Game Theory of Rush with Stall Decks: A Guide for the Aspiring PVPer

[theelkspeaks]

Game Theory of Rush with Stall Decks: A Guide for the Aspiring PVPer

Spoiler for Table of Contents:

Table of Contents
1 - Introduction/What is a "Rush with Stall"
2 - Constructing a Rush With Stall
3 - Playing a Rush With Stall
4 - Extra Sample Rush with Stall Decks (credit: PoLdeR)

Section 1 - Introduction: What is a "Rush with Stall" Deck?

Every aspiring PVP player should know at least the basics of the seven basic archetypes of decks, so that they can succeed with and against them! While each of these archetypes goes by several different names, I'm going to use the names PoLdeR used in his decklist, as they seem to be the most common names: Rush, Stall, OTK, Allaround, Denial, Rush with Stall, and Deckout.

The first three of these decktypes already have fairly extensive guides made, and I'll link them here for your convenience:
Rush - by Acsabi44 - Strategy of Rush Decks
Stall - by Acsabi44 - Strategy and Game Theory of Stall Decks
OTK - by Chapuz - OTK Deckbuilding Guide

Of the remaining 4 deck types, Deckout and Denial are essentially specialized versions of Stall decks, and while their means to an end might be different, a lot of the same general theory applies.  The final two archetypes are fairly similar, with only slight differences between Allaround Decks and Rush with Stall Decks, and the differences aren't particularly important to how Rush with Stall Decks play in practice.

The most important thing about Rush with Stall Decks is what I like to call the "doubled core" - a set of key cards in the deck for rushing, and a set of key cards in the deck for stalling.  Consider briefly another great Acsabi article, Who is the Beatdown?.  This article talks about a given match of Elements as a race between two decks.  One deck takes the role of the Beatdown, or the deck which is fast enough to win if the opponent does nothing to stop it, and the Control, which seeks to lock down the Beatdown until the Control can cross the finish line itself.

Building a pure rush deck, as Acsabi explains in his article, means that you focus solely on killing the opponent as fast as you can.  The weakness of a rush deck is exactly the same as its strength - every card in the deck is devoted to killing the opponent as quickly as possible, with no way to slow the opponent down, or catch up after a poor draw relative to the opponent.  When you build a pure rush deck, if you don't have the fastest deck, you will lose.  The advantage of a stall deck is also quite apparent - card and quanta advantage stack up quickly when playing such a deck, and often a stall deck will have confirmed its victory long before the final point of damage is dealt by completely locking down the opponent.

A Rush with Stall deck seeks to take the best of both playstyles and merge them into a single deck.  Fundamentally speaking, a Rush with Stall deck is a Rush deck that has a backup plan if it's facing a deck that's more of a Beatdown.  The faster your rush is, the less of a stalling core you'll need to give it a chance to succeed against faster decks.

Section 2: Constructing a "Rush with Stall" Deck

Like with any other deck, constructing a Rush with Stall Deck starts with an "idea".  In the context of a Rush with Stall Deck, this idea can come in three forms: a rushing core, a stalling core, or a synergy of rushing cards and stalling cards.  In this section, we'll build three sample Rush with Stall Decks starting with each type of idea.

Catatitans:

Catatitans is one of the classic Rush Decks of EtG.  By playing a Catapult and a Titan, then using Flying Weapon to turn it into a massive creature before hurling it at the opponent for 34 points of damage, it takes just a few cards to put a lot of hurt on the opponent.  Let's check out a sample core of a catatitans rush:

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This rushing core is actually extremely fast, and will be fast enough alone to overcome many decks if supplied with decent quanta.  Furthermore, it's a fairly robust rush - even in a bad scenario against heavy PC aimed at your catapults, you can hold titans in your hand until you can fly them immediately, then fly multiple Titans and deal fairly significant damage - and Titans are quite hard to CC with their 50 HP!  Such a strategy wouldn't work against a rush deck, of course, but few rush decks can draw the PC to take out all of your Catapults.  The other weakness of this rush core is its weakness to fast, hard hitting creatures, such as a quick Immorush or Grabbow.  That's where the stall core of this deck comes in.  What does this deck forever have too much of? Air quanta!  In a match where your rush succeeds, you'll only need 2 or 3 air quanta the entire match, but you produce one per turn from your mark.  This leaves you room for cheap cards that can improve your stall!

