A wondering about identity

When I was at WBC playing Spirit Island I had to choose a spirit to play.  I immediately gravitated to a lightning spirit, one that obviously spent its time blowing up the enemies.  My cards all smashed and I had powerful AOE so it was clear my job was to PEW PEW.

I wasn't trying to build up.  I wasn't trying to do a combo.  I was purely going to beat down as hard as possible as fast as possible.

Thief said that he was not at all surprised at my choice, and seemed to think this is exactly the sort of thing I do.

Which is strange to me, because I see myself as a control player, not a beatdown player.  When I was playing Magic I constantly gravitated towards control decks, and in fact I was well known in my hometown as being *that guy* who just counterspelled everything you tried to do until my Serpent Generator snake tokens would eventually poison you to death.  I didn't take a controlling spirit type in the game of Spirit Island because I figured I would have to know how the games works to do that properly, but any fool can point lightning bolts at an enemy and watch them burn.

Today I was playing Hearthstone for the first time in awhile and I immediately built a control warlock deck.  Mostly people just conceded to me once I built a sufficiently large wall of taunts, but my final game tonight involved me killing everything.  I was up against an elemental mage who dropped Jaina early on and manufactured endless water elementals.  But finally in the end they played their last minion and I killed it and watched them die to fatigue.  There is nothing quite so satisfying as killing every last thing an opponent has and watching them just fade away to black.  YOU HAVE NOTHING.  I KILLED EVERYTHING!

Beatdown is never, ever as satisfying to me as that feeling of weathering every storm and watching an opponent crumble, flailing, with nothing left.

So I don't think I am a beatdown player.  And yet people who know me pretty well seem to think I gravitate towards beatdown styles.  I wonder if it is just Thief who thinks this, or if other people agree.

If anyone has an opinion on this, I am curious to hear it.  I think of myself as a total control style player, in virtually all games... but maybe I am not seeing myself objectively.