This multi-part guide is designed to help intermediate players go from understanding the rules of Skyweaver to reaching Grandweaver. It's written with a Constructed bias because that's mostly what I play, but the concepts also apply to Discovery. Read Part 1 here.

-Jamodon 

Introduction

An effective Skyweaver Constructed deck is built to win the game in one of four ways. Aggro tries to win on tempo by rapidly reducing their opponent to 0 life. Control tries to win on value by dragging the game out while building up an insurmountable advantage in cards. Between them, Midrange decks can adopt either an Aggro or a Control stance in a given game depending on their opponent. Finally, Combo decks win by playing a few specific cards that together do enough damage to end the game.

Deck Archetypes

Aggro wins on tempo

Aggro decks try to end the game while mana is still the main constraint, before either side runs low on cards and value becomes relevant. Their strong tempo also generates value as slower decks may need to use their cards suboptimally to stay alive.

• Agility-flavored aggro focuses on reducing the opponent's health to zero as quickly as possible without necessarily maintaining a lot of creatures on the board. They need to do damage to their opponent quickly to win, as well as to trigger Fury on many of their creatures, so they struggle against high HP creatures with guard. They can also run out of cards and lose if their opponent gains significant life. However, many Agility creatures trigger powerful effects or can attack the turn they come into play, reducing the value of their opponent’s removal. Aggro Agility is played alone more than other mono-prisms, but it is more commonly paired with Strength or Heart.
• Strength-flavored aggro focuses on using large creatures to control the board and extracting enough value via 2-for-1 trades that they can overwhelm their opponent with a big creature or two. They need to maintain board control to win, so they are vulnerable to hard removal (especially on creatures they have buffed) and heavier mass removal. However, their huge creatures will always overwhelm their opponent’s lifegain or Guard creatures if they aren’t removed. Aggro Strength is occasionally played alone, but usually it is combined with Agility or Heart. Many Strength/Agility decks make use of the fire synergies available within the two prisms like Trailblazer and Mothermander.

• Heart-flavored aggro (often called “Zoo”) focuses on keeping constant pressure on the opponent. They play lots of small, cheap creatures, many of which draw or summon a replacement when killed. Cards such as Wall of Dead generate massive value AND tempo if not immediately answered with mass removal. Heart aggro can often run through all of an unprepared opponent’s mass removal and then overrun them. A swarm of Heart creatures is especially deadly when combined with buffs and guard avoidance like Blood Hunter’s Blood Moon or Full Bloom + Chain Storm. Like strength, Heart needs to maintain board control to win. However, their small stats and high numbers make them more vulnerable to debuffs like Roots. Silencing aggro Heart’s creatures with death effects can also cause them to run out of cards. They also struggle against large quantities of mass removal, especially mass removal that dusts like Kha’s Wrath. Heart’s lack of good single-target removal and low creature attack also means they lose the game if the opponent can get multiple high HP armored creatures onto the board fast enough. Aggro Heart is usually combined with Agility or Strength.
• Intellect is rarely the primary focus of an aggro deck, but can support other prisms by adding more card draw and finishers like Gemini so the deck still has a chance if the game goes longer. Generally these types of decks would be considered midrange rather than aggro. The exception is Hax decks built around lots of 1 cost cards to trigger a big Unophobia, most commonly played in Intellect/Heart. 
• Wisdom is even more rare in an aggro deck, because it has very few cards that damage the opponent significantly. However, a Wisdom/Intellect aggro that borders on midrange can be quite effective. Wisdom’s contribution to aggro is mainly creatures with attached spells like Matchstick, which provide both tempo and card advantage.

Control wins on value

Control decks try to extend the game by blunting their opponent's tempo with removal while gradually pulling ahead on value by getting 2-for-1s or better with their cards. They ultimately win by having more and stronger cards.

• Wisdom-focused control wins through card advantage. They often use one card to remove one or more of even the largest enemy creatures, and run multiple cards that draw other cards. Meanwhile, Wisdom has expensive but resilient creatures like Sky Phoenix that often require multiple cards for the opponent to answer. This prism generally relies on the high value of its cards in a vacuum, rather than synergies between its cards (with the notable exception of earth cards that help find and cast Etherwail, plus large creatures in the deck for it to summon). Most control decks will include Wisdom as one of the prisms due to its incredible long-term value. Because they don’t do significant damage to the opposing hero for a long time, Wisdom-based and in fact most control decks struggle against decks that put the pressure on them to kill the enemy hero, like combo decks and greedier control decks.

