Control is the ability to end the game while ahead.
?
Where did you get this? That's not the standard concept of control. The term literally comes from a deck whose purpose is to control the opponents cards and progression. +buys, gains, and alt-VP all affect your own deck and does nothing to control your opponents. It forces your opponent to keep pace, which is why I called this "tempo." Now giving your opponent junk or making them discard controls their cards, i.e. "control."
Again, thinking in the TCG sense is not a great way of approaching Dominion. They are both fundamentally different things. I object to using TCG definitions because they're simply confusing. Control is messing up the opponents deck, which makes no sense for Dominion. You'd logically think control is controlling your own thing, right? It may make sense for the TCG end, but not so for Dominion.
I'm not even sure your definition is correct, either. I pulled a quote from Hearthstone wiki for a Control deck, and maybe it's different for say MTG, I don't know.
A control deck, also known as a late game deck, is a deck that attempts to attain victory in the late game, through a combination of early game removal and Taunts, and powerful cards in the later rounds of the game. These decks focus on controlling the early game in order to survive through to the later rounds, where they can use a string of powerful spells, or a steady flow of larger minions to overwhelm the opponent. -Hearthstone WikiYes, it controls the opponent, but it's a subset of the general idea of controlling the outcome of the game, i.e. control of one's deck as well. I see no real objection to calling what I called 'control', because there isn't really a 'removal' type in Dominion in the first place.
...even silly things like trashing attacks aren't really 'Removal' in the typical sense.
There's no persistent board in Dominion to remove from. But you buy cards in order to play them. If you then force the opponent to discard, you've removed that card from their ability to play. This is probably the most clear correspondence of any from classical TCGs.
1. You make it harder to play all the cards they want. This is not removing them from the game.
2. Opponents will discard their worst cards, not lose their best ones.
Again, arguing this is going to be kind of moot anyways, Dominion and Hearthstone are two completely different games. You say it's a bad idea to compare the two later on, but then you do it anyways? Why?
Tempo is being built up to win faster than your opponent ...
I don't know what it means to win slower than your opponent. This definition is meaningless in a game where the definition of winning is tied to speed. You've basically said "Tempo is winning." Also, any rush strategy that aims to go faster than an engine is more of an aggro strategy.
You don't win slower than your opponent. That is why Tempo is important! Tempo is simply time. If you win before your opponent, you won faster than they did. It's not like your opponent didn't want to win! He was just slower at it. So yes, tempo is winning in a sense. I like more accurate definitions though, so if you have a better one, I'd love to hear it. I readily admit my definition is sloppy.
To win, you want to get to point A faster. And then point B. And then C, all the way to Z.
All in all, this is a somewhat poor way to think about Dominion ... it is better to have a unique system of thinking for every different game ...
I agree, and have tried to point this out in every reply. It just seemed some people were into this concept based on the original responses to the OP. I thought there was room to add in tempo decks instead of classifying that one big idea as a control deck. I kind of didn't expect this much pushback on something that was supposed to be very loose correspondences anyway.
Fair enough.
I don't mean to be this obnoxious person, I apologize. It's not universally agreed on with all of the terminology and how to think of Dominion, so there's a lot of heated debate about even simple things like 'control' and even 'engines'. It seems to be somewhat of a (insert some name that I forgot, I think it was Hilbert) Problem where sometimes reality won't ever 100% match a given definition. Another example is art. Art is very hard to define because anybody can make an exception for basically anything.