Both you and the other reply are focused on blue. I wonder if HN has an affinity for thinking with blue? Yes, you're all quite right. The word often associated

Both you and the other reply are focused on blue. I wonder if HN has an affinity for thinking with blue? Yes, you're all quite right. The word often associated with blue's style of play is "control", and in tabletop card games, control is about restricting what your opponent can do. Control often doesn't directly remove creatures from the battlefield (like red and black can do), or buff your creatures (like white and green), but instead directly removes your opponent's ability to introduce cards to play. Counterspell is possibly the iconic blue technique. I found this article [0] a really interesting writeup of the mechanism design. There is interestingly one other style closely associated with blue, called "bouncing". [1] While black tends to be able to permanently remove blockers, i.e. to the graveyard, blue's skill is in temporarily removing blockers back to the hand or library. In addition to being able to decisively change the course of a battle, bouncing can also provide control over several turns, because bounces prevent blue's opponents from being able to set up a proper offensive line, and force opponents to waste mana on fielding units that will be bounced. This latter requirement is analogous to how counterspell forces opponents to waste mana on casting spells that will be fizzled. [0] https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/counter-intelligence-2005-03-28 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/c... [1] https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Bounce https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Bounce