How to build a multi-colour aggro deck to be more effective against control

Question

I'm building a vintage deck for my friend, out of our combined pool of cards, which will have 3+ colours (atm it's three). She's a Vorthos/Timmy. She often builds her own deck out of the biggest/prettiest cards, but suffers/is frustrated when she plays against control style. I'm making it Red/Green/Blue, with as many elves/merfolk/faeries as possible for flavour reasons.

As a general question, how do you stop a deck with 3+ colours from being unfocused? That is to say, focus on a successful tactic (engines, brute force, lots of little creatures etc) whilst spanning the three colours. You need to juggle 3 types of land, which can end some games too early through having to muligan/suffer the consequences. How can an aggro style, also be anti-control?

I'm sorry if this question is too localized/general. I'm really struggling to get my request into a SX style, but I do want a list of correct practices in making this deck, without a long list of good cards; chances are I won't have them, and can't afford to buy any more.

Answer 1

You've stated that your card pool is limited, and your ability to buy more cards is even more so. This restricts specific card advice significantly, so I'm going to give some general advice on the process of tuning the deck.

Running a 3 color deck is difficult, as you've already noticed. Without some specialized cards which are in many cases quite expensive to obtain, it is hard to be competitive. Here's what I would do:

1. Ensure the deck is 60 cards, you can go a little higher if you need to. In no case should you be anywhere near 80+ cards though! The more cards you add, the more likely you are to get some really weird mana fluctuations. It's also difficult to sufficiently randomize a larger deck.
2. Make sure you have enough land! For a 3 color deck, I'd want probably 24 land and a couple mana producers. Upwards of 26 land if you have no other mana producers (artifacts/birds of paradise) to include.
3. Proxy some dual-lands. Take 4 swamps and write "Red/Green" on them, take 4 plains and write "green/blue". They are land that can generate either color as necessary (but only 1 mana a turn from each land). When you are playing with friends, I think a little proxying is fine, but be sure to let them know about it before hand. Encourage them to try out a few cool old cards as well! Just because you didn't spend $2000 in 1996 on cards doesn't mean you shouldn't experience those cards every so often.
4. As you play the new tuned/proxied deck try to figure out which colors are most important. Shift things around to try to favor 2 colors, focus the third color on being the "finishing" color. This will allow you to decrease the mana supply for that third color and will make your deck run smoother. An example would be just including a few mountains and a couple fireballs. In other words, try to move your color mix from 40%/30%/30% to 40%/40%/20% or even 50%/40$/10%

Answer 2

On the subject of managing "focus" (i.e. color distribution), what you'll really need to worry about is lands. With three colors, mana fixing can become incredibly important. You'll want to play dual and tri-color lands and maybe some mana-generating creatures (what's a multicolor green deck without Birds of Paradise?) or "mana rocks" (mana-generating artifacts), to lessen your changes of getting mana screwed. On that same note, I'd recommend a lot of the hybrid-color spells from the Ravnica and Shadowmoor blocks - they're fairly versatile and see quite a bit of play (e.g. Kitchen Finks, probably not for your deck but just as an example).

One of the better resources I've found for mana fixing is intended for Commander, but is great for deckbuilding of any kind (link is noncommercial, and I am not affiliated in any way): McGee's Commander App.

Secondarily, there's the issue of "how can aggro be anti-control." The answer to that question is and always has been speed. You're racing to see what happens first - you winning, or the control deck hitting its stride (which usually means a loss for you). There's always certain cards that are going to help (e.g. Autumn's Veil - in fact, see Strategies against counterspell decks for specifically counter hate, though it's specific to Standard) - try to find the right balance of speed to evasion.

I'd look around for what other RUG aggro decks are doing - you'll see some commonly-run cards (Tarmogoyf, Vendilion Clique, Spellstutter Sprite, etc.). It really depends on how competitive (read: expensive) you want this to be. I'd also recommend tossing in Kird Ape, Trygon Predator, and/or Bloodbraid Elf.

Lastly, running blue usually means running counters. In Vintage this means you've got the fun stuff (Force of Will, actual Counterspell, etc.) - it's also an answer to control, but be careful not to accidentally build a slower deck that ends up in the midrange (between aggro and control).

Answer 3

If you're using the Red-Green-Blue "wedge" and you're playing "casual," you might find some use in one of the Commander decks produced by Wizards of the Coast: the "Mirror Mastery" deck, in particular. It includes a number of tools to help smooth out the mana in a deck with three colors — multi-lands and artifact mana sources among them.

Answer 4

Pat and Ian have covered the three-color angle pretty thoroughly, so this answer focuses on aggro-vs.-control.

Aggro-vs.-control matchups tend to revolve around board presence. I look at it this way:

The aggro deck is trying to put a lot of threats on the board, and the control deck is trying to remove them or build his own board. Every turn that the aggro player has a stronger board presence brings her closer to victory, because she gets additional incremental value from each of her threats. For example, any turn that it's on the field and your opponent doesn't have a blocker, Goblin Guide gets to do 2 more damage.

At the beginning of the game, the control player's immediate priority is to "stabilize", usually by getting to a sweeper like Day of Judgment. We often talk about the "card advantage" build into a many-for-one spell like that, but the momentum swing it provides is usually more decisive. I think your priority as the aggro deck isn't so much avoiding card disadvantage as it is maintaining pressure, through a mix of two strategies:

• "Be fast": play an all-in game where you dump your hand out as fast as possible and try to get your opponent to 0 life (or 10 poison) before he has a chance to play many cards. During deckbuilding, this means prioritizing low-curve, cost-efficient threats like Goblin Guide and Wild Nacatl, and packing in "guaranteed" damage like Lightning Bolt to get in that final blow after you've lost control of the field.

• "Be tough": develop a respectable board position to create pressure, then maintain it despite removal and disruption; you're still playing aggressively, because your opponent's "endgame" probably trumps yours, but the idea here is to deny your opponent the ability to stabilize early and easily. During deckbuilding, this involve persistent threats like Doomed Traveler, Chandra's Phoenix, and Thrun the Last Troll, or alternate lines of attack like Shrine of Burning Rage.

Note that these aren't so much competing gameplans as two facets of the same goal: getting your opponent to 0 life quickly and consistently. A good aggro player will tailor her current approach to the strengths and weaknesses of her opponent's deck, so it's valuable to build decks that can play both "fast" and "tough" (and are, ideally, at least a bit of both at the same time).

If your deck is running blue, you also have recourse to countermagic -- which you'll often see used in tournament "Bant" (green-white-blue) and "RUG" (red-blue-green) list. This is the basis for the "aggro-control" style of deck, which uses control cards to protect its board position. Forcing your opponent to wait until he has enough mana to play Day of Judgment with counterspell backup is often backbreaking against straight-up control decks. Generally, though, avoid running specific answer cards unless they are also threats, so that they don't just languish uselessly in your hand while you wait for the right moment; e.g. Qasali Pridemage is a better aggro choice than Disenchant because a 2/2 exalted is always useful even if you don't have an enchantment or artifact that you need to blow up.