What have we already done? Made our opponent spend all their PC that they'd normally spend on shields on our catapults? What does that leave us? Oh right, shields that are hard to break!  With your spare , you can power a fog shield, and reduce a pretty significant chunk of the damage your opponent would deal to you.  Since this deck is currently pretty roomy, I'm going to go ahead and add 3 of them - draw chance on the Fog Shields is really nice, as getting them out ASAP goes a long way towards keeping you alive, and you don't need a ton of the combo cards to make this deck's combo work wonders.

We're looking to hit pretty close to 30 cards, and this deck's going to want a lot of gravity quanta in it to speed up the combo, but we've got room for one or two more stalling cards.  A great choice here is Armagio, giving you effectively 25 extra HP (or more!) to buy you a couple more turns against the rushier rushes.  With these stalling cards added, you've got something like this:

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.

Since we built the air quanta in this deck to be fully mark-powered, we can fill the rest of the deck with gravity pillars, and voila! A Rush with Stall deck built from a "rush core" idea, with winning chances against a wider range of decks added by combining 4 key cards worth of stall.

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Chargetal:

Suppose now we wanted to build a Rush with Stall Deck from a Stall core.  Everyone seems to think that the two most OP cards in the game are Dimensional Shield and Fractal, both of which are right at home in Stally decks, as Dimensional Shields can block many attacks, and Fractal lets you create card advantage by generating many creatures from just two cards.

A simple stall core for this deck might look something like

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In just 8 cards (not counting the needed quanta, of course, you've created a massive stalling core which can in theory generate up to 24 creatures and prevent all opposing attacks for 15 turns.  In actual gameplay of course, you'll rarely reach either of these numbers, but it gives a bit of context to how powerful these 8 cards are.  Since, however, you're likely taking up nearly 1/3rd of your deck with stalling cards, you need the creature you intend to fractal to be both efficient (having a good damage/cost ratio) and robust (hard for its damage to be prevented).  One great example of this lies in a classic combo with Fractal - Sapphire Charger.  With this deck being a Fractal based deck, you don't need to draw a ton of them, and you don't want useless cards clogging up your hand, but as your main source of damage, you still probably want 5 of them.  Chargers' 4 damage for 5 might not be the most efficient card in the world, but they have 5 HP, making them immune to a decent number of CC cards (<20 quanta bolts and Shockwaves, most importantly), and their momentum renders your opponent's shield or Gravity Pull useless.  Since a huge portion of our robustness of the deck lies in Momentum, and we've got a decent amount of gravity to pair well with the Fractals, we can go ahead and toss in a Titan or two while we're at it.  As a general rule of thumb, unless you've got a compelling reason to do otherwise, toss a weapon or two of the element you expect to have the most spare quanta of into your deck - it rarely hurts to draw it!

Our dual core for Chargetal looks something like this:

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At this point, you're pretty much ok to just quanta up your deck, though it's not a terrible idea to toss in a Shard of Focus or an Amber Nymph if you're playing in a meta that allows it.  15 quanta cards might seem like a lot, but when you consider that you're looking to Fractal up and win, having a lot of quanta immediately is usually quite important.  A completed Chargetal Rush with Stall looks something like this.

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Simple, Brutal, Efficient.

Grabstall:

Next, let's look at a Rush with Stall made by noticing a cool synergy between a popular rush core and a devastating stall tactic. Earth happens to have one of the best rushing cards in the game, the Graboid, and one of the best Stalling cards in the game, Basilisk Blood.  6 turns is practically forever in a rush, but Basilisk Blood doesn't feature in true rush decks, as it's a waste of a card slot that could be used for damage (Catapult-boosting exemptions barred, of course).  A Rush with Stall deck is the answer!  First, let's place both cores into a deck and see what else we could use!

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This deck, like our Catatitans earlier, needs only 6 to use every card in it so far, so we have room to add an inexpensive time card or two to help the deck out.  While neither Eternity nor Procrastination is cheap enough for a role in our deck, Time has one of the lynchpin stalling cards - entire games can be turned on a single Reverse Time, and many decks lose a lot by having a creature rewound.  Flying Weapons, Buffed Creatures (Pegasus and Otyugh in particular), Growth-based creatures, Overdriven Dragons, any remotely expensive card in a nonrenewable quanta deck (i.e. a Nova/Immo based deck) - there's so many cards that your opponent can be devasted by playing just a single Reverse Time on!  Let's toss in 2 of them!

Remember when I said above that most decks could benefit from adding a weapon of the spare quanta element?  Here's a slight exception to the rule - the spare quanta in this deck is clearly going to be , but a Pulverizer is of only marginal use, especially since we're not packing any sources.  Instead, we'll pack an Other weapon, specifically a Short Sword.

