Transcription
Hello, hello everyone! It's Martin Anders, Shayla, Coaching Strategist that you may recognize from teams like Fnatic and Version X. In this video, I want to go over one of the theories that I use most prevalently when I develop world-class strategies for the teams that I work with, and it's actually a refresh of a video I've done in the past. Let's dive into Style Dynamics 2.0.
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To start at the beginning, let's look at the most foundational concepts that are relevant in Style Dynamics because this is not something that's specific to me or specific to Valorant. This is one of the most storied design theories in the history of gaming. It all stems from the basis of a style triangle, in which you have three primary archetypes that have conflicting interactions. In this diagram I have here, it would be Red beating Blue, Blue beating Green, and Green beating Red, creating a circular dynamic that makes the game fundamentally balanced at its core. This is manifested in more games than we can count over the years, all the way down to MMORPGs like RuneScape, tabletop war games like Warhammer 40,000, and most notoriously, trading card games like Magic: The Gathering with its aggro, control, mid-range dynamic.
Now, at risk of exposing myself as an Esports Boomer, my starts with a three. So, I've been playing Magic for quite literally more than 20 years, and it was extremely natural for me to start applying those concepts immediately after transitioning over to Valorant. It's no surprise then that that's the foundation of this system. Fortunately, triangular style dynamics is a pretty universal system when it comes to competitively balanced games, and so Valorant's agents fell quite nicely into the aggro, mid-range, and control buckets.
Now that we know that we're going to go in the direction of an aggro, control, mid-range triangle when applying style dynamics to Valorant, let's take a step back and establish what those even mean. To keep it as quick and simple as possible, I want to go through each type and touch on three primary topics: their defining characteristics, their approach to the game, and their goals as a style.
Beginning with each style's defining characteristic, we have aggro, which is very focused on tempo. Control is focused on permission, and mid-range is focused on flexibility. Tempo and flexibility are both rather self-explanatory. Permission is a little bit more of an abstract concept.
When looking at approach, I want to borrow another analog that's used very frequently in the TCG world, which is we're going to look at these styles in the context of who's asking and answering questions conceptually. Whenever you watch a game of Valorant, you can think of it as the two teams having a conversation. One asks a question, the other one may or may not be able to answer, and the game continues in a tit-for-tat. When applying that idea to each of these styles, aggro asks questions, control answers questions, and mid-range both asks and answers questions.
That at last brings us to each style's goals. In aggro's case, these goals are to seize tempo, create wild swings in pressure by using that tempo, and then convert that tempo into wins via reach. Reach, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, concerns the tools and tactics used by a team to sort of push themselves over the edge and get through that final stretch. This is particularly important for aggro as a style because it often burns very hot and fast but runs out of gas extremely quickly. As it pertains to Valorant, you'll see reach manifest usually in off-site post-plant mollies, late-round ultimates, things like Brimstone mollying or Orbital Striking a spike just to close out that last little bit of time into 90 fuses.
Looking at control, their goals are to manipulate their opponents into play patterns that they're prepared for, and then they stabilize by repelling those expected scenarios. Now, we can expand a little bit more on why I said permission was a bit of an abstract concept when we're looking at control's defining characteristic. The way that we're manipulating our opponents in this specific scenario is we're allowing and disallowing them to do certain things. If they try to take certain space, we're going to hard deny it, and in doing so, we're going to force them to do exactly what we want, and they're going to end in a scenario that plays to our strengths and the scenarios that we've set up as a controlling team, and that will give us our advantage.
To elaborate a little bit on stabilization as a concept, what we're talking about here is that you are now realistically comfortable with any scenarios that remain in the round. That could be because you've garnered such an egregious headcount advantage that your opponent can no longer present an imminent threat. It could be that you've drained your opponent of so much utility that they can no longer really get anything done, but the end outcome is all the same: it's that regardless of what your opponent does, you feel extremely comfortable moving.
At last, to mid-range, their goal is to react to their opponent's efforts and gain incremental advantage via resource attrition. Resource attrition is, well, exactly what it sounds like: it's using a glut or surplus of your own utility to tax the utility of your opponent and generate an advantage. This could manifest in something like, say, a Skye trading her flash for a Breach flash, knowing that hers is going to come back off cooldown, but the Breach only has two. The eventual outcome is that the mid-range team running the Skye is going to have a resource advantage.
