Rock. Paper. Scissors.
The metagame circus.
Permission beats Combo beats Aggro beats Permission.
This model, while an oversimplification, is a good starting point when it comes to discussing how to select your deck based on the environment around you, rather than the more common methods of “that deck seems broken” or “I think I like this one.” All too often I see players drop out of tournaments early, shaking their heads in bewilderment at how they could have run into their bad matchup so many times.
For purposes of illustration, I’ll talk about the rock-paper-scissors model of the metagame; that is, an environment that has evolved into simply “Deck X beats Deck Y beats Deck Z beats Deck X.” This happened two years ago at Regionals, where we had Goblins beating Tooth and Nail, which in turn beat Affinity (or so I’m told), which in turn beat Goblins.
Thus, if you took Tooth and Nail to Regionals, you had – assuming a completely average build – a good chance at winning if you were paired against Affinity, a poor chance if you were paired against Goblins, and a 50% shot at the mirror. If you got paired against Affinity all day, then bam! You were a lock for the Top 8. If you ran into Goblins all day, you went home nice and early.
Two guys of similar playskill might have gone with the same decks; one got his dream pairings, and the other got his nightmare pairings. One went home sad while the other took a victory lap at the end of the Swiss.
In fact, if this whole rock-paper-scissors idea were completely accurate, and if everyone brought equal quantities of all three decks, most people should have an average win rate of 50%: 50-50 against the mirror, 70-30 against the bad matchup, and 30-70 against the good matchup, averaging back out to 50-50 overall. A 50% win rate doesn’t get you into the Top Eight, so clearly something else must be done if one is to achieve that goal.
Since certain Magic players do consistently well at almost every event they attend, it is unlikely that they are merely the beneficiaries of extremely fortunate pairings, time and time again. As we all know, the real reason for this is that the three-pronged metagame is an oversimplification; there are many, many ways a Magic player can exceed the predicted matchup outcomes, and overcoming these unfavorable odds is precisely how you consistently do well at tournaments.
The first way that you can break out of this loop is by, well, having lots of playskill. I was talking to a certain Pro Tour Champion earlier about my deck choice for Honolulu, and at some point in the discussion I asked what he would be taking to the tournament. His response basically amounted to “I’m just going to bring the control deck I know best and outplay people.” I guess that’s fine… if you’re the caliber of player who has won a Pro Tour in his lifetime. For the rest of us, that might not be such a realistic option just yet, but it’s calming to know that if you get good enough at this game, you can just “bring a good control deck” to the Pro Tour and still expect to do well.
If you’re like me, you might try to defeat the numbers by refusing to play an established build of one of the popular decks. You’ll throw a monkey wrench into the works somewhere, making a Skullclamp control deck when everyone else is making Skullclamp aggro decks (check), dumping Meloku and Keiga from MUC in exchange for a combo kill with Proteus Staff (check), and running Vedalken Shackles and Cremate in U/B Psychatog when everyone else is playing three-color Dredgeatog (aaaand check). In this way, you fudge the numbers a bit – hopefully in your favor, but if your metagame predictions are off, you can end up doing more harm than good. You have to be very careful when doing this, and make sure that all of your changes are steering you toward a better chance at winning tournaments, rather than just changing things for the sake of being different.
I played B/G Skullclamp Control (when everyone else was playing it aggro-style) because the two most popular decks were Goblins and Affinity. They all beat the control decks using Skullclamp, whereas I just beat them using Skullclamp. The control decks were having to do things like maindeck Damping Matrix to shut down the hyper-efficient draw engine, whereas I was just using it to my own benefit, in order to draw into more removal, more 187 creatures (which then wore Skullclamps and blocked, drawing me even more cards in the process), and eventually a lopsided Death Cloud that put me and my extra cards way up on permanents, leaving my opponent with an empty hand and close to nothing in play.
