I spent this past weekend playing a brand new card game, Chrono Core TCG. I entered their premier tournament in Houston, Texas with just a starter deck, and let me tell you, the designers really juiced those up to compete with constructed decks. If you’re a fan of the old MechWarrior style of mecha combat, mixed with what I hoped FAB would be, you definitely want to check this game out.

This week: how to read a metagame, and how to innovate against one. Two articles by two legends, Drake Sasser and Rahul Reddy. One of our longer issues, but definitely worth the read.

Let’s get into it.

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Reading decklists, reading results, and knowing the difference between what people play and what wins. A former MTG pro’s method.

By Drake Sasser

Since the beginning of competitive card games, metagame analysis has been at the forefront of conversations about gaining an edge over other competitors. It is often quoted as the rationale for off-the-wall deck and card choices, and the pseudoscientific nature of analyzing a metagame for a specific format and event leaves plenty of room for truly outlandish justifications. To succeed at the highest level for any card game, understanding the metagame for your event is vital for making the best possible deck choices and preparing your list to face the most powerful threats and largest represented archetypes you will face. How you go about doing so varies a bit for each person, but the roots of the process are centered around the same core ideas: understanding the variables and using them to distill the highest likelihood outcome.

When I used to do coaching for Magic: The Gathering, the second most requested skill to work on outside of learning to pilot decks more proficiently was how to accurately predict what the metagame for a particular event will look like. While my process may not be perfect, and is hardly scientific, reading a metagame boils down to two fundamental actions.

Rather aptly, reading a metagame involves a whole lot of reading. Reading, then analyzing, and finally taking the next logical step suggested by the emerging pattern.

When reading individual decklists, attention to detail is paramount. A decklist may look entirely stock in the maindeck, but maybe it has a sideboard configuration that isn't very common. Maybe a decklist has a stock sideboard but the maindeck flex slots have something unorthodox. Maybe some cards typically in the sideboard are now in the maindeck. Even just a plain, boring, completely stock list from top to bottom can be significant if it shows up in multiples, as that indicates a lack of need for innovation. There is such a thing as regressive deck development and in an era of content-based incentives for games like Magic, it is more common than ever.

The point is a deck doesn’t need to be a completely off-the-wall spicy new strategy to communicate something to you about where the format is now and give you the tools you need to determine where it is going next. It is of course extremely important for you to have extensive experience with most, if not all, of the decks present in the metagame currently, so you have context for cards and what their presence or absence may imply about this player’s opinions about the format, and what is giving them the best chance for success.

The final important note about reading decklists is that not all players carry equal weight. If there is a player you believe to be better than you that you know is preparing for the same event you are, and their decks show up in an online tournament decklist dump or another smaller tournament result that they are clearly using to prepare, then assumptions and information you can extract from that decklist are far more valuable than those from a player you are unfamiliar with. To that end, one of the more bizarre skills you can actively improve to get better at reading metagames is memorizing the usernames for the top players on the digital clients so you could immediately recognize top player results in decklist dumps. Ultimately, the closer aligned a player’s skill level and incentives are to your own, the more use you get out of the things they are telling you by what decks and cards they are trying.

Reading and analyzing tournament results is the most approachable and well-known way to analyze a metagame. For nearly every TCG for which there are high stakes there are websites where you can see tournament results, decklists, and the metagame percentage of each deck for a given event and format. These are valuable tools that do a lot of the data collection steps for you and save you an immense amount of time, but they cannot yet effectively do the analysis step for you.

When analyzing a metagame and trying to distill discrete nuggets of knowledge from the data you have that you can incorporate into your playtesting strategy I find what works best for me is to assess the state of a metagame based on a list of questions that I can individually seek answers to. In general I would do this weekly as I prepared for an event, but if your event is further out it may be prudent to widen the time span just to make sure your time is spent efficiently. The list of questions I would seek to answer includes but is not limited to:

How far out is the event I am preparing for?

Important context to keep in mind broadly. Things can change dramatically from week to week so if you are months out from your event, metagame analysis is probably going to be much less valuable to you than it will be within a month of the event.

What are people playing broadly?

Across as many events as possible, what are people showing up with? This is best used to get the full scope of what is popular, but also helps identify which decks are most accessible to the wider audience, as variables like deck price and perceived deck difficulty are factors in how much a deck is represented across the entire field.

What are people playing when it matters?

Once you have an idea of what the metagame breakdown looks like across as many events across all levels as possible, it is important to then go back and look only at the highest-stakes, most prestigious events you can. This will help you get a better picture of what decks and strategies people believe in when they are really trying to win, and can help you classify decks absent from those events as underperformers and overperformers when juxtaposed with the broader data set. This is also the best time to go looking at specific players and what their specific lists were as that is some of the most valuable data you can get.

