Standard Deviations: Understanding the Metagame

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HammerAndSickled

3 June 2011

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Hello all, and welcome to my new column here on TappedOut! I plan this to be a regular weekly column published every Friday (just in time for our beloved main-page makeover for FNM edition) to hopefully give some of you insight into what to expect at your local Friday Night Magic events, and how to prepare. Obviously, everyone's personal metagame is different, and you need to adapt to the way your individual store plays, but we all know the “trickle-down” theory of metagame-economics: that the individual sixties that show up at the top tables of Opens and Pro Tours inevitably show up the next week at local stores. I'm not going to get into a discussion of net-decking today, but since the goal of my writing is to better prepare you for the environments you're likely to face, it's best to know your enemy. Since we're here on TappedOut, a site devoted to testing and critiquing our own deck ideas, I'm going to assume that most of you aren't looking for the best Caw-Blade list to sleeve up, but rather how you can make your own brews more competitive against the standard decks of Standard. And for that, I salute you! Now, lets get started.

From a game theory perspective, a “metagame” is defined as a strategy which operates outside the confines or ruleset of the game. If I had to paraphrase, I would define it as “knowledge from the collection of all the games you aren't playing.” Essentially, when you sit down to sling some spells with an opponent, whether it's at the kitchen table or the finals of the Pro Tour, you are using information from outside this particular game to influence your actions. Maybe you've seen the deck before in a previous game, and know what to expect. Maybe you know how this particular player likes to build decks or play, and can expect certain things as a result. Even if you have never seen this player or deck before, you have some metagame information simply because you know how decks are likely to be built. He's bound to have some mix of lands, creatures, and spells. Depending on the sets your format allows for deck construction, you can be reasonably sure that he's running certain card types over others (Scars block is a good example of this, as nearly every deck has adopted some artifacts in their seventy-five). All of this information can be used in your particular game, but you come to know it from factors outside the game.

Now, in tournament Magic the metagame is a little more strictly defined. It is colloquially used as the sum of all decks people are consistently using within a format. The formats of Magic vary wildly, not just because of the innate card restrictions in them but also because from week to week the metagame shifts. While you can use all the cards in the game in the Vintage constructed format, that does not entail that mathematically there is one “best deck” that lies unchallenged until a set of bannings or a new set comes by to disrupt the balance (if there is one, I'd bet it plays multiple copies of Jace, the Mind Sculptor). Instead, what we see is a trend of a constantly adapting metagame. As one deck becomes more popular, players who desire to win will adapt decks that prey upon the weaknesses of that deck and eventually the field will be more even, with the original deck dominated by its foil deck which is in turn disrupted by a deck that could not have functioned in a format oppressed by one deck.

If you're new to the tournament scene, this might all be confusing to you. Let's use an example: if you're playing casually with a friend, who we'll call Steve. You play against this guy every week, and eventually learn that Steve's go-to deck to play is a fast red deck with low-costed haste creatures like Goblin Guide and low-costed burn spells like Lightning Bolt. “My typical strategy isn't working,” you think to yourself as you scoop up your cards for the tenth loss in a row. So you decide to build a deck that can beat Steve's. You notice that most of the creature removal spells in his deck do 2-4 points of damage, and that all of his creatures have 2-3 power. He also seems to blow his hand out early, often having no cards in hand by turn 4 or 5. So you build a mono-green deck filled with fat creatures like Leatherback Baloth, Obstinate Baloth, and Pelakka Wurm with some early-game acceleration and blockers in the form of Llanowar Elf and Overgrown Battlement. Now Steve barely has a chance against you, because as long as you survive to turn 3 he's going to have to deal with huge creature after huge creature, and even if he manages to take one down through two of his cards (either two burn spells or a creature block combined with a burn spell) he simply doesn't have the resources to play that game out forever. Assuming you both draw spells at a roughly equal rate, you'll win every time. This is an example of metagaming: using what you know about the environment to shape your play and construction decisions.

Now, lets say you're playing for a while and a new player enters your playgroup. We'll call him Adam. Adam shows up with a strange blue-and-white deck that doesn't seem to be interested in attacking into your giant creatures at all. He plays Preordain and See Beyond in the early turns to draw some cards and get selective advantage, letting you play out a field full of beefy Baloths and bringing him down to 14-15 life. Then, like clockwork, he always plays a Day of Judgment, clearing your board of three or four creatures and leaving you with probably nothing in hand or on the field but lands, and then drops a Sphinx of Jwar Isle to kill you in four clean swings. If you do manage to draw a new creature to replace it and try to race he has a Cancel or Mana Leak at the ready. Every game you play out your creatures as early as you can, which you learned was advantageous from playing against Steve, and every game he has that one sweeper to send you home with a loss. Just as your Baloths got you a win against Steve by stifling his early pressure and making him spend two cards for each of yours, so too did Adam crush you by killing three of your creatures with one and essentially closing out your midgame with counterspells.