• Heart-focused control also wins through card advantage, but rather than drawing extra cards from their deck, they draw them from creature death effects and the graveyard via cards like Eclipse and Evermore. They may also add additional threats to their deck via cards like Flame Phoenix, and attempt to close out a long game with several Fireballs once they have emptied their deck. Heart can also recur creatures with powerful summon, end-of-turn, or death effects. Heart-focused control decks are vulnerable to dust effects on their creatures which remove them from the game, both while the creatures are in play and while they are in the graveyard waiting to be reanimated.
• Intellect is almost never used alone, but Wisdom/Intellect is the most common choice for control decks. Intellect adds a combination of removal, lategame value cards and interesting synergies to a control deck. These include some expensive but high value cards like Encapsulate, It’s A Trap, or Krackus. Cards like Puppeteer synergize with a big-creatures-only Etherwail deck, while Nakamoto enables a unique empty deck control archetype. Intellect also has some of the strongest tools to win very long games, like Iron Mask and Clone Army. These types of lategame-focused control tend to struggle against aggro or combo opponents that can finish the game before Intellect can extract enough value from its cards.
• Strength is typically used in control decks to provide removal and finishers. Strength has strong single target hard removal in cards like Mortal Blow and efficient AOE removal in cards like Burninate. Titanic serves as both removal and finisher, while Dracomantium is a potential finisher while also providing long term value on death by giving the hero armor. Because Strength on its own relies on tempo to get 2-for-1 value from its cards, in a control deck it depends on the other prism to gain card advantage. It pairs well with Wisdom or Heart, which can both draw more cards than can fit in their hand. Control Strength struggles when the opponent has more single-target removal in their deck than it has big threats.
• Agility is rarely used in control decks, although in theory it can serve a role like Strength with mass removal and finishers. Control Agility’s weakness is that very few Agility cards are well suited to the control role, so it relies heavily on the other prism. However, Agility does feature a few devastating mass removal cards like Maelstrom as well as some decent draw spells. These are most often seen in slower combo decks that play somewhat like a control deck in that they stall for time. 

Midrange wins by beating the opponent in their weaker domain

Midrange decks win by doing their best to match their opponent in their opponent’s focus area (tempo for aggro, value for control) and pulling ahead enough to win due to innately higher value or higher tempo cards in the other. A midrange deck wants to beat an aggro deck by trading creatures until the aggro deck runs out of cards. It wants to methodically chip away at a control deck’s life total without falling behind on cards.

• Intellect is a staple in midrange decks as it enables synergies that generate both value and tempo. For example, Leonitus combos with Savage Garden to create tons of tempo from two cards that are unimpressive alone. Floodwater does double duty against control in a water deck by both completely refilling the hand, and by putting threats back into the deck so the midrange deck can play its big threats a second time against an out-of-deck opponent. Gemini is also an excellent blocker and finisher for a midrange deck. Intellect is rarely played alone, but can be used in a midrange deck with any other prism. It can have trouble dealing with aggro opponents who generate tempo so quickly that Intellect has to play its cards immediately rather than waiting to draw cards that synergize with them.

• Strength is also fairly common in midrange decks. It provides high stat, hard-to-answer creatures that efficiently generate tempo. Strength’s greatest weakness as an aggro monoprism is a tendency to run out of cards if it can’t force 2-for-1 trades with its big creatures. But in a dual-prism midrange deck, any of the other prisms can provide enough draw for Strength to keep playing cards for much longer. Strength/Intellect is one of the more popular midrange options, and can use Alight and Cross Reference to quickly find Glorious Mane to pump up most of the creatures in a single color deck like water, metal, or earth.
• Heart is another popular choice for midrange. Heart creatures that draw or summon other creatures on death provide card advantage without sacrificing much tempo. They also serve to harden Strength/Heart decks against mass removal. Heart can also generate massive tempo spikes by reanimating creatures, especially ones with strong death or summon effects like Hydrex. This particular borderline-combo archetype is usually played with Heart/Intellect, as Intellect has multiple tools to get copies of expensive creatures into play without paying their full mana cost.
• Wisdom’s main contribution to midrange decks is card draw, especially on creatures like Nomad to keep tempo high. Wisdom also provides creatures with attached removal that can get scarier over time, like Scraggy. Wisdom/Intellect midrange decks can be surprisingly fast while still having substantial draw.
• Agility is rare in midrange decks, but similarly has creatures with powerful attached spells or summon effects that can 2-for-1. These include cards like Plane Ranger that can swing the game if unanswered.

Combo wins by playing a specific sequence of cards that wins the game

Combo decks are in a sense like control, except that rather than trying to stall the game while they draw more cards, they are trying to stall the game while they draw the right ones. They usually run few creatures and only play the important ones the turn they win, rendering their opponent’s removal mostly useless. Combo decks tend to perform poorly against aggro, especially decks with agility creatures that do damage immediately and thus reduce the value of removal. Combo decks usually have excellent matchups against control decks, as control decks can rarely do enough damage to them to kill them before the combo goes off. They depend on individual cards and thus the prisms involved vary. With the change to Octavian to prevent unlimited mana generation, there are two major combo decks as of February 2022.

Note that any deck can contain combos, ranging from minor (Avatar of Light + any light card) to game changing (Desire + Mimic with an empty deck). But you can still classify these decks as aggro, midrange, or control an dplay against them appropriately. OTK (one-turn-kill) combo decks, on the other hand, are in their own category. You need to quickly identify when you are facing one, and 100% commit to getting lethal damage at least a turn before you expect them to go off. Alternatively, a few decks can instead preemptively outheal the combo. 

