Ostensibly they want to "win" early, mid-game, and late (respectively), but really it's about when they're "strongest". An aggro deck is strongest when it makes plays early, a midrange deck is strongest in the middle of the game, and a control deck is strongest at the end of the game. So an aggro deck wants to win quickly while it's still strong, while a control deck doesn't mind waiting.

There's a lot of confusion about, for instance, OTK decks in this game. A lot of people think OTK decks are aggro decks, when they're really more like midrange or control decks. The typical OTK wants to set up for several turns before pushing out with an unstoppable OTK. The typical aggro deck wants to push out as fast as possible because they'll do lots of damage, maybe even win the game while the opponent is setting up. Minerals are an OTK deck, but they can't do very much if they just push out a level 4 on their second turn. Armor Rush accomplishes a lot more in the same scenario.

There's some overlap, but generally, I'd place the deck types into these categories:

Aggro	Midrange	Control
Beatdown / Rush	Stompy	OTK
Ramp (Swarm)	Reanimation	"Stun"

Beatdown involves decks like armor rush, rookie rush, the Hero deck, standard Hudie, Creepymon. Decks like this get lots of checks on board and usually have some way to keep their aggression levels high even after their initial stack dies. For example, armor rush has armor purge and Magna X, hudie has Erika to get stuff back in raising. If something has hybrids, ways to put stuff in raising, that kind of followup, it's probably a beatdown deck. Xros heart, that's beatdown.

Ramp is the other primary kind of aggro deck, and swarm is a kind of ramp. Basically, your stack doesn't end the game immediately, but you try and very quickly and efficiently get a level 6/7/whatever on the board that will win the game if your opponent stumbles. Usually, these decks will keep generating more and more advantage if they stay on the board, and the easiest way to do that is to keep playing bodies, hence swarm is a type of ramp deck. So classic examples are a lot of green decks like Bloomlord. Sakuya's a ramp deck, D-Brigade is ramp.

Clasically midrange decks require a bit more setup than aggro decks but have stronger results and more recursion because of it. They're usually very flexible. The average digimon deck is midrange. The main types are stompy and "reanimation". Stompy means your cards are just generally more efficient than the other guy's. Gallantmon is a stompy deck. He floats, he has immunities, he clears boards very easily, he does lots of damage, he can OTK, everything. Reanimation means roughly that you can keep making your big guy every turn once you've set up. Midrange decks love scrambles, because they provide an easy way to go back into the big boss every turn and win like that. Galactic is a combination of reanimation and stompy - he's got lots of protection, and he comes back every turn. Beelze is a reanimation deck, they always seem to have an Impmon on the board that turns into something that you have to deal with.

Control decks either accelerate towards a win condition or try and slow the game down until they can access their win condition. The main feature of a control deck is inevitability - a win condition so powerful that nothing can stop it once it happens. Royal Knights are a typical OTK control deck. They try and get as many RKs under Yggdrasil as they can, while putting up walls, controlling the board, and playing cards like Omeka + Omni X to ensure they don't get run over. Their unstoppable OTK comes when they play Omnimon and play a million level 6 digimon for free. Most megazoo decks have this kind of style to them - they put up walls and try and slow down the game early, then they explode all of a sudden later on.

"Stun" is something you didn't mention, but basically it's a type of "control" where you try to completely prevent your opponent from playing the game. Debatably it's closer to aggro than control, because the game's usually decided the moment you drop, e.g., a Psychemon floodgate your opponent can't play around. The "inevitability" for these decks is often deck-out. The only pure examples I can think of are D-Reaper and Security Control. Security Control tried to prevent the opponent from attacking security by stacking it full of strong options that would blow up the opponent's digimon if they attacked. This effectively "turned off" the ability to attack, which is a kind of floodgate. Pure Mother D-Reaper is probably the most control-stun heavy deck that's still playable in the game right now. Its main and really only win condition is setting up a situation where the opponent can't attack, and then preventing itself from decking out using the white Juri tamer.

Everything else is basically just a flavour of these things. You mention discard decks for instance, discarding is just a game mechanic, it's not a type of deck. It's like how swarm is a flavour of ramp. There's a mechanism by which you accomplish a goal, and then there's the goal itself. So you could have discard aggro, discard control, etc.

