In a collectible card game, there are always a very large number of options for your decks. How do you choose the right combination of cards to make things work? It's more than just plugging a bunch of cards that look good. You can't just make a Yu-Gi-Oh deck out of all strong monsters. They have to work together in some way. In this article, I'll examine the general ideas behind how decks typically work and how to make the colors do that.
Let's start with aggro, because aggro always wants to start quickly. Anyone who's played Magic will be familiar with the concept of goblins & white weenie, where you just try to overrun your opponent with numbers. Green is well known for getting big heavy hitters out quickly, as well. Aggro is where you just try to rush at your opponent and win the game quickly. Aggro decks are designed to play out as much power for the cost as they can, and do it quickly enough that the opponent can't react to it all. Control is entirely the opposite. It does everything it can do slow the opponent down and keep solid control of the game state. The goal is to guarantee a win regardless of your opponent's options. Combo is just that. It relies upon a combination of cards that just work so well together you basically have the game just in that. My first example of combo I ever discovered involved
Twilight Sparkle, Faithful Student and
A Vision of the Future. With a boosted Twilight, all your event cards from faceoffs go into your hand, and Vision puts itself on the top of your deck. Using
Gyro to fetch it out faster and pink's draw effects, it can be a pretty lethal setup to win any faceoff you'll encounter.
Blue is definitely on the aggro side. Many of the characters in it are very cheap to play and the color specializes in high mobility. You don't have to pay much for your characters and you don't have to pay much for moving them. Its control element is pretty low. It lies in its love for troublemakers, which exist almost solely for the purpose of slowing your opponent's progress. Its combo capability is mostly through overall synergy, which it has in spades. With many cards that make it cheap or free to move, you can bring whole squads over to a problem at one time for very little cost. With plenty of ready effects too, they can freely play villains on their own strongholds and not particularly care about frightening their own characters. All this taken together makes blue a very solid choice to play aggressively and get points quickly.
Orange takes a moderate stance on the whole issue. It is certainly not fast, but once it gets going, it has the most powerful characters in the game. It can play aggro with a focus on mid-game. Plenty of its cards will give you a lot of power. Its other theme involves making the opponent discard cards, a lot. This is definitely where it works its controlling magic. When a player doesn't have any cards in their hand, they have to pay a lot more action tokens to draw a hand they can use, not to mention their options become much more limited. Its combo capability is rather limited, mostly with itself, but its large supporting role for resources can make for splashy capability.
I would make the argument that Pink is probably the best color right now, because it can do pretty much everything well. It has more focus on the control side, with 5 cards that outright dismiss characters. The only other color that can deprive the opponent of its (figurative) resources on the board is yellow with Too Many Bandages. On the aggro side, pink has a lot of cheap Friends and plenty of card draw to get more. Its combo ability is rather massive, especially with purple's love for events (of which pink has the most) and its primary "random" ability showing a lot of love for 1 power.
White is definitely working on control. Its Inspired mechanic tries to keep the opponent from drawing crucial cards they may need. White also likes to control the opponent's movement with its main and Stand Still. White's aggro is focused on its burst capability, giving significant, one-time boosts as you play new characters. This is especially valuable against your opponent's problems, where you just need raw power. White's ability to bring cards back from the discard pile is probably the most combo-capable effect you can get in any card game, but white also demands a lot of loyalty to itself to play well. This doesn't make it very splashable. Overall, it wants to keep the opponent from doing very much while it just stands around and buys the game.
Yellow is probably the best color at aggro. It relies on massive numbers of critters, with multiple effects that give a small boost to everybody. The highest-power faceoffs I have seen have almost all involved yellow, getting as high as 37! It also has a fair amount of maneuverability, though unlike blue, it is almost exclusiely restricted to its own critters. Yellow doesn't control very well (yet), but with multiple cards that make the opponent lose action tokens, it could very well grow that way in future expansions. Because yellow is so focused on its own critters with basically every effect, it's hard to combo, but synergy still works out well. For example, it is unique in its ability to remove Resources, so combined with pink, the opponent won't keep many cards on the field.
Purple is definitely the most combo-capable color in the game, understandable given it is based on magic, and Magic: the Gathering is famous for having so many combos. Many of its cards revolve on stacking your deck and preference for Event cards. Anything you can do with events will be very beneficial. It subtheme of increased strength for each of the opponent's characters can work either aggro or control, depending on the situation. Focused Study and Ponyville in a Bottle are very strong control cards, shutting off the vast majority of your opponent's characters from being played there (and therefore any effects that work upon them being played). Purple doesn't have much love for aggro though, as most of its cards are expensive to play and rely on the opponent's position. Purple is very much interested in the long game, and as a result, needs to make sure the opponent can't race well. As a splash though, it has plenty of cards that can give you action tokens, and every deck can work with that. Like white though, it's difficult to splash given the high requirements to play cards.
Ultimately, the cards you have available and your preferred play style will determine the general design of your deck. I experiment a lot, but because I like longer games, I often end up preferring control strategies. Hyper-speedy cards also often end up getting the most expensive in money value, because they get to work right away at maximum efficiency. Control decks work more on a larger combination of cards. I also like to play beefy, bruisy things in any game I play, and long-term strategies can often work that way. While every color has certain preferences, a properly balanced game will allow for a great variety of options (even though ultimately, there will be few deck styles that actually come out on top at any given time). For example, in Magic: the Gathering, blue is stereotypically the master of control and red the master of aggro. When constructed right though, they both are able to accomplish the opposite quite well. I went over a lot of generalities here, because the game is still enough in its infancy that the meta game has yet to really develop. (The metagame, by the way, is a subject for another article.)
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