materpillar wrote: ↑10 months ago
I think of group hug as trying to provide a massive influx of resources to every player at the table, usually massively speeding up how fast people start dropping threats. The "normal" group hug deck does that but doesn't actually have an endgame strategy/plan other than losing after causing pandemonium. This deck is explicitly trying to do the standard early/mid-game group hug strategy of providing everyone an over abundance of resources, but instead of kinda just rolling over and dying like "normal" group hug decks it tries to piggy back off opposing haymakers for the win.
Group-Hug is just kinda reverse Stax. I assume you think that Stax is a strategy or do you just call that a type of control?
I have pondered slightly and it amuses me how poorly this deck lines up against
Phelddagrif.
Stax is a subset of control.
There are two big differences between stax and hug as strategies (or "strategies"):
1) Preventing your opponent from doing things is positive for you. The less your opponent can do, the more powerful you are relatively speaking. Whereas giving your opponent resources, without further explanation, doesn't benefit you.
2) Stax as an archetype is well established and involves ways to break the symmetry to win - the specific wincon may vary, but the most significant part of the plan is hamstringing the opponent, which is why the archetype is named after it. Hug, as a "established archetype", doesn't have a consistent way that it uses hugging towards any larger plan, and some hug decks have no plan to win at all. So when someone says their "strategy" is hug, again, that really says next-to-nothing about their game plan. Whereas stax says quite a lot.
So both in concept, and in concrete form, hug doesn't constitute a strategy. If you wanted to describe what the strategy of this deck is by way of hugging, you'd pretty much have to describe the entire game plan of the deck, at which point categorization is no longer useful.