Time to ask the key question - is it time to quanta up?  Let's see what the deck would look like if we did.

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This deck looks ok, but only 6 creatures for damage, and those creatures only having 3 HP, isn't the most robust source of damage in the world, and 15 quanta cards in a deck whose most expensive card costs 3 is most definitely overkill.  I recommend switching out 3 of the pillars for additional creatures, but what creature you choose to add is up to you.  This still leaves you 40% quanta, and a pretty good chance of 3 pillars in the starting hand for a second turn graboid to start the rush with.  The original version of this deck runs Hematite Golems, another fairly cheap creature that still contributes to the attack, and rarely do you fail to have the quanta to play it.  If you have tons of spare quanta in your playtesting, switching the Golems for Shriekers or Stone Dragons is also an option, dealing a bit more punch per card, but harder to rush onto the field.

The final version of the Grabstall with the Golems looks like this.

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Now, you've seen a sample building process for each of the three ways to come up with a Rush with Stall, and seen a variety of different decks that can result.  Now, it's time to talk about actually playing the decks.

Section 3 - Playing Tips[/color]

The key to playing a Rush with Stall deck successfully is to focus on determining the speed of your deck compared to your opponent's.  If you are piloting the faster deck, you should spend as much of your quanta as possible on your damaging cards, forgoing your own safety with confidence that your opponent will fall to 0 HP first.  On the other hand, if the opponent is playing the faster deck, you need to focus your efforts onto slowing them down, and counting on the fact that your damage will come later.

Choosing dual-function cards for your deck, such as Gravity Pull, can come in very handy in making your deck more flexible, as you can either use it to kill a dangerous enemy creature or to set up a tanky creature of your own as an extra line of defense.  Speedbumping, using Gravity Pull on a weak creature such as a Photon, to block a large attacker in the opponent's 1st slot is a useful strategy when only a little bit of stall is needed, and it can often buy you an extra turn of staying alive. 

Remember the key rules of both rushes and stalls - if you're faster, keep rushing and ignore damage, and remember the power of card advantage. 

Look at your deck, and consider the types of decks you're most likely to see that could screw you over.  Make a list of these, and see if any of these decks could be neutralized even partially by including a particular card.  Sanctuary, Deflagration, Steal, Reverse Time, Empathic Bond, Bonewall, and Titanium Shield, for example, each severely weaken a fairly significant number of decks, so considering the inclusion of any of these cards if on-element is usually not a bad idea - though testing is the only real way to be sure.

Practice your deck in PVP1 if possible before the event you intend to use it in, unless it's a tournament with a heavy amount of restrictions.  There's just no substitute for human opposition, and 100HP as opposed to 150 or the variance of HP in the Arena gives a very different dynamic to some decks.  In highly restricted tournaments, using AI3 as a testing ground is probably your best bet.

Know what cards you have and what cards you want to draw at any time, and plan your quanta usage carefully.  It does you no good to draw your Dimensional Shield if you just spent all your on a Fractal.  Know what card is most important to you at any time, and play accordingly.

Section 4 - Bonus Decks[/color]

In this section, I present a few more Rush with Stall Decks without extensive commentary to showcase the great variety of decks possible.

Psiontal

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Wingsbow

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Owls and Queens (sharded)

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Cocktosis (sharded)

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Lycansteal

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[Ilraon]

Very useful for us newbies, thanks a lot.

[Acsabi44]

I like this article a lot. The decks you feature are all pretty easy to comprehend and assign, yet they have clever twists which enable the player to react to the opponent's decks.
For example, the graboid rush pretty much only loses to immo and PSN rushes from the rush department, so the RTs are really a nice touch. Ofc the deck still has problems with true stalls but thats what you get when you sacrifice diversity on the altar of speed.

A couple of the "rush with stall" decks you mention (I think "midrange" is the official term, at least in MtG) are pretty easy to understand to newer players as well, which I like. Decks like the chargetal are easier to play out since you basically have to evaluate the current HP and the damage output of the two decks (yours and the opponent's) and act accordingly. This sounds hard but basically it comes down to "if they are hitting me, then dimshield, if they are not hitting me then fractal", at least on a basic level.

The cards you mention in your "playing tips" section, the "dual function" cards are where it's at. Cards ike Gravity Pull, Shockvawe, Firebolt etc. are really hard to master in such a deck. First and foremost, you would have to assign the role of beatdown and control correctly, then you'd have to correctly identify the key threats the opponent's deck has, usually without seeing any of them. This takes tons of practice and experience. I really like that you gave some examples of such cards.