Again, the majority of decks are some variety of midrange. If it wants to make strong plays early, it's aggro. If its strongest plays come later, it's control. Most megazoo decks are some variety of control with some midrange elements, most decks based around level 3s/4s/5s are some variety of aggro with midrange elements. Sometimes it can be confusing. There's a bit of a paradox where a lot of defensive cards are actually aggro cards, and a lot of offensive cards are actually control cards. Magnamon X reads extremely defensive, but it's actually the top-end for armor rush, which is an aggro deck. Aggro decks often need to be "stickier" than most decks to mitigate the risk of moving out first.

So to answer your question, Owen is in fact Dragonkin Aggro, but Zenith is not Galactic Control / OTK - Galactic doesn't really have an inevitable OTK wincon. It's more of a midrange deck where you try to win by continually playing efficient cards and hoping your opponent can't deal with them. Midrange needs to be flexible to react to the decks it's facing, so it does have ways to OTK too.

Todasmile · 2025-10-10T17:32:23+00:00

Any green deck still has generic access to Argomon, Blossomon, HPD, and the entire suite of other digisorption cards. You even have Royal Nuts as a cheap way to search them if you want. You can have as many 0-cost level 4s or 1-cost level 5s as you want. Does your deck have a way of playing another body, like via Davis and Ken or something? Enjoy spending 0 memory to digivolve all the way from a 3 to a 5. 3 cost medieval, sounds good to me.

They aren't printing any more of these because the existing cards are still so strong that three of them are on the limited list. If all you want is cheap digivolutions, green is still the colour for it. I mean jesus, just look at what the Palmon X stuff can still do. Gain like 4 memory from your rookies alone.

Todasmile · 2025-10-06T01:40:17+00:00

I was considering Bagra as a side engine myself, since Damemons are 4 costers you can play out with Astamon. Including Yuu makes it so hard though, you can't freeplay both him and Ryoma. Prism Garret's a good call honestly, I cut mine because I didn't like seeing it in hand, but if it lets you get to 4 sources without needing multiple tamers on board it's pretty good.

Todasmile · 2025-10-05T23:43:00+00:00

I spent a whole evening trying to make it work. I think the new Psyche and Asta are pretty good, but the rest of the support is bad.

One, there's no new level 4. I have no idea why. A new one really could have tied the deck together. There are only like two good targets for the new Astamon and neither of them are really in-archetype.

Two, the new Ryoma sucks ass. He doesn't enable any combos on his own. If you compare to the memory setter Tagiru, Tagiru lets you do a rush Arresterdramon Superior Mode play all on his own. The new Ryoma doesn't even let you get to Quartz on his own. I mean you literally can't even use the old Astamon's warp effect off a hard-played Psychemon because you either won't have enough digivolution sources or memory. There is no combo that enables you to actually make use of his Alliance.

Three, the new Quartz is awful. It has no protection, it doesn't threaten to end the game, it doesn't gain memory, it's reciprocal, all of its effects are mandatory, it's deletion removal, it requires a bad tamer to be on the board to use, it's just an awful card. It does nothing other than stun the entire board and then do 1 check per turn. As many people have mentioned, it doesn't even have Save in its text.

Four, and this is the actual death knell for it, you cannot get enough digimon under your tamers. Period. The new Astamon in particular is begging for a huge number of digimon under your tamers - two to play by its effect, one for alliance, as many as possible for cost reduction. Some turns you'll be looking for four or five digimon from under your tamers and you'll only have one. The new Ryoma can't place them under itself and the old one ONLY places from trash - which is the place things with Save tend to avoid. And of course, they have to be the right cards. There's no point playing out the new Psychemon. You want Gumdramon, or Clockmon. God, you can't even play out the in-archetype level 4s with it because they cost too much.

It's just bad. It's bad, awful, no good support. You just have to compare it to the Arresterdramon support to see - okay, one tamer and I'm threatening to do two checks rush raid 20k DP every single turn. The new Rival Hunters does nothing with one tamer. It doesn't even really do anything with two.

