Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero.
Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine going by turn 3 or 4, if you get a drought or flood (or mulligan), you’re basically completely dead in the water. Same for your opponent.
The net result is that it feels like something like only 15%–25% of games are actually competitive, because either you or your opponent gets fucked by too many, too few, or wrong color land draws, or for whatever reason you don’t draw the cards you need within the first few turns.
A game where 80% of matchups are effectively no contest is not fun.
I think that's why I like prerelease (and sealed, generally) the most of any format. For day 1 prerelease, a lot of the players are reading the cards for the first time. For sealed later on, even if you know the meta for that set, it's more about playing the best deck with the cards you've got. Knowing the meta doesn't change your pool. (As opposed to draft, where if you don't know the meta you might inadvertently pass excellent cards and miss signposts other players will catch)
> But this must be the case for all competitive games right? At some point the meta has been figured out and there is no real way to deviate from that.
I think this is only true about games with too few variables (not really the case for MTG), or games where too many variables can be controlled (which various MTG formats suffer from).
Historically this has not been that big a deal for the RTS genre specifically. If you look at a game like SC2, the skillfloor to actually execute the meta builds is so high that player with good fundamentals can win with a suboptimal build, versus a player with a fully meta build executed imperfectly. Plus there are almost always cheese builds that only work if the opponent doesn't expect them - not a reliable source of wins, but sometimes all it takes to clutch a tournament series
SC2 achieved this with balance patches - Blizzard paid close attention to the meta and when it got stale/boring, they adjusted things to keep games interesting and varied. They did their best to make this the case for low and high skilled players.
To me the issue isn’t simply that you need to track the meta to be competitive, it’s that the game only worked when decks were less powerful.
When games regularly took 10–20 turns, luck evened out pretty well even if you were a bit slow out the gate. But now when your opponent is putting out threats on every single turn that need to be countered, there’s nearly zero room for unlucky draws. Given two opponents, the odds that both of them will have sufficiently equal luck to produce an interestingly competitive game has dropped below a threshold where the game is actually fun to play.
If you don’t play the meta, you get curb stomped. If you do play the meta, most of the time the outcome of the game is essentially predetermined (and obviously so) by the luck of both of your draws or by hard counter matchups. Only a handful of games ever feel like both sides have fighting chances.
Frankly, the majority of games these days could be decided in seconds by both sides revealing their opening hard and mutually agreeing on the outcome.
Well playing Fortnite is the opposite. If you suck you get into crappy pools. Every once and a while it someone resets and you spend a few matches getting victory royale until the competition gets better. Way more fun for everyone this way.
Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero.
Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine going by turn 3 or 4, if you get a drought or flood (or mulligan), you’re basically completely dead in the water. Same for your opponent.
The net result is that it feels like something like only 15%–25% of games are actually competitive, because either you or your opponent gets fucked by too many, too few, or wrong color land draws, or for whatever reason you don’t draw the cards you need within the first few turns.
A game where 80% of matchups are effectively no contest is not fun.