Metagame refers to more than just the decks that players in an environment play. It refers to how they choose those decks in the first place, how they build them, and how they pilot them as well. It refers to how those decks respond to one another and how they change over time. Metagaming as a philosophy applies to more than just Magic, but you’ll be happy to know that there’s a Wikipedia entry with a whole section about Magic. So we’re all on the same page, we’re going to work from the basic definition that metagame refers to things outside the game of Magic’s rules set.
Many players refer to the deck selection of an environment or format as the metagame, but that’s only part of the story. "Jund/Faeries/Eggs" isn’t the complete picture. "I’m playing Eggs because no one’s playing any counterspell decks" is a metagame choice. An even deeper metagame analysis might include, "Because of the Jund deck’s popularity, which came in response to the creature aggro decks, counterspell/control decks aren’t viable, so the door is open for a combo deck." Putting Orim’s Chant in your sideboard in case there is a control deck is metagame choice. Even during play, when you’re deciding which turn you’re going to try going off based not only what’s on the board but what might be in the opponent’s hand is a metagame choice.
We’re going to talk today specifically about how Commander metagames develop, the differences between them and other formats, and use examples from how I’ve seen things progress in my local environment.
First of all, it’s important to point out that here is no format-wide Commander metagame. Because there are multiple different viewpoints on how to play—some environments highly cutthroat, some highly durdly—each group (whether that group is Bob’s Kitchen Table, the University of Bob Game Club, or Bob’s Cards and Comics) has its own character, and players often port between the different groups. The size of the group is a primary determinant in how things develop, and I think the smaller group size is what Richard Garfield had in mind when he first thought about how the game would instantiate.
Whether or not you want to play in one of those places is also a metagame choice. "Bob invited me over to his kitchen table game this week, and I know those guys are really casual. I don’t really want to show up with my Hermit Druid combo deck and win on turn 4 every time." Obviously, the other side of that coin exists too. "Those guys are really casual, so I’m going to go crush them repeatedly with Arcum Dagsson. This will be so easy!"
Commander metagames develop far more slowly than others like Standard and Modern. There are four reasons.
First, the rate of change is much slower because there isn’t the same temporal necessity or pressure to adapt. In competitive formats, players always need to be on the leading edge if they want to win. In Commander, with less focus on simply winning and more on winning in the particular fashion you want (or even just doing the thing you want whether you win or not), you’ll be more likely to give strategies or cards more chances.
Second, there is less focus at the deckbuilding stage on what other people might be doing. Again, much of Commander deckbuilding is "I have a cool idea I want to explore." You don’t have to evaluate "can I beat the Jund/Faeries/Eggs deck?" Unless your regular playgroup is somewhat closed and you’re seeing only the same five or six decks all the time, you’re willing to stretch your legs a bit with ideas or just do things to see what will happen.
When folks say they’re playtesting Commander decks, it doesn’t mean the same as testing in competitive environments. What they’re doing is simply seeing how things work with no specific end in mind other than to see if they like what a card or strategy does. For the most part, they’re not prepping for a tournament or competition; they’re looking at how cards function in the context of their own deck. They’re not arranging a gauntlet of other decks to play against to evaluate win/loss percentages or attempting to figure out what everyone else might be playing for an upcoming event. Playtesting, like super teams such as Team SCG do, is pretty scientific stuff, and their data sampling is much greater than me running out Vorrac Battlehorns for a few games to see how it might do in Animar, Soul of Elements.
Third, the Eternal nature of the format simply means that players are less willing to do wholesale swaps of cards—much like in Vintage and Legacy. Although folks switch cards out in ones and twos all the time, I find Commander players are more likely to simply build an entirely new deck than they are to swap ten or twelve cards out of an existing one. Unless you have a fair amount of free time (like me) and an unhealthy obsession (like me), building and maintaining a deck for every cool idea you have gets awkward, time-consuming, and potentially expensive.
Four, Commander players generally have more than one deck available to them, and they often choose that deck based on what they feel like at the moment or sometimes even randomly. One of our local players has two decks and has both Commanders facing different directions in the same toploader. To choose which deck he’s going to play, he does a big spin/flip of the toploader. Whichever is face up is his deck for that game. When it’s more difficult to know what other players are going play because there are even greater variables, it’s more difficult to make pre-game metagame choices (which include deck building and deck selection), slowing the rate of the environment’s development.
The other significant difference between Commander and other formats is that not everyone is playing the same metagame. Sure, you get that guy at FNM who’s been playing mono-red since Odyssey block, but that’s for the most part the exception. In Commander, far more players are simply playing what they want to play. They choose cards "because they’re cool" or make decks because of a theme ("look, all my legendary creatures represent dead Game of Thrones characters!").