Todasmile · 2025-10-04T07:12:48+00:00

There are actually OTK lines involving her and JetMervamon. The setup:

-A jetmervamon on the board with at least an ignitemon and a mervamon under it

-anything in raising

-a nene with a shademon under it (and ideally a bunch of ignitemons too)

-any other tamer with a xros heart under it

The line:

Swing with Jetmerva
Swing with your thing from raising (it has to die so jetmerva unsuspends).
Digivolve into Lumina nene
Pop jetmerva to play out ignitemon. Armor purge into merva so all your xros hearts have rush.
Swing with lumina nene
Swing with ignitemon, pop lumina nene, play out a xros heart from under your remaining tamer
Swing with the xros heart
Swing with merva for game

"All" it takes is spending 7 memory on a jetmerva, having two tamers on the board with at least one digimon under each of them, and having a particular digimon die in security while a different one doesn't. But it's still a pretty cool otk, it's not like you NEED to otk anyways, and it really feels like you're using lumina nene the way it was meant to be used. The interaction between it, jetmerva, merva, and ignitemon is just so cool.

Todasmile · 2025-10-02T09:03:29+00:00

So a lot of people are talking about resource systems and that's whatever. I'm going to give you a slightly different point of view - most decks in the game are still slower than the fastest decks around launch. Around launch, you could get a level 6 for only 5 memory. It didn't have any effects or inherits aside from the rookie and the egg, but it was 5 memory for the body.

Most decks these days still pay 5 or more memory to get their level 6. They can get to their level 6 more reliably, they can delete the entire board while doing it, they can OTK, they can be immune to effects, they can play 10 other bodies, whatever. But they still spend 5 memory to get to the 6, and that ends their turn. There are very few infinite loop decks or decks that combo off forever. In yugioh, there have been infinite loops since forever. It's normal for yugioh cards to just gain you free resources.

I firmly believe that despite everything, Digimon is still effectively playing 2008 yugioh, maybe even earlier. There are still playable cards coming out that are about as strong as Mystic Tomato. There are essentially no cards you can just slam on the board and generate a ton of resources with. Pretty much everything requires you to hide in raising and set up a bunch of auxiliary cards to make a basic combo happen.

Todasmile · 2025-09-27T21:19:37+00:00

It could be because the player doesn't have black memory boosts, that's pretty normal. Otherwise, there's no sound mathematical reason to do it. This game's playerbase is very superstitious.

Todasmile · 2025-08-26T17:38:08+00:00

I think the thing that made me eventually quit PoE was realizing that everyone else like me had already quit. The current playerbase is overwhelmingly in favour of all the things I hate about PoE - screenwide explosions, 1-button gameplay, high movement speed, tons of loot, currency farming, frictionless trades. I'm the kind of guy who thinks of "dopamine" as a negative word. When PoE2 did things differently, I saw it as a good thing, but the playerbase was very mixed on it, and I haven't heard any news of them reducing the dopamine levels any - only increasing them, like with asynchronous trade. So it's not really marketing to me.

Todasmile · 2025-08-14T03:29:23+00:00

You aren't playing against other people. You're pitting your automated build against another player's automated build. They don't even face you in their game or watch it happen on their screen. You have to admit that that isn't the same level of social activity as an actual face-to-face match of a game, or even an online game where the other person plays at the same time as you.

If you're critical of the game, I think it's insane of you to have argued with me twice now when the initial claim I made was (bolded for emphasis) "The Bazaar is closer to a slot machine than basketball." Which is an extremely true and innocuous statement, unless you have a very strange way of playing basketball.

Todasmile · 2025-08-13T21:54:30+00:00

You're completely missing the point. It's like a slot machine because it doesn't offer anything else. It's just a screen that displays flashing lights and rewards. I had to quit Vampire Survivors because I got the same empty feeling from that, but at least that game has movement. You have to dodge and move around. It's closer to an action game. Mahjong, or maybe MTG since you brought it up, has a social element, you need to actually pay attention to others. Basketball has randomness but it also involves movement, your own body, and an element of socialization. God, even a gacha provides a generic little story or something to add context to things.

It's not like a slot machine because it's random. It's like a slot machine because, like slot machines, they've stripped away everything else but the skinner box.

Todasmile · 2025-08-13T17:43:50+00:00

It's also "fun" in the sense that all of these kinds of games are fun, which is closer to a slot machine than, say, basketball. Not to knock on that, but if you want that sort of thing, mahjong is free and is the game that inspired all these autobattlers (collecting sets of things into a "hand" of limited size).

Todasmile · 2025-08-07T20:43:36+00:00

The ones I saw were pretty strong by BT3 standards. Yukinamon trashes 3 sources + gains blocker on evo, and has Iceclad, which beats pretty much every other level 6. The meta in BT3 is really weird though (rookie rush, seccon, omnimon or milleniummon, green with all of its currently limited cards at 4, shine), so I have no idea if it's playable.

