This is an article written by one of our crew, Martin Alvito, quite a while back. Sorry it took me so long to get it up on the site.

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This is an update and revision of another M:tG inspired article I wrote several months ago. The title is borrowed from an article making the basic theoretical point written by Michael Flores, a UPenn grad student in mathematics at the time.

The point of his article was simple, and extremely clever. He noted that virtually all decks in M:tG had cards which were flexible, known as utility cards, which could be used to attack the enemy or disrupt enemy attacks. The point of the article was that in any 1v1 competitive situation, one player sitting at the table would inherently have a more aggressive deck than the other. This deck was the beatdown deck, and the player with the slower-developing deck was the control deck. The beatdown needed to use its utility to attack in order to win, and the control needed to use its utility to defend in order to win. Misidentifying oneself in the match would inevitably lead to bad play decisions and losses.

The basic theory applies well to any strategy game - the player with the strategy which is faster to develop must use disruptive elements to impede the adversary's efforts to defend against attack. Why? In any balanced strategy game a swift strategy will involve exhausting resources. As a result, the attacker is left open to crushing counterattack if the assault fails. Similarly, the player with the slower strategy must disrupt the enemy's attack in order to live long enough to deliver the counterattack.

This is easiest to do when there are archetypes involved (you're always control against IWAY - any "kill the warriors" or "kill the trappers" strat is a control strategy designed to stop them from disrupting or killing you) and most difficult to do in a near-mirror match when you have roughly the same build as the other side. Typically in a mirror match in GW, you want to mimic how good teams have previously beaten you in your approach to beating the other side. With spikes it's easy - disrupt the spike more effectively than they disrupt yours. With balanced builds, it gets a bit more interesting.

Interestingly, in GW few builds actually involve exhausting energy resources in order to attack. Generally, if you run out of energy, you die. The resource in question in Guild Wars is usually time. Slow-developing strategies require two things in short supply: consistently excellent monk play (properly disrupting the attack) and good decision-making from the utility slots in the build (shutting down the most dangerous skills of the other side in order to make the monks' job simpler). Generally, the slower developing team will beat the more aggressive team if it gets good play, proper positioning, and correct disruptive decision-making. Why? Pressure deals out more damage than spikes over the long haul, and the spike's monks are going to eventually run out of energy if the match goes long. The classic counter for the spike is to run and rebuild energy once the monks start to wear down, then begin anew. It occurs to me that hex stack teams probably need to carry a ranged snare (Grasping Earth, Crippling Shot, etc.) in order to deal with that problem.

As a consequence of the above dynamics, there are a lot more good spike teams (inherently an aggressive strat) than good balanced/pressure teams out there. Top players complain about spikes not "requiring skill"; the same is true of players that complain about IWAY. To a certain extent they are right; however, all of us have noted that certain spike teams and IWAYs are better than others. The reason is usually that those teams use their disruptive elements (monks, hex/condition removal, etc.) more effectively than their inferior cousins. The archetypes limit the decision-making the player has to make on the fly, increasing the chances of making good decisions when using the utility skills in the build. Interestingly, what is implied is that what a spike really wants is NOT to clear the hexes - what it wants is to spike consistently. As such, a properly built spike (if such a thing is possible) would be capable of utterly turning the other side's infuser off, regardless of positioning.

Proprietary builds offer a huge advantage in the beatdown/control continuum - they increase the opponents chances of misallocating themselves on the continuum markedly. It's unlikely that you'll beat a top team in GvG with an archetype, no matter how good you are with it, because your adversary will already know what you are running and therefore will counter it properly from the first minute of the match (and will have brought the right counters, as well). If your adversary doesn't know how beatdown or control you are, they can interrupt/Diversion the wrong things early on, and this can be turned into an early-match advantage and a morale boost. Good subsequent play is needed to convert that into a win, but it's a solid first step.

Finally, it's on the team's leader to observe early and give direction. There should be clear plans going into the match for what to do with disruptive elements against common archetypes and known builds. Against an unknown opponent, it's on the team leader to figure out whether the team is the beatdown or the control and what to jump on. The safest call is to go control at the beginning of the match and then switch to beatdown if that is what is indicated in the matchup - a hex stack isn't going to pressure you out in the first ten seconds. Once you realize that hex stack is what you're facing, go beatdown and attempt to take some of them out before you have to retreat for energy. If you can get a couple of the damage sources down, your monks should be able to manage, and the flag stand/tournament match is yours.