The next year I retooled the slow, plodding win conditions of Meloku and Keiga in MUC because I found they were not getting the job done against Tooth and Nail, the best deck in the format. Whereas I could just go “counter, counter, counter, combo out a Darksteel Colossus (via Proteus Staff) on turn 6 with countermagic mana open,” the other MUC decks were scrambling to hit their eighth land drop so they could play Meloku with Hinder backup. And with Tooth and Nail playing seven or eight ways to search up Boseiju, this was no simple task. I didn’t make the Top 8 of Regionals that year (though at a record of 7-1, I found myself obliged to wonder, “Shouldn’t I be able to draw in by now?”), but the important lesson to take away is the reasoning behind my changes. It wasn’t just a “wouldn’t it be cool if I killed with a combo instead of with The Clouded Mirror of Victory?” kind of decision; I just saw a problem, and came up with a solution.
This year I played U/B Tog when most other Tog players were running three colors and the Gifts Ungiven/Life from the Loam/Cycling land engine, because starting with Antoine Ruel U/B build let me maindeck four Cremates as well as several copies of Vedalken Shackles, and a maindeck Meloku. Though there was not a three-pronged metagame at the time, these bad boys helped out against Ichorid, CAL, and Aggro Rock, three popular decks where other Tog builds had deficient matchups. (Or so I’m told.)
But superlative playskill and tweaking existing decks aren’t the only way to break out of the unfavorable odds of rock-paper-scissors. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of looking at how closely the decks in the metagame actually adhere to this simplistic model. For example, before Affinity was banned in Mirrodin-Kamigawa-Eighth Standard, I played a lot of Tooth and Nail online. My build was tweaked, as usual, but not drastically so…because I didn’t feel that any of Tooth and Nail’s deficient matchups were all that bad. Land destruction decks aimed specifically at crushing Tooth and Nail were 50-50 for me; I almost never lost to Affinity – if memory serves my final match count was 33-3 against that deck – and so the mirror match was tied as my worst matchup at 50%.
Sometimes, you discover that one deck is just so much better than all the others, that the common wisdom about it beating one of the other Tier 1 decks and losing to another is just wrong. In such a case, you play the deck you’ve found to be overpowering, and reap the benefits of the percentages you know the deck has, while everyone else incorrectly assumes it’s “just another Tier 1 deck.”
Now if you’re stumped on the innovation front, not (yet) possessive of enough playskill to just run a control deck and bash face, and convinced that the decks in the metagame really do accurately fit the model of “X beats Y beats Z beats X,” then you have two final options.
First, you can figure out how much you expect the decks in the metagame to be played, and then choose the one whose bad matchup is expected to show up the least. You might not have good matchups against all the Tier 1 decks, but if fewer people are playing the Tier 1 deck that beats you (for whatever reason), and your good matchup is significantly more popular, then you’ve at the very least made a solid choice.
And then, of course…you can invent your own archetype. Most of us are not good enough to scratch-build a deck whose win percentages exceed those of the established decks, but if you’ve exhausted all your other options and cannot find a deck to play that you like, this option certainly has its merits.
For one, even if you don’t do well, the season will teach you a lot. Working closely with a deck and being forced to update and tune it as a season progresses will teach you a lot about Constructed Magic, just like playing a very complex control deck for a season will improve your Constructed playskill. If you accept the fact that you might not win as much as you usually do, and – most importantly – if you think it’ll be fun, this is always an alternative worth exploring.
I see a lot of players jumping into a tournament playing a deck because “it’s good,” or because “it beats X,” without really taking the metagame as a whole into proper consideration. If you aren’t taking your environment into account every step of the way when choosing the deck to play, then you’re putting your own success squarely in the hands of the pairings. You’re barreling headlong into the tournament just hoping you’ll play your best matchup every time, even when a glance at the percentages might tell you you’ve got almost no chance of things lining up so favorably at the actual event.
Now, although I’ve just detailed my whole process of deck selection for you, you should feel free to ignore it and come up with your own. By any account, make sure you do come up with a process; the Pairings Gods are merciless and wrathful, and if you let them, they will keep you from the Top 8 as long as they can.
See you tomorrow.
Richard Feldman
Team Check Minus
[email protected]