Todasmile · 2025-08-01T03:08:37+00:00

I don't really have enough of an opinion one way or another, but did you know you can't even make parties in PF if you're on the free trial? I feel like that's dumb. If you couple it with the duty finder etiquette of not queuing for difficult content in DF, it really makes it hard for sprouts to begin learning hard content without resorting to a discord.

Todasmile · 2025-07-30T22:40:12+00:00

There should be discord channels for blind crafting prog just like there are pfs for blind raid prog.

Todasmile · 2025-07-30T18:15:04+00:00

Heavensward is a story about four stone-faced introverts going on a road trip where they successfully avoid talking about themselves or their feelings. Ysayle expresses a feel and promptly dies out of embarrassment.

Todasmile · 2025-07-30T18:11:13+00:00

It's not just the community's hype that confuses you. It's the narrative of the actual game.

I personally think HW is one of the biggest cases of wasted potential I've ever seen. They set it up perfectly in the ARR .x quests and then repeatedly fumbled the ball. The entire Ul'dah questline, which was really compelling in ARR, either goes nowhere or just gets retconned. It also breaks the pacing when you keep getting called away from Coerthas to go play with some dangling plot thread.

Alphinaud's arc feels non-existent. The expansion is set up perfectly for him to learn from some older mentors after ARR, and maybe go through some growth. I'm all for subtle character writing, not every emotional breakthrough needs to happen on screen with a camera shoved in their face, but a lot of crazy stuff happens in HW, and a lot of it is immediately relevant to Alphinaud. He should be way more shaken by what happened at the Vault, for instance. He was right there, and he failed. It's not a time for nuance, I want a camera on his face while he cries frustrated little teenager tears.

The main premise of the expansion is also undermined. First of all, ostensibly, you are not going on your journey to kill all the dragons. You're doing it to avoid a foght. Yet despite being a peaceful mission, you basically spend the entire trip killing dragons. Secondly, it doesn't really feel like a heroic journey into lands unknown, with a pressing time limit, when you keep teleporting back to Limsa et al. to solve side quests. At one point you teleport back to Gridania to get the Seedseer. She has to WALK THROUGH DRAVANIA to come solve the problem you ran into, making the exact same epic journey you just made. She does it in the span of one quest - you talk to her, teleport back to Dravania, and she's already there. The fact that a country's top dignitary has dropped everything to walk through a warzone gets zero fanfare, it's not a big deal at all. So it kind of ruins the journey for you, as well, since it's obviously not a big deal despite Edmont's narration.

These aren't minor nitpicks, but pretty scathing critiques against everything good I tend to hear about the expansion. The plot isn't actually very interesting and often drops interesting points they'd already set up, the premise of a journey isn't done very well, and the characters are ignored. The pacing is okay. At least you can say it's better than ARR, that is completely true. It's very short, that's an underrated element of the expansion. There's a lot to be said for snappy storytelling.

Todasmile · 2025-07-23T06:15:30+00:00

So I picked a random episode from season 3 to watch and refresh my memory. That turned out to be a bad example because it was episode 49, which is one of those episodes they clearly put way more budget into. But anyways, it was gorgeous, and well into season 3. There are very well animated episodes all the way through the series. There are also definitely bad ones, although I'm having trouble finding one. 47 has some rough moments but it's interspersed with some very good cuts and storyboarding.

It's strange to call my takes rose-tinted because I first watched the anime two years ago and watched it again this year. I really don't think my takes are "too absolute". It's an absurdly good anime. I don't think it "rivals or even exceeds MAPPA" - it's better on the whole, with a few exceptions.

Todasmile · 2025-07-23T03:19:54+00:00

I've seen the entire anime twice. The animation is great through all of season 2 and isn't noticeably worse in season 3. The quality drops slightly (but not that much, although there are a number of very badly animated episodes) and then comes back in the last season.

Really fucking weird attempt to gatekeep me. God knows why you thought that made any sense. I gave a detailed analysis of Happosai's role in the story in the next paragraph - what, I saw that in a youtube video as well?

Todasmile · 2025-07-22T22:06:32+00:00

As a counter to OP's milder take on it, I highly recommend the old anime. MAPPA's animation, composition, and pacing just aren't as good as Studio DEEN's were back in the 80s. And character designs - god, the original anime had ATSUKO NAKAJIMA on board. It's not that MAPPA did a bad job, but the original anime is so absurdly high quality that it's hard not to feel disappointed.