Now that we've established the basic concepts of these styles in isolation, let's start talking about their interactions. Now, the meat and potatoes of style dynamics isn't necessarily that we can understand agents and compositions better by putting them into these stylistic buckets. It's that after we put them into these buckets, there are specific matchups that should result in favorable outcomes.
Starting with aggro and control, aggro is meant to beat control. Aggro's exclusivity when seizing tempo and applying pressure can go under control's permissive setups. This denies control's win conditions of forcing their opponents into a planned outcome, and it puts the control team at a major disadvantage. When I say "go under control setups," what I mean is that aggro will generally have tools to either be so explosive that they can go directly through, bypass, or outright ignore control setups. This can manifest in aggro's regular use of dives, things like Jett dashing through Killjoy setups. This could be something like a KAY/O knife completely shutting down entrenchment utility in the first place.
Looking at control and mid-range, control is meant to beat mid-range. Mid-range's lack of brute force can't sufficiently break through control setups like aggro can. Control punishes mid-range's attempts to apply that pressure and ultimately stabilizes. This one has a lot less nuance than aggro beating control because it really just boils down to the control compositions being disciplined. Mid-range is going to attempt to tax out resources, try and bait out things like Killjoy nanos from the control setup, but as long as the control team truly relies on their entrenchment, trusts their setups, and waits for mid-range to try and punch through, mid-range simply lacks the teeth to sufficiently bite through it all.
And that brings us to the last interaction, which is mid-range beating aggro. Aggro's exclusivity comes at the cost of poor resource volume. There usually isn't a plan B. Like I said, burns hot, burns fast, runs out of gas in a hurry. Mid-range can tax this already shallow pool of resources via a flexible mix of proactive and reactive utility attrition. And if the aggro manages to seize tempo, they're left with comparatively and meaningfully fewer tools to fight back against the mid-range team.
Now, we've checked all of the really important boxes. We understand what a style triangle is, we understand the definition and characteristics of each of the stylistic archetypes, and we even understand how they interact. Now we get to jump into the really fun part, which is applying it to Valorant and understanding what types of utility allows us to code each agent into one of these buckets.
For each style, there's going to be a couple of types of utility that are hallmarks of their archetype. For aggro, this is going to be explosivity, that's dictated by a high speed of use, spammability, or an immediacy of effect. Think about the difference between something like a KAY/O flash when he's left-clicking it versus right-clicking it. One of those is far more explosive than the other. And then if you compare it to a Breach flash, which is truly spammable, that's even more explosive still. Their utility is also generally high potency. It will be high damage or high catalytic value. When I say catalytic value, I mean it is used in order to catalyze engagements. It's a flash, it's a stun, it's something that creates an opportunity to fight immediately off of its back. Aggro utility is also generally short-range, self-enabling. It will include almost all pieces of utility that have kill resets. It'll include almost all instances of anti-utility, almost all instances of untradability, and all of the forms of truly explosive dive.
Looking at control, the ability types and characteristics you'll generally see are the ability to pre-place, having high duration, either long stall or long ground denial, having global range, having passive value, generating hard information, and this is an important distinction. This is precise agent info or tagging silhouettes. The info from a KAY/O knife tells you exactly what agent you tagged. If you tag someone with a Cypher camera or you hit them with a Recon, you actually get their outline. This compares to what mid-range has, and we'll talk about that in a moment. They'll also have access to verticality and non-catalytic dual facilitation. This includes things like decay or vulnerable that generate an advantage for you but aren't an outright catalytic utility.
Finally, looking at mid-range, the most defining characteristic is multi-modality. This is something that can be used in more than one distinct and unique way. They'll also have high volumes of utility. They'll have intermediate or semi-global range fairly regularly. They'll have cooldowns. They'll have soft information to contrast the hard information of control. This is Boolean info, so true/false. When I Skye flash an area, it squawks at me if there is anyone there. It could be one person, it could be five, it could be an extremity controller, it could be a duelist with a flash initiator. We have no idea, but there is some form of information involved. They'll also have healing, and then the hallmark attribute of reusability. This includes toggleable resource bars and retrievability.