The beauty of the game is that in most cases, the differences between the two decks are not subtle enough for littlie things to matter, but when the decks on the two sides are really close to each other, thats when all the advices you wrote about really come into play and enable the more skilled player to come out on top.

[ddevans96]

'Rush with Stall'? When did we stop calling these Domination? Also, how do you differentiate 'Rush with Stall' and 'Allaround'?

Other than that, the tutorial looks great.

[theelkspeaks]

'Rush with Stall'? When did we stop calling these Domination? Also, how do you differentiate 'Rush with Stall' and 'Allaround'?

Other than that, the tutorial looks great.

,
I used PoLdeR's deck compilation for the category names.  As far as I can tell, 'Allaround' refers to decks like Vader Saders, which heals enough to be a semi-stall but is also kind of rushy.

I'm not completely sure how he differentiated in some cases though, as he listed this monofire as 'Allaround', when I'd have likely included it as a 'Rush with Stall'.  As I said in my intro, these two deck types seem fairly interchangable to me.

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[ddevans96]

Fair enough. I just think including them in 'most common names' is misleading, considering Domination is the common term here, but as I said, it's a great thread nonetheless :3

[Acsabi44]

I dont really understand all the name confusion with "rush with stall", "domination", "all around" and the rest.
Way I see it, those names dont refer to the speed of a deck; more like to the way they approach the game. Speed has nothing to do with it. A poorly designed rushdeck may have the speed of a stall but that doesnt make it a stall now, does it.
Same for Vader Sader. The fact that it heals doesnt make it a semi-stall. I believe the term "semi-stall" is neither informative nor exact enough to warrant use.

Let's see a few examples, shall we.

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This deck is a pure rush. Its only gameplan is to beat the enemy down before they do. The fact that it attacks from 2 angles (regular damage and poison) doesnt change this.

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This is the Vader Sader. The deck uses the great combo of Crusader + Vampire dagger to attack the enemy and at the same time heal itself. But the fact that it heals doesnt make it less of an aggro deck. (aside: using the term "rush" doesnt feel right since the deck is terribly slow compared to something like vNG)
So yeah healing aside, the deck still aims to beat the opponent down before they do, and the deck offers virtually no interaction with the opponent's deck. In my book this is as hard of an aggro deck as any.

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This is the Bonebolt. It is a pure stall deck, and I dont mean the speed of the deck. When I think of a stall, I think of the way it approaches the game. This deck uses cards that interact with the opponent's gameplan a LOT (bolts and BWs both hinder the opponent's cards), slows the game down to a crawl and wins by inevitability. By inevitability I mean that it uses damage sources that may be slow but you cannot interact with them. Creatures you can kill, but you cannot really do too much with ever-accumulating poison.
Note that the deck has 2 cards that enable for an OTK but this obviously doesnt make the deck an OTK deck since the way the deck plays out has nothing to do with OTKing 95% of the time.

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Another prime example of stalls is The Immortal, which wins by decking out. Sometimes it wins on the back of a Morningstar. Both are inevitable damage.

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This is a dragon OTK. I think this is the closest to "combo" we have in EtG. The game plan is to "lose until I suddenly win". The deck doesnt interact at all with the opponent. All it does is to stall the game until it accumulates its key components and quanta and then it suddenly wins. The flow of a typical game is an interesting mix between playing vs. a rush and playing vs. a stall, because the deck uses every good stalling card in the book to slow the game down INCREDIBLY, so the opponent may feel they as if they were palying vs a heavy stall, but in reality they are racing vs. the clock of however many turns the OTK deck needs to go off. Also, the OTK deck leaves no room for interacting with its damage. You can interact with its board by disturbing the permanents it plays but you cannot interact with its clock.
Basically this means that vs. an OTK every deck needs to play as if they were in a rush vs rush situation, and they were the faster deck. This means GO GUNS BLAZING.

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This deck is a good example of a midrange. I believe this is the kind of a deck that others refer to as "domination" because aside from the quanta, nearly every card in the deck has the capability of interacting with the opponent's cards. The deck aims to slow the opponent down by interacting with their deck, but it wins by massing up creature damage instead of slowly building up inevitability, hence I dont think this qualifies as a "stall". If you wanna see a deck that is, in my book at least, the epitome of inevitability, then check the next one on the list.
I also believe this is the type of deck the OP called "rush with stall", or even "allaround"? I dont really understand the exact meaning of those terms. I see OP's basic "rush with stall" deck concepts and they are fairly easy to grasp, but when it comes to more complex decks, the definition gets a bit blurry IMO.

