Over the past few months, I have seen numerous articles appear which make attempts to grab hold of and make sense of the Classic metagame. To varying degrees, these articles have been well written and have covered varying portions of deck choices, or make respectable stabs at mathematically building a model for the Classic meta.

I love reading through these