Thought Vessel

Tempo is a way to describe decks focusing on heavy interaction with efficient mana usage. Tempo decks play a few threats early, and try to chip away opponents HP and resources. Tempo decks are not the fastest decks causing damage, and aim to dragging the game a bit longer, and preventing opponents plans with right timed removals.

Saboteur is an effect on a creature triggered whenever the creature deals combat damage to an opponent. Many saboteur creatures have evasion and can wreck havoc with their effects if unanswered.

Unblockable creatures often have strong evasion, like flying or fear, or they are simply unblockable. Highly evasive creatures tend to have lower power to balance the strong effect of free damage in combat and tend to have lower toughness too.

The ways to discard are plenty: cycling, rummaging, end steps discard phase, to name a few. Discard decks are built around triggers from discarding, like madness and synergizes well with reanimating.

White has many great support spells and permanents for +1/+1 counters theme. Counters theme is often combined with White-weenie or token strategy and turns the small creatures into a formidable force.

Vampire tribal is second most popular mono black tribal. Eternal vampire have a multitude of different commanders available and different game plans, too. One vampire tribal can focus on full combat with lord effects, other focusing on life gain and life loss and third can focus on stealing other players creatures.

Casting from exile is often found from red, and sometimes carries over combinations like rakdos or even mono black. Some popular cast from exile ways are madness, adventures, cascade and impulsive draw.

Casting other players spells is mostly found in Grixis colors. Ways to steal spells tend to focus around exiling libraries and abusing opponents graveyards most of the time. Decks focusing on opponents spells is close to chaos decks and can cause some irritation in the play group.

Cheating permanents to the battlefield is available in every colours. How the permanents are cheated into play depends on the colours available, eg black uses reanimation from the battlefield and red uses sneaking, meaning the permanent will be sacced in the end of the turn.

Cantrips are spells with a draw effect on them. Cantrip decks are often instant and sorcery spell slinger decks and aim to cast as many cantrips as possible and creating value from the cast triggers.

Aristocrat decks are a combination of sacrifice effects, reanimating and value creation. Wincons revolve around multiple triggers, either from dying, ETB or cast triggers.

Illusions are mostly blue creatures and some times have a specific characteristic: if they are targeted with a spell or activated ability the creature is sacrificed.

Draw matters decks gets value out of card draw triggers. Value can be anthem effects, tapping creatures or straight up life loss for the opponents. Draw matter decks run a high amount of interactions and tend to draw during opponents end steps.

Mono white token decks aim to create a mass of small creature tokens and then with anthem effects or +1/+1 counter defeat the opponents in combat. White token decks are aggressive decks and aim to flood the battlefield soon rather than later due to the weaker card draw mono white has access to.

Zombies are first and foremost: black creatures. Mono black is the original zombie tribal colours, and later received multiple great cards in Dimir colors.

With mono black zombie tribals are fully combat focused decks with resource advantage from abusing the graveyard. With looting effects, discard and creatures dying the graveyard is zombie decks most valuable resource after the zombies on the battlefield.

Aristocrat decks are a combination of sacrifice effects, reanimating and value creation. Wincons revolve around multiple triggers, either from dying, ETB or cast triggers.

Reanimate decks brings back creatures from the graveyard straight to the battlefield. The reanimated creatures are often expensive to cast, like demons, and are complete haymakers compared to the reanimation costs.

Lifegain is one of the the most popular themes in EDH. Multiple triggers to gain life and value received from the lifegain triggers are really fun to follow as a player. Often lifegain is combined with another theme, +1/+1 counters or creature tokens, as pure lifegain is often not powerful enough to win the game.

Vampire tribal is second most popular mono black tribal. Eternal vampire have a multitude of different commanders available and different game plans, too. One vampire tribal can focus on full combat with lord effects, other focusing on life gain and life loss and third can focus on stealing other players creatures.