The changing Metagame in unchanging Playgroups

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

After a long writing break where I focused more on my FTB Infinity-Series plus my holidays where I didn't produce any content at all, I decided it is time for me to write something Magic related again.
So what's the topic of today's post? Metagaming in EDH!

What I discovered after I had joined a fairly stable playgroup (in terms of the players) that met once every one or two weeks is the following: If the playgroup consists of people that constantly seek to upgrade/update/improve their decks, there will be a constant, very slow but overall noticable shift in the metagame.

Let me give you an example for this:
When I first joined said playgroup, everyone was fairly new to the format and each of us had 1-4 decks. Basically everyone was doing something along the lines of:

The boards got clustered with stuff pretty fast, which led everyone to pack even more sweepers than normal. Now that's completely understandable. Imagine you sitting there looking at a board of 10-15 creatures total without a boardwipe in hand. Of course you'll think "Maaan I should play more sweepers!" so the next time you're at home, tuning your deck, you'll cut some of the spotremoval that looked completely useless to play 2 or 3 more Wrath-Effects.

It got so bad at some point that starting turn 5 or 6 we had rounds where the board got sweeped three times before it was my turn again.

Now obviously the meta shifted again from there, because noone likes loosing all his stuff without getting something out of it. But that's another story...

A different form of metagame shift happened very recently. I have to admit, it's pretty small but I still think it's worth mentioning. With all the Gods from Theros being Indestructible AND most often not a creature, people started to realize that they're a very reliable linchpin for a deck. So more and more God-led decks started to get built. This led to a slight shift in preferred removal options:

 The funny thing is that I didn't really realize it until I played a few games outside of our playgroup and stared at my Deglamer when I wanted to remove a Sword of X and Y while being a mana short to play a threat and asked myself: "Well why did I swap that for Nature's Claim? Oh right, Gods..."

Now this means there can be two different shifts in metagame. They will either affect...

•  How the decks work entirely (e.g. controlly vs. aggressive)

or

• How a certain cardtype works (e.g. cheaper removal that destroys vs. more expensive that exiles/tucks) 

While the cardtype shift is always very detailed and unique to each metagame, the overall shifts should always follow a certain pattern. Of course sometimes the metagame skips certain stages due to... like reasons... but the wheel will be turning nonetheless.

Meta-Rotations

Let's start off with a metagame that consists of 1v1-EDHs that have been tuned a bit to work better in a multiplayer environment. This is also known as "Players new to EDH decide to form a playgroup": (Note that the example rotation will be void of combo decks. I'll get into that later.)

1. At first the metagame will probably be very explosive since the decks are former 1v1-decks. They'll ramp hard, disrupt a bit and try to overwhelm the opponent in some way. This is basically the metagame we had at first at least what I experienced.

As already described the metagame will shift...





2. To counteract getting overwhelmed once you run out of gas, people will now probably incorporate even more sweepers and general disruption into their decks. This means that after a while ramping and speed overall will drop in priority because the sweepers act as speedbumps.

Now things will get interessting...





3. In an increasingly grindy metagame, slow "value"-cards like Mulldrifter begin to truly shine. You'll try to gain something out of your creatures even if they die immediately. In further consequence, blinking and/or reanimating creatures will be a big factor as this will really let you abuse your "Enter the battlefield" creatures.

This means that interaction between players will decrease since everyone is trying to get ahead by gaining "value" little by little. Disrupting that doesn't feel good at all, so in consequence spotremoval and/or counterspells see less play...

      

1. Besides graveyard hate getting a bit more attention because of rising reanimation counts, slow decks that sport some kind of inevitability are on the rise now. If they're left unchecked they have the potential to take over the entire game without much counterplay possible.

Massremoval isn't as necessary anymore as decks have been factoring it in for some time now and adapted accordingly.

      

1. While disrupting these decks can work, straight out killing them as fast as possible is an even better plan. Especially in this "value obsessed" metagame, voltron/aggro decks can be really effective since the opposition isn't necessarily equipped to deal with the pressure while also being fast enough in closing out the game once the aggressive player needs to recover/rebuild.

Now to survive the onslaught of damage put out by these aggressive decks people will opt for more speed again... So we're looping back to 1. which concludes the cycle.

Of course these shifts will never happen like they do in theory, especially since many commander decks are "meant" to be played in one very specific way. But a.) people will always build new decks and those are very likely to attack the meta in a favorable way and b.) decks that are unfavored in the current meta are likely to see less play (you're not going to play your tokens deck when everyone is casting back to back sweepers are you?).

What about Combo?

Well combo is an entire different beast. While basically fitting into the "slow decks with inevitability" section they can also play out very explosive and fast if they so choose in the way they've been built. This means combo decks can always attack the format in a way that is prefferable for them, most importantly because they don't rely on creatures to win games, which means that whenever the format becomes grindy, they're heavily favored.

The thing with combo is though, that many playgroups dislike having them in the games, so wether this is affecting your playgroup or not depends on that. I personally like having a few ones in there just to keep things fair and balanced since some strategies really thrive when they don't have to account for combo decks.

Conclusion

Having an edge in your playgroup and winning aside, shifting metas are also quite refreshing. Once you've cast your fair share of Mulldrifters and Damnations, playing a deck full of creatures that are meant to beat down or ramping really hard into something big could up your enjoyment of games a lot.

So maybe mentally review the last few rounds you played with your playgroup and try to analize the pace of the games. You might be surprised how many patterns you might find and those patterns will give you a good idea on how to attack your meta.

Alright, that's it from me, I hope you liked my little insight into our meta and into metagaming in general...

See y'all 'round!