But you know what's funny? Steve has no problem crushing Adam every game. Adam takes his time drawing cards and maybe countering a few early spells but by the time his board wipe comes online, he's down to 5-8 life from good old Goblin beatdown, and the Lightning Bolts and Burst Lightnings close it out before big bad Sphinx of Jwar Isle has time to be too disruptive. This illustrates the metagame perfectly: playing against a known field of one type of deck leaves you vulnerable to another deck, which may be good against you but not so much against the rest of the field. Obviously these are the most simple examples, but it's easy to see how the principle can be applied to help tune your decks to attack the metagame where it is weakest.

Generally, there are only three pure deck types in any format. Aggro decks try their hardest to close the game out before the opponent can mount a meaningful defense. Red decks are the easiest types of aggro decks to imagine, as the familiar form of a Red deck is to use early creatures and burn spells to close the game quickly. But aggro decks exist in all colors and combinations: what they all share is a willingness to trade card quality for speed and a desire to win quickly.

Control decks are the opposite of aggro: they seek a long, drawn out game where the superior quality of their cards and opportunities to gain more cards than their opponent finally avalanche into victory. Players of control often play one-for-one types of attrition spells like Doom Blade and various counterspells to try and survive into the late game, where having more cards than your opponent through card draw like Jace's Ingenuity and having “better” cards (Baneslayer Angel strictly dominates Craw Wurm) will tilt the game in their favor. Pure control decks tend to have a less-than-favorable (but certainly not unwinnable, depending on the format) matchup against aggro strategies, because the large casting cost bombs in their hand waiting for the lategame are quickly invalidated by a turn 5 loss. Blue, Black, and White tend to be the “control” colors, for their early game removal spells as well as their late-game opportunities for card advantage. In theory, however, any deck can play a control game as long as it has the tools to weather the storm of aggro and close out the game with powerful spells.

Why play control if it loses more often than not to the matchup it has the tools for? There is a third “pure” archetype, however, which control strictly dominates. It is called combo. Newer players have a hard time imagining combo decks, because the last few sets have been quite dry of competitive-quality combos. Essentially, the point of a pure combo deck is to find two or more cards in its deck that, in combination, can win the game quicker than normal aggression or through use of an alternate win condition. Quillspike and Devoted Druid formed a combo deck a few seasons ago (although not a very competitive one) but it serves to illustrate the example. The Druid taps to add a green mana, then untaps, putting a -1/-1 counter on itself. The Quillspike uses that green mana and removes the counter to give itself a Giant Growth. Devoted Druid is now untapped and ready to go again, so a player can pump the Quillspike infinite times and crash in or Rite of Consumption for the win. This deck can easily win on turn 4 if its components come out on time, making it usually one turn faster than the aggressive decks of its day. For this reason, combo tends to crush aggro given good draws, but usually folds to control because control has the tools to just Doom Blade the Devoted Druid as it sees fit, Unsummon the Quillspike after it swings, or Mana Leak the Rite of Consumption. Good luck trying to draw three copies of each of your combo pieces, because I'm saving all my removal for that!

It would be really nice if the world stayed in such an equilibrium, this perfect dance of aggro-control-combo. But people tend to innovate, as we all like to do. If you're playing a control deck you're not satisfied with just folding when you see a turn-1 Goblin Guide on the play from your opponent, are you? No, you want to win! You put in the early-game defense cards like Wall of Omens and you put in the Day of Judgment for when the board gets too cluttered and you upgrade your finisher to Baneslayer Angel to gain some life to escape burn range, and suddenly the matchup becomes favorable. You still have a counter-suite of Mana Leaks and Cancels to deal with combo decks, and of course there's always a sideboard. You've made a deck that has just shored up its unwinnable matchups while preserving the tools to stay afloat in the field. Congratulations, you just made a good deck. Of course, a pure control deck is likely to stomp you, as they have more counters and more removal than you, as well as all the card draw you likely cut out in favor of your walls. This is a simplistic view at how the metagame works.

Join me next week when I take a look at the current standard metagame, post-New Phyrexia. There have been a few high-profile tournaments since then, so we'll look at the state of the art and how to combat this open field.