• Zam OTK (one-turn kill) is the fastest combo deck. It first finds and plays Magnanimous to reduce the cost of all spells in the deck, then plays Zam and Electron and a bunch of very low cost spells in a single turn to do enough damage to kill the enemy hero. With a great starting hand, the deck is unbeatable except by the fastest aggro decks and can win as early as turn 7. However, sometimes the deck won’t find the right combo pieces. At this point, the deck will either die helplessly or be forced to fire an incomplete combo to clear the opponent’s creatures and stay alive, then figure out a way to eke out a victory without the right cards. A Zam deck has the least interaction with the opponent of any deck in the game as most of its cards are devoted to finding combo pieces as quickly as possible rather than removal. It requires Intellect and is normally paired with Wisdom. Zam can do 50+ damage if given time to assemble a perfect combo, so it is very difficult to heal out of lethal range unless combined with hero armor.
• Lion Montage OTK is a significantly slower combo, but one that requires much less preparation and deck slots. It works by playing Mountain Lion to double all sources of banner, playing multiple banner spells or creatures (usually Flock), using Strikestorm to clear all enemy creatures if needed, and then punching the enemy hero twice using Montage. The full combo requires at least 12-15 mana without preparation, but this can be sped up by using Head in the Clouds to reduce the cost of air cards, or a few other methods. This deck has the advantage of being able to use most of its card slots for removal and draw, but has to survive for longer than Zam to win. The  Agility/Wisdom version is most focused on executing the combo as quickly as possible, and plays like a control deck that attempts to stall while reducing the cost of combo pieces. However, the Lion-Flock-Montage combo can be added to an aggro, midrange, or control Agility deck to provide an alternative combo finisher. This combo does 26 damage (+4 for every additional banner source the deck plays), so it is possible to heal out of lethal range.

Deck Archetypes in Discovery

Deck archetypes are very important in Constructed, where decks often push the limits of pure aggro, control, or combo. Effective players need to have a clear strategy when building their deck. They also need to be able to very quickly identify their opponent’s deck type and adapt their play accordingly. 

In Discovery, combo is non-existent and control is very rare (usually Wisdom or Heart that happen to random strong lategame value cards like Prismata). Most decks will fall somewhere in the midrange category, with a few specific prisms like Agility and Strength/Agility usually being aggro. A key skill in winning Discovery is being able to predict which of two messy midrange decks has more value than the other - in other words, which has “inevitability.”

Inevitability

In every match, one player will have inevitability - they are expected to eventually win if the game goes on long enough. A player has inevitability if they on average generate more value each turn than their opponent. The player with inevitability can ignore their opponent’s HP total and focus on staying alive until they draw what they need to win. They don’t need to gain a tempo lead, they just need to make sure their opponent doesn’t gain one. 

Aggro decks focus on tempo over value, so they have low inevitability and will usually lose if the game goes too long. Control decks focus on value over tempo, so they have high inevitability and their chances to win go up the longer the game lasts.

OTK (one-turn-kill) combo decks almost always have inevitability, unless their opponent is able to heal out of lethal range. Control decks have less inevitability than combo decks, but typically have better tools to clear the board and stay alive. They can also still win even if the opponent gains a significant amount of life. 

Inevitability can occasionally flip during play

Inevitability is mostly determined by the decks being played. However, this can occasionally flip during a match. For example, if both players are drawing from out-of-deck, even an aggro Wisdom/Intellect deck may have inevitability compared to a midrange Strength/Agility because random Wisdom cards have higher value than random Strength/Agility cards. Inevitability can also change based on hero HP. If you are at 1 HP with two cards left in your deck, and no source of lifegain, the pressure is on you to do something or you will die when you run out of cards. A control deck may similarly lose inevitability if they fall to very low HP and their opponent has direct damage spells that will reduce them to 0 HP when drawn.

Playstyle adjustment based on inevitability

It’s important to identify which player has inevitability at the start of the match, so you know how to play. If Wisdom control is playing Agility aggro, it’s likely obvious to both players that Wisdom has inevitability. But if Wisdom/Intellect control is playing Heart/Wisdom control, who has inevitability may vary. 

If you don’t have inevitability relative to your opponent, you are the “beatdown” deck and need to make plays that reduce your opponent’s HP, even at the cost of your own. Aggro decks typically lack inevitability, so they need to aggressively damage their opponent in addition to securing board control before they fall behind on value. Players without inevitability may want to attack the enemy hero directly rather than trading their creatures to kill enemies. They often want to be aggressive in punching enemy creatures with their hero, since they don't mind losing life.

If you do have inevitability, you want to make plays that keep your hero's HP high, even if you don't damage your opponent. Even if you don't immediately die, at a low HP total you'll have to make desperate low-value plays like using multiple removal spells to kill one creature or playing Guard creatures even if you can't play their attachment. Because control decks typically have inevitability, they often look to slow the game down with roots, board wipes, lifegain, and similar plays. Players with inevitability usually want to clear all enemy creatures before attacking their hero, even if it causes their own creatures to die in the trade. They also want to be a little more cautious about punching high power enemy creatures with their hero.