Now that we’ve talked about how Commander metagames are different, let’s explore their development path. It’s important distinction that the source of metagame decisions for Commander can either be internal or external—internal being made solely from the player’s own beliefs or desires and external being from data the player has gathered from outside him or herself. The three major factors are foundations, results, and reactions.
Foundations refers to basic premises that the player carries in to approaching the format. The deckbuilding and format-specific rules are not part of the metagame; they’re part of the rules set. How the player will approach building the deck and working within the rules set are. In foundations, the player chooses his or her goals. Goals in this format include winning/killing other players, having a good time, creating or participating in epic plays, creating specific board states, and more.
Once you’ve chosen the goal, then you figure out how you want to make it happen. For example, Pro Tour Scorekeeper Nick Fang Grip of Chaos has the goal of creating as much mayhem as possible (and was featured on the mothership quite a while back—I’ll see if I can get an update version from him). It runs cards like Possibility Storm[/author]“][author name="Possibility Storm"]Possibility Storm[/author], Confusion in the Ranks, and Radiate simply for the laughs they create.
The foundation is a place where you might consider playing cards that will interact with other people’s strategies or protect your own based on your experience with the format and the people you know you’ll be playing with. The classic example is building in some counterspell capability, or maybe the Orim’s Chant mentioned above to protect your combo when you try to go off. You’ll get more information on this in reactions since you’ll have a better sense of the types of things the other players are doing.
Results refers to how the deck functioned. This is more than just "did it win?" It’s "did it meet my goals?" For the next time you’re going to play the deck, you’ll have to evaluate how cards did in pursuit of those goals. If your goal was to have a deck that created as many Plant tokens as possible and you couldn’t because you didn’t have access to the right color or amount of mana to Clone Avenger of Zendikar a dozen times, you figure out what went wrong.
A single game isn’t likely to have major impact on evaluating these kinds of results—mana bases and curves are evaluated over multiple games. The results you’ll have to think about from a single game are the kinds where particular card interactions didn’t work the way you wanted them to ("What? That card is a sorcery?") or didn’t create the desired effect.
Results is also where you evaluate how much you enjoyed the deck. We all get our enjoyment differently, but here you figure out why you did or didn’t have a good time with it. Was it because you were a non-factor in the game? Did your turns take so long that the other players got bored? In a social format, how much we liked what was going on impacts how we approach future games far more than it would in a competitive one.
Reactions refers to what we commonly think of as metagame choices and is the actions we take with results. Reactions happen as you observe how games play out in your group—what cards, deck styles, and strategies get played (or not) and by which players. This is where you are exposed to cards and strategies that slow down or cripple your deck then make appropriate adjustments, where you take in that external data and do something with it.
If you find out your friends love Wrath of God effects, then that impacts both how you play and how you build your decks. During play, you’re going to keep a creature or two in your hand instead of playing them all out so that you can recover quicker. In building, you’re going to provide some protection for your creatures. You know you can’t regenerate from Wrath of God and Damnation, but you can from Day of Judgment, Akroma’s Vengeance, and Austere Command. Applying that information, you run Faith’s Reward, Ghostway, or Second Sunrise to protect you from Wrath / Damnation, whereas you might play Asceticism or any number of other regeneration effects if you see more of the others.
Because Commander groups are significantly smaller than your FNM or PTQ scene, you’re more likely to get insights into individual players and how they play. If one of your friends has only one deck, you know for the most part what they’re going to throw at you.
If you’re playing some kind of Storm deck and Bob loves playing Rule of Law, you’re going to have to pack some enchantment removal. If you want to battle for lots of combat damage and Bob loves playing Constant Mists / Crucible of Worlds, you’ll either want a counterspell for that Constant Mists or a Relic Crush for that Crucible. If Bob has only one deck, I’m not suggesting building the beat-only-Bob deck, but playing cards that react well to the cards he plays is reasonable protection. That said, packing Chill because you’re tired of his shenanigans with Norin the Wary is absolutely a metagame choice.
Even if players have multiple decks, they tend to have play styles. I know that I personally like doing stuff with creatures, mostly attacking. It’s a reasonable metagame choice for the folks that I regularly play with to pack things which create hostile board states for creatures or at least prevent me from killing them with attack steps.
Knowing the other players also helps you figure out what they might have in hand at any given time. If you know that Bob is such a slave to theme (actually, for this example, we’re going to call Bob "Toby Elliott") that he’s not running any Wrath effects in his Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice deck because Selesnya is all about life and growth, then you can be confident that Toby isn’t going to wreck you for overextending with creatures (but remember that Toby might not be the only player in game).
