Can this be moved to Tutorials or Elements Articles? took me ages to find for someone in chat, and it seems much better in one of those locations
I'm glad to see that this is still being appreciated! I might write another sometime.
Ah the world of deck semantics such a difficult area to truly get down as some decks can fit into multiple categories. Things like sanc rushes an area the particularly interests me are built like rushes but act with a decent matchup against other areas of the list but a weaker matchup against other areas, are they classed as a rush except they often have a decent matchup against rushes.
Sanctuary Rush is something I consider to be non-viable, both in terms of its deck classification and its actual prospects in competitive play. Perhaps it works in Arena, but that's a metagame confounded by asymmetric restrictions and suboptimal AI play. In unrestricted PvP, I have almost never seen Sanc Rush, and with good reason. For a deck with enough damage to be considered a rush, other cards such as Lightning and Basilisk Blood provide a much more efficient means of blocking damage. These cards can respectively kill and delay cards with a much higher attack than the 4 damage that Sanctuary heals back.
Of course, Sanctuary is still a decent card in Stalls, and that's because Stalls need some way of having more than 100 HP in order to survive the whole game. You could manage kill all of your opponent's creatures and weapons, but they'd probably manage to collectively get in 100 damage before going down.
I do think a given deck can fit into two different categories in two different metagames. Light Dragons, for instance, would be considered Bypass Offense against an Air deck (since Wings and Shockwave cannot easily stop them) but Direct Offense against an Entropy deck (since Antimatter can definitely stop them.) There's more nuance to the game than I can cover with just a table, but I think I've gotten pretty close.
Also what would control decks class as I'm guessing domin, but control decks are weird in a way, as a control deck can function in two different ways as a stall like say the deck, or more like a domin like pandebonium depending on the path you choose.
Discussions many years ago over what constitutes a control deck are largely what led me to formulate deck type theory in the first place. Some players considered control to be about creature control, while others considered control to be more about denial from Discord and EQ. These were completely different archetypes - one to defeat rushes, the other to defeat stalls! So, I've purposely avoided calling decks Controls because there's just no clear definition on what it really means.