Looking at things like Gekko, now this is where the 2.0 of Style Dynamics 2.0 comes in. If any of you have watched my initial video in my Mastering Macro series, we went through Style Dynamics and looked at a very, very simplified scoring system for each agent where each agent got three points, then you combined that all to create a full compositional score, and that could dictate what style each composition fell into. There was statistical evidence to back that up, so even as an oversimplified version, there was a lot of weight behind that system. This, we're going to take quite a significant distance further, and we're going to start very small. We're going to look at an ability level for each agent and we're going to budget them out almost like we did the agents in the initial version of this system. We're going to give three points to each ability in an agent's kit and only one to their ultimate due to its infrequency and impact in the game, and then we're going to combine all of those scores to look at where our compositions land.
Let's walk our way through an example. The example we're going to tackle is admittedly vanilla, but we're doing that because it will be extremely easy for pretty much anyone to follow along with. We're going to look at the bare-bones, ultra-standard pro-play Ascent comp. Starting with Jett, we're going to score out each of her abilities like I said with three points and only one for her ultimate. Starting with her Cloudburst, we're going to give it two points in aggro, one point in control, and zero in mid-range. The reason we're going to score it this way is because in almost every dimension, this is the most aggressive smoke you could imagine. It's spammable, its effective range is pretty short, it has to waft through the air if you're going to get it anywhere beyond just immediately near you, but it still gets that one point in control because of how it can be used. You can easily throw this smoke to get a one-way, albeit brief, and that's a fairly entrenched controlling quality.
Moving to her Updraft, we're also going to score it as two points in aggro, one point in control, and zero points in mid-range. In this case, we're giving it the two points in aggro because it's a spammable ability, its burstiness makes it a pseudo-untradability mechanic, but it gets that point in control because it can just be used for access to verticality.
Moving to Tailwind, I hope this surprises nobody, it's going to have three points in aggro, zero in control, and zero in mid-range. It's the most archetypal dive ability in the entire game. It's an untradability mechanic. This is about as aggro as aggro gets, and it's very cut and dry.
Finally, we get to her Blade Storm, which is going to give us an additional point into aggro. This ability, it just screams aggro. It's meant to be hyper-mobile, it's meant to be able to fight on the go. Everything about this screams aggressiveness. That gives Jett a final agent score of 8 points in aggro, two points in control, and zero in mid-range.
As we move on to Omen, we're going to start with Shrouded Step. I scored this with one point in aggro, two points in control, and zero points in mid-range. The one point in aggro stems from the fact that this can be used in a really scuffed way to function as dive, but it gets the two points in control because it gives you access to verticality and its primary use case is as a repositioning tool that facilitates entrenchment.
Going to Paranoia, this one might trip up a couple of people. We put two points into aggro, one point into control, and zero into mid-range. The two points in aggro come from fairly obvious characteristics: the first of which being Paranoia's extreme catalytic value, the second of which coming from a combination of Paranoia's immediacy of effect as well as its short range. The closer the target is to you, the faster they are affected. This is an incredibly aggro combination of attributes. And then we get to the one point in control, which is the tricky bit, and this stems from the fact that Paranoia can be used as an incredibly strong corridor stall utility. Paranoia is tied for the longest minimum flash duration of any piece of utility in the game, meaning throwing it at a bottleneck will hard stall many, if not all, teams, and that's where this point in control stems from.
Next, we come to Dark Cover, which is zero points in aggro, two points in control, and one point in mid-range. The first of its control points comes from the fact that Dark Cover is a full duration, 15-second smoke. The long duration being a controlling element is what brings that here. The second point is the fact that Dark Cover is one of the only smokes in the game that can effectively and consistently be used to one-way. The remaining point in mid-range stems from the combination of factors that it has a cooldown as well as the fact that it has semi-global range. That leaves us with just Omen's ultimate, From the Shadows, which I give one point in control. I could definitely see an argument as to why someone would put a point in aggro here, as this ability is frequently used to dive back sites during executes, but if you look at the characteristics of the ability itself, it has global range, it gives hard information, and in instances where it is shot and the teleport does not fully channel, the only guaranteed value that this ability provides is controlling in nature. This puts Omen at a 3-6-1 score line across aggro, control, and mid-range. And if we blitz through the remaining agents and the composition, we have Killjoy at 3-7-0, KAY/O at 5-4-1, and Sova at 1-6-3. That leaves this composition as a control-aggro hybrid with 20 points in aggro, 25 in control, and 5 in mid-range.