Now that we’ve discussed how Commander metagames develop, let’s take a specific look at some of the things I face where I play, Armada Games. We’ll use my Karador deck for examples along the way. Although I play in the Armada Games EDH League nearly every week that I’m in town, the League only accounts for about a third of the games I play.
I generally show up at the shop around 1400 on Thursday afternoon to get my fix before the League starts at 1900. There’s a core group of six-to-ten players who are also commonly there at the same time, many of whom you’ve read about in some of my reports like Apple, Melvin, Shea, Kyle, and Anthony. This means that I play a greater percentage of my games with a somewhat closed group, so my metagame choices are based (sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously) on the people with whom I play the most. I’m aware going in that League games are slightly different and the field is more wide open but also that I play with the "afternoon guys" in League sometimes.
At the foundations stage, I go in knowing a few things. The first is the group is hostile to mass land destruction—most likely as a result of the League counting it as a negative. I know during deckbuilding that I’m not likely to have to put in Sacred Ground or Terra Eternal or have a backup plan on how to recover from Armageddon. The second is that there is a general slant away from raw combo decks. Sure, decks have combos in them, but there are no raw-dog "combo out turn 5" decks. What I take from this is that I don’t have to participate in the escalating arms race and figure out how to kill them by turn 4.
The third thing I know is that epic combats are popular—Avenger of Zendikar, Craterhoof Behemoth (sometimes in tandem), tokens plus Beastmaster Ascension, Insurrection, and the like. This means that in the foundation stage, I want to make sure that I have a few Fog effects. Even if I’m running an epic combat strategy of my own, there are times that someone else’s board is going to be better than mine. Cards like Holy Day, Tangle, Spore Cloud, Riot Control, Seht’s Tiger, Crawlspace, and Moat get considered to go into decks.
A unique part for us in the foundation stage is the League points system. Although the specifics change from League to League, I know going in that there are more things than just killing other players that I can get points for and things that I can get penalized for. I can plan accordingly. The no-mass-land-destruction penalty has impact, as does the penalty for drawing more than ten cards in a turn cycle. I know that there’s currently a point for having six or more nontoken creatures in play, none of which share a creature type. I might choose to try to take advantage of that, which means a non-tribal deck.
Foundations is also where I choose which deck to play (one could argue there’s also a choice of which decks I decide to bring along on any given day). I might play my Kresh deck in the non-League game because it’s likely to have that moment where I play Momentous Fall on a 30/30 Kresh and I’d rather not incur the penalty during League. I don’t actually play any decks that are specifically designed to take advantage of the League points—I certainly have none built with the positive points in mind—but I do build them to (for the most part) avoid the League penalties.
Let’s look at the Karador deck and see some of the choices I made at the foundations stage. I chose the commander, the graveyard recursion theme, and most of the mana ramp here. I didn’t make any choices about who I’d be playing the deck with here, but because of the strong creature bases, I chose a few cards like Sudden Spoiling and Decree of Pain. I also chose some utility like Fracturing Gust and Aura Shards. That’s a brief glimpse; the entirety of the foundation stage is written up in Player’s Guide to Karador.
When it comes to results, part of it is with decks that didn’t do what I needed them to do in a timely fashion. For the most part, "make the land drops and mana more consistent" has been a common thread for me. Through results, I’ve seen decks without green need a bit of a boost—like with mana rocks and whatnot. I then apply those results to foundations for new decks which are similar. Most of my results data deals with cards which underperformed. In the Karador deck, Knight of the Reliquary was one of those cards. It never had the same kind of relative impact that it had when I played it in Standard, so it got swapped out.
One of the best examples I have for reactions is putting Leyline of Sanctity into that Karador deck. The deck operates mostly out of the graveyard, and while I’ve built a little resiliency into it (as well as avoiding overcommitting), it can get completely blown out with a well-timed Bojuka Bog or Tormod’s Crypt. Both of those cards target the player, so making myself hexproof seemed like a good response. The collateral benefits of being hexproof—like not getting Fireballed—were simply a bonus.
A reaction that became a foundation is always building sacrifice outlets into my decks. I had seen many examples of players stealing stuff, mostly creatures, with cards like Control Magic and friends. The first card I ever used in this way, back when Phelddagrif was my only deck, was Read the Runes. I turned what was a downside of the card into an advantage by sacrificing the things that someone wanted to steal from me and turning them into new cards. Down the road, cards like Goblin Bombardment, Greater Good, and Altar of Dementia reflected the foundational knowledge that I want to be prepared because people are always going to try to steal your stuff.
You see that the metagame of Magic in general and Commander in particular is deep, layered, and rife with choices. It comprises a far broader set of actions, choices, and thought processes than it might seem on the surface. I hope that this little philosophical trip can help you walk a stronger path to thinking about and flourishing within your own metagame.
Embracing the Chaos,
Sheldon
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