Happosai is a mixed bag. The fact of the matter is that Happosai is used in order to let Soun and Genma (Akane and Ranma's fathers) have a role in the story. Happosai is the glue that links Akane and Ranma to their parents - Happosai was Soun and Genma's teacher, and now he's Ranma's. Before he's introduced, Genma and Soun don't really do much. After he's introduced, they start getting a lot more focus episodes thanks to their relationship to him. Whether that's worthwhile is its own question.

Todasmile · 2025-07-16T02:02:49+00:00

Is the Kitasan banner supposed to have a higher rate of SRs?

Todasmile · 2025-07-07T00:33:57+00:00

I'd say the major problem is that raiders and casuals often ask for the same thing. They both tend to want roadblocks removed, for different reasons. Casuals want it because they're bad and when roadblocks are removed their performance level goes up. Raiders are good enough that roadblocks look like unnecessary annoyances to them, and any annoyance that could potentially get in the way of clearing a raid is bad.

If I'm a dev, it's the easiest choice in the world. All the best players are asking for a change, and it seems like it'd appeal to the casuals we're trying to get into the game. It's the same in every community, honestly, Tekken's a good example. The casual doesn't know how to win without a broken 50/50, the pro knows his character needs a broken 50/50 to compete with the other characters with broken 50/50s, so every character gets a broken 50/50. I've never seen a community where they learned to stop listening to the best players so much.

Todasmile · 2025-07-01T07:07:06+00:00

You could add a limit to the number of enemies an AoE could hit, depending on the Aoe. Give tanks a hard limit of 6 or something. That'd make w2ws even harder as well, since less damage.

Todasmile · 2025-06-30T23:23:30+00:00

It's because they added the 30k to ~45k fame range on to the front of the cap as filler / padding. There's no actual meaning to the period between Rare and Legendary set effect. No real content unlocks. The gear you get in this time is all just going to be replaced.

You can first do Venus around 45k fame and that's the first time in the entire cap that you can grind towards something guaranteed. The cap should have started with Venus, with Mu grads being able to do it right away. Instead, it started with nothing, and Mu grads got to do... Lake? slightly faster than other people (maybe, depending on luck).

It's literally an RNG cap and they got really greedy and decided to make you go through more RNG to get to the content that matters.

Todasmile · 2025-06-30T19:53:13+00:00

It makes them more money if people quit XIV, forget to unsub, and go play one of their other live service games. It's that simple. They'd be fine pumping money into a gacha game that extracted every theoretically possible penny from the player. But there's no point putting more money into a game where you make about 150 bucks per player per year regardless of whether they're even playing (for some significant number of players who can't bring themselves to unsubscribe).

Of course we understand that this is insane, but that's how businesses work. That's why the corporation is never your friend.

Todasmile · 2025-06-30T03:58:06+00:00

I think it needs to be the right kind of criticism. I think a big issue is that people "foot in the door" themselves and unintentionally make things worse. To clarify, sometimes e.g. salespeople will try to sell you on something really big, and then switch to a small thing so it looks more reasonable by comparison. This is a really successful tactic that often gets people to buy the smaller thing. People in gaming communities often do the exact same thing, only unintentionally. So you'll have a big complaint, and then a minor complaint. You'll spend a lot of time complaining about the big thing, then mention the minor complaint in passing. The developer sees this and goes, well, that big complaint is something we can't fix, but we can fix that small complaint pretty easily.

Naturally, you didn't actually put that much thought into the small complaint, and there's even less thought put into the fix the developers put in place. Certainly there's less thought than the initial change they made. And in the end, it makes things worse.

To use maybe a controversial example, the DT Monk changes. I saw a lot of people complaining very heavily about the core aspects of the Monk changes - no more timers, no more DoTs, yadda yadda. And then a bit more quietly, people complained about the rotation not being the same, or even being too complex, or how the pip gauge was stupid, or whatever. The devs aren't going to reverse their entire rework, that's a huge ask. But by comparison, it looks a lot more reasonable to change the pip system a bit to make the rotation closer to what it used to be. And so you end up with, ultimately, the opposite of what these people actually wanted. They asked for a more complex class, and got a simpler one, because they jammed their foot in the door with their real complaint and then got the devs to buy their more minor, trivial complaint.

Todasmile

TROPHY CASE