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This one is the CCYB. The deck is pretty slow to win, but its not a heavy stall in the sense of the word one means when one thinks of 6 dimshield decks.
But man, look at those win conditions. Everything in the deck is shielded, the enemy cannot do anything about the damage slowly building up. Eventually the immortal Lava Destroyer or the mass of Fireflies will build up, all the while the shielded Pulverizer kills the opponent's permanents one by one. Even False Gods cannot interact with the deck other than outrushing it, which is again, hard because the deck slows them down a great deal. (indeed the deck was designed to be a FG grinder and it still has the best overall WR out of non shard FG grinders)

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This is the one that is referred to as an "allaround" deck earlier. However I dont really see the need nor the reason to categorize this as anything besides an aggro (or a"rush", if you like the term better). The deck simply wins by building up a ton of damage relatively fast. The inclusion of the 3 FBs and one Nymph is not enough to significantly change the way the deck plays out when paired versus a faster rush.  In the event this deck has to play the control, it suffers, unless the opposing deck is not significantly faster, in which case it comes down to the amount of interactivity among both decks and the luck of the draw.
I see the inclusion of the 4 CC cards as a way to overcome the defenses a stall deck musters. I think there are a couple key creatures like Otyugh and  nymph that need to be killed ASAP if a rush deck wants to succeeed. Every good rushdeck that aims to triumph in a fairly diverse meta sholud have ways to handle such threats. But that doesnt mean the deck is anything but a "rush" IMO.
If anything, the deck is a suboptimal rush because its offense is a bit too much diluted with ways to break through stalls. I'd rather see 1 less FB and/or 1 less deflag in favor of more rushing power.

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And then there's this. This deck is too dumb for me to say anything that vaguely resembles proper discussion, but we all know nobody uses this one anyways.


Now, you might say, "hey, this is all nice and whatnot, but heck, gimme TLDR!!44!"
okay.

There are the following deck categories that IMO make sense to estabilish. They are diversed not based on speed but based on how they approach the game.

1, Rush. Aims to win by building up creature damage. May have CC and whatnot to break stalls. Obviously it aims to be fast since it has no way to hinder the opponent other than by winning before them.
2, Stall. Aims to slow the opponent down by making their cards useless through interaction. Wins by building up inevitable damage/deckout.
3, Midrange/Domination. Aims to interact with the opponent deck and thus slow the game down, but wins by building up rush damage.
4, Combo. Aims to win on the spot by playing a combination of very specific cards. Slows the game down to buy time until it finds the key components.

[iNuzzle]

I really enjoyed this! I was drawn to this sort of deck after playing only briefly, though I couldn't have explained why at the time. I think this article helped me put pen to paper on the matter though.

I've imagine that this sort of deck is very attractive to forward-thinkers in a given metagame that promotes aggressive decks. I haven't grasped a good deal of the Elements metagame yet, but I am a rather skilled MtG player so I do have experience in deciphering and combatting a similar one.

As was explained, rush decks generally have fewer decision trees compared to their more slow opponents. I've seen many good-great MtG players gravitate towards slower decks where more decisions are introduced and the game becomes less of a 'coin-flip' with both sides racing each other and relying heavily upon the top of the deck. The thought being: if I am better than my opponent, the longer the game goes the more chance I have to outplay him/her.

This is only 100% true in a card-less vacuum though. Sometimes very strong aggressive cards are printed that give them a clear edge over control decks. Or at least a few smaller edges. Rather than playing a full-on control decks, many pro players will play what is called a midrange deck. Probably the equivalent of rush with stall here.

The idea is to be just one step slower than your opponent, but also slightly larger. You only need to disrupt them a little bit to take over the race, and if your disruption is strong and versatile it will also help you throw control decks off their game long enough to win. One of the most commonly used types of disruption is targeted discard, where the player looks at their opponent's hand and chooses one of their cards to be removed.

Although Elements has no targeted discard, the idea is the same. You only need to remove the most important part of your opponent's gameplan, and your own offense will negate the effectiveness of the rest. That is why only 6 basilisk bloods are needed. You won't be using them on your opponents' ray of light. You only expend your valuable quanta and cards when necessary. This brings me back to forward thinking. Knowing which of your opponents threats are most serious and how to combat them with the minimal defensive measures you have is an interesting puzzle!

I may have left some loose thoughts throughout this post, as I'm about to run, but I hope someone can make use of the comparison. May the top of the deck be kind to you!