What Are Deck Archetypes? (Magic: The Gathering)

One of the things that are exceedingly common in Magic: The Gathering deck building communities is the idea of "deck archetypes" - like the Spellslinger deck or the Aristocrats deck. Some websites will elaborate more on different kinds of archetypes (like EDHREC's list of themes, which separates similar decks into different categories).

Some archetypes center around similar play patterns, getting you into a familiar loop. Others focus on particular kinds of cards, such as generating Treasure Tokens or creating copies of things on the board.

The purpose of a deck archetype is to make the struggle of building a deck and, in effect, summarizing what your deck does much easier. It's a whole lot faster to say "I have a Black-Red Aristocrats deck" than it does to explain in detail what an Aristocrats deck does: "Sacrificing things to a sacrifice outlet in order to gain some sort of advantage, often in the form of buffing creatures that have escaped the sacrifice outlet."

Common archetypes can be found listed on EDHREC under "Themes", which will also share the top Commanders and top cards in the Commander format for those archetypes.