What is winning?

This is different from the metagame share data we are looking to analyze with the questions above in a couple important ways. At both the broader and high-stakes levels, what is winning in both spaces often converges. After all, the most successful strategies rarely become less successful just because the stakes are lower on average, but the representation between those winning decks may be way different. Getting an idea for where similarities are found can help you identify early candidates for the “best deck” in an otherwise wide open metagame share. Again, this is another area where specific players matter. A good player winning with a good deck is significant, but if players you have never heard of are winning with a deck, that is equally significant if not more so. A deck is much more compelling to me as underrated if it is able to make deep runs in the hands of less experienced pilots in high stakes events.

What are people not playing at all? 

We talked about this a little bit when talking about decklists because the absence of certain cards is as informative if not more so than the presence, but this is true of historically present decks and archetypes too. If there aren’t any aggro decks in a top 8, and aggro decks haven’t appeared for a while, that tells you something about the public opinion of aggro decks in general that may or may not be true. It is often true that if a deck isn’t showing up it has been outscaled, power-crept, or just doesn’t line up well against the current metagame snapshot. This is not universally true, however, and some of the most iconic and memorable metagame calls for an event stem from a player playing an archetype no one else was prepared for because it had all but disappeared. Answering this question often spawns direct actionables because it is important to understand why people aren't playing certain decks that you otherwise feel could be powerful competition.

Once you have answers to these questions, you almost certainly have distilled questions that need to be answered not by reading tournament data, but instead by playing games. This is where the next step of the tournament preparation process can take place and it is time to start playing games to get answers to your next round of questions. While you are doing so, it is important to keep in mind that other players are asking the same questions and trying hypotheses just like you are. As you get closer to the specific event you are preparing for, in order to be at the next level, you have to start thinking about what it means when your top competition for the event has arrived at the same conclusions you have, and whether or not that is exploitable. Metagames are not stagnant, and much of the art of making metagame calls is discovering what the best deck for a given weekend is, and making sure you are proficient with it. That, however, is an article for another time. For now, thanks for reading!

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When half the field is a single deck, that's not a wall, it's a target. A top-cut finisher on building to beat the known quantity.

By Rahul Reddy

Hey all, I'm back and coming off back-to-back top-cut finishes. I've been thinking about the thing everyone in the room is complaining about: the Tier 0 format. The current hot topic in the Pokemon TCG is the existence of a Tier 0 format.

Now to start this discussion off, what is a tier 0 format? It basically means there’s one deck that is taking up almost 50% of the top meta share with its presence suffocating the other decks in the room and creating an environment where you have to beat it if you want to succeed in a large event. 

Currently the go to plan of action has been to complain about the situation but what players have not noticed is that for the last few majors the meta has been rapidly evolving to allow for innovation and creation to take hold of the metagame. Andrew Hedrick revolutionized the format with his 4 Crushing Hammer Dragapult EX deck at the Los Angeles regional championships and since then that has become the de facto way to play the deck. The tier 0 deck in this case is Dragapult EX with the Crushing Hammers and it is one of those decks where 56-57 cards are locked down with just a handful changing between events to react to the metashifts, why would you change up a winning strategy overall? The following few events saw decks like Mega Lopunny EX/Dudunsparce rise to the top and counter Dragapult as well as Hydrapple EX/Meganium take the spotlight. Chaos Rising was released and players continued to complain. So what happened at NAIC and how can you personally go and innovate further?

We saw 5 non Dragapult EX decks take their spot in Top Cut this weekend with James Kowalski coming up with a super innovative Psychic Mega Kangaskhan Toolbox deck that he championed to a first place finish. James didn’t think about anything but the Dragapult matchup with this deck and chose to target it, some of the other finishers in the Top Cut had the same idea including myself with my Crustle deck. When you are playing against a known quantity it becomes easier to figure out how to find ways to beat it turn after turn. Sometimes your deck doesn’t have to beat everything in the room when you know what almost 50% of the room is going to be.

Moving forward for your own testing and practice you should always consider every option. What I mean by that is don’t accept the deck or the list that is being presented to you right away, many players take countless hours to figure out if one tech card is worth a slot. Take the time to figure out what 60 cards you are playing and WHY you are playing them. Then question everything you think you know. That's how you break the mold and keep the metagame moving. Innovation starts with hard work and just thinking about why each card is played, once you figure out the WHY you can figure out how to beat a deck and go from there. I expect this year’s World Championships to have a lot of fun decks and cards that players will innovate and revolutionize.

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