8/3/2023 0 Comments Mtg metagame![]() On the first round, you might just go at it randomly, but you would increase your odds of winning if you knew what you opponent was going to play. You chose one strategy for the entire tournament, and then are paired with other competitors one round at a time. Now imagine yourself participating in a 2000 players competition of this game (which I shall therefore brand RPSLS on the grounds that I want to). I am sure you all get the gist : Lizard beats Spock, Spock beats Scissors, Scissors beat Paper, etc… Quite understandably, this game's metagame is comprised of five strategies: Rock, Papers, Scissors, Lizard and Spock. Source: Snorgtees and The Big Bang Theory For instance, if an archetype represents 8% of all the decks that are being played and the following archetype in terms of popularity represents a mere 5%, I would consider this an important shift and I would consider the second archetype the start of Tier 2. I now consider tier 1 to be the most popular archetypes up until I can spot an important shift in representation. Tier 3 meant that the deck was currently irrelevant, even though that might change some day. Tier 2 decks were the following decks in terms of representation and were usually the niche decks that could thrive if paired against specific top tier decks they could beat but could just as well fail to deliver if paired against other archetypes of the format. In my early years of playing the game, I defined tier 1 as the archetypes that, added up, comprised of 50% of the total played decks. ![]() The border between Tiers, much like Tempo, has never been treated in a serious or objective way. You might hear "Tier 1.5," which is made up of decks that are borderline between tier 1 and 2, and sometimes, you might hear funny things like tier 4 or tier 1000, which is used to describe non-competitive decks played in a competitive environment. ![]() Tier 1 includes the most important decks at any given moment, and then the competitiveness/popularity decreases as you move down in tiers. This is what "metagame" actually means, and this is where "Tiers" become relevant.Ī deck's tier is classified by the deck's competitiveness and presence at a given time. This is what most people actually mean when speaking of metagame: given that it is pointless to stick to the literal definition of the metagame, everyone directly focuses on the field of popular strategies. What you might be interested in knowing, however, is which strategies are the most popular. What this means is quite simple: don't bother. After all, for many formats, there is no maximum number of cards you can have in a deck, making it simply amount to an infinite number. When trying to take into account every possible combination of cards to make a deck in a given format, you might feel your head spinning. Seriously though, the metagame technically defines all the legal combinations of legal cards within a format, so it is not very useful as such. ![]() Clearly this card is busted and should be banned in more than a few formats. The MTG metagame is the list of the possible decks that are legal in a given format.Īnd yes, in case you are wondering, this does include "60 Islands" in any 60-cards format. So, the real question becomes: what is a strategy in Magic? The stricto sensu answer is tricky, but let's focus on our MTG metagame. It's about as simple as that, but if you're interested in the details, a strategy is a series of legal actions available to a player within a game up until the game ends. A metagame can be defined as followed:įor a given game (in our case, an MTG format, such as Standard or Commander), the metagame is the whole of the existing strategies for this game. It is taken from game theory, a branch of mathematics about decision making. Metagame, aka Meta or The Meta, actually has a very simple definition that goes well beyond Magic: The Gathering. You might have heard this word come up a lot around you. Stay tuned if you're interested! Metagame and Tiers Metagame If a mere definition is what you seek, then you can probably stop around the first half of this piece, but I will try to develop a bit of metagaming theory after that. Some of you might remember that in my last article, I mentioned that Metagame was a tough notion to cover because it is actually really easy to define. After going through CA, Tempo and tiebreakers, let's work on a lighter notion: the Metagame. While some words are easy to define, some have a sturdy theoretical background, or are simply not easy to describe as such. In the current set of chapters on Define This, we are going into more specific notions of the vocabulary.
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