Now we've laid out the system, understand all of its core tenets, and can even implement it and figure out how to score out individual example compositions. There's only one thing left to do, and that's to look at why this matters. You may have heard me mention earlier that in my past iteration of this video, I pulled statistical evidence that proved that the interplaying dynamics between each of these points of the triangle held up on a statistical basis. Well, I've done that again for the entire competitive VCT level year of 2023, and what should be surprising to nobody, it still holds up across the almost 12,000 rounds of VCT level Valorant played this year. Aggro beat control 50.75% of the time, control beat mid-range 52.17% of the time, and mid-range beat aggro 53.13% of the time. And you can certainly look at that and say, while control beating mid-range and mid-range beating aggro have pretty convincing margins, the aggro-control margin is probably just within variance. And to that, I have a little something to show you, because Valorant has a meta game issue.
If I were to show you this cluster of dots, what would you guess that they are? They represent seven compositions, which, if you plug and play different Sentinels, allowing for that amount of wiggle room, represent more than 50% of all compositions played the entire competitive year of 2023. And where do they land? Right at the intersection of aggro and control. The reason aggro beating control doesn't have as strong evidence as the other archetypes is because there are so many matchups where you have aggro-control binary compositions that it becomes closer to a coin flip. It becomes less a matter of style dynamics and how the team's compositions match up into each other, and more how do both of these teams playing the exact same comp lean into one style or the other and counter their opponent on an intra-round basis. While there's certainly a level of intrigue in that style of gameplay and that type of competition, it certainly isn't high variety. And if anyone is in my camp, as I imagine you are, I've gotten pretty tired of watching the same comps run it down on Ascent for the last two years straight.
And here's where things get a little bit interesting, and you get to leverage this system at a really completely different level, because things haven't always been this way. If I were to add these two red nodes, what would you guess that they are? They're the two core compositions that existed during the Chamber era. The only compositions to ever successfully upend the existing control-aggro meta game. Are you playing a clearly controlling style this round? All right, I'm gonna go aggro. I'm gonna break any sort of setups you have, and we're gonna punish your attempts to do so. Are you playing an aggro style the next round? All right, well, I'm gonna go mid-range. I'm gonna start taxing out all of your utility. In a world where all three points of the triangle are at play, teams actually get to express strategic superiority. And if we really, really want Valorant to be an incredibly complex, thriving competitive esport, I would even take it a step further and say, why are we still missing a third of the triangle? When we look at the layout of every agent in the game, it's pretty obvious where the concentration is and why the meta has been as it has been so far.
And so, a while back, I went through and thought to myself, what things would we have to add for this game to be in a healthier spot? And my first stop was a mid-range Sentinel. My second stop was an aggro-mid-range hybrid slicing controller, and my last stop was a mid-range aggro hybrid duelist. Funnily enough, and if you needed any further evidence of the validity of style dynamics applied to Valorant, let's look at what Riot's been doing and will be doing as it pertains to this timeline that I created. We just got Deadlock, and look at where she falls on this triangle. She's not too far away from the mid-range Sentinel I wanted, although I don't think she does the job well enough to move the needle. The next release from Riot is going to be a duelist. I'm willing to wager that it's probably gonna fall within the mid-range aggro corner. It's certainly not one-to-one, but the devs clearly have an understanding of what creates compelling meta games, and they're using this system, whether consciously or not, in a lot of their decisions.
That's all we have time for in this one, but hopefully, I've earned your subscription, maybe a like, and a share. Obviously, I have endless passion for Valorant theory, but it doesn't exactly have the biggest audience, so every little bit helps. Also, if you're interested, on my Patreon, I post every single patch of competitive Q tier list where I rank every agent, as well as Premiere tier lists where I apply these style dynamics concepts to compositions and rank them for viability in your team's Premier attempts. At tier three of my Patreon, you'll also get access to ready-to-go core playbooks where I've laid out how you can succeed with those compositions. With that said, I also wanted to give a quick shout-out to all of my patrons, which I actually have to put up on the screen because there's so many of them that I can't say them in a video anymore, realistically. Thank you all so much. You are all what makes this able to happen the way that I get it done. And as always, thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you in the next one. You know what? I'm not saying that my mid-range agent concept would have fixed the meta better than Deadlock, but uh, totally would have. Just saying. Just saying.