Drifter’s Context Corner: What’s the difference between beatdown and aggressive decks?

This is taken from my White set review:

Decks in Constructed and Draft are very different. Many decks in Draft want to be ahead and attacking in the early and mid-game, and have draws that are good at that, but they’re not like constructed aggressive decks at all. Those are specifically low curve, they don’t have high end, and they make up for that with tricks and burn spells: ways to close out games against weakened opponents when their creatures can no longer attack. They completely collapse when they’re behind, so their gameplan is to always be ahead for as long as they can.

That’s just not how the vast majority of decks in Draft are. Sure, they’ll have more early game, but they’ll still have ways to play from behind because it’s so much harder to curve out perfectly in most Draft formats, and it’s very hard to break the play-draw tension or beat your opponents when they curve out better than you as a dedicated aggressive deck, because your early game cards aren’t that amazing. Your beatdown 2 drops will get stopped a lot more by opposing 3s and such, and you’re often forced to sacrifice synergy and having every card on-plan for the sake of card quality. Fast decks can still win a lot of games in Draft just by including a little high end or value, or by having a backup plan and playing in a dynamic way, because your opponent doesn’t have busted haymakers and planeswalkers to punish you for not killing them by turn 5. Rigid gameplans just don’t work as well in a really dynamic format, where games are so different from each other. For that reason, most decks in Draft (we’re talking 90%+) are some flavour of midrange.

I think the distinction between dedicated aggression and what goes on in Draft is important and not always clear in people’s minds, so I use different terminology – I view beatdown decks as the much more common sort, and aggro decks as the more dedicated rarer sort. Midrange beatdown decks form part of that 90%, whereas aggressive decks are part of the 10%. A deck like Selesnya Counters in M21, one of the best decks in the format, would qualify as a beatdown deck, but not an aggressive one – it doesn’t necessarily have no high end and often it will try to grind people out or go over the top of them, but it still wants to attack early and often, and it still has some characteristics of aggressive decks.