When using MoGraph in Cinema4D, the effectors can be used for several things other than affecting the position, rotation or scale.  Another option is to control the visibility of clones. If you switch to the Parameter tab of an appropriate effector, scroll down and you will see an innocent little check box labeled Visibility.  Now you won’t find this on all the effectors as it just wouldn’t make sense on some of them.  On the effectors where you can use it however, this check box  . . .  believe it or not  . . . makes clones visible or invisible!

Visibility Checkbox

You can use this to simply control which clones are visible and which are not.  Of course you can use the Falloff to control this too.  I’m made a small example scene that demonstrates this using the Random, Shader and Step Effectors.  Although the Step Effector is only really using Falloff as it’s control.

Here’s a preview of the result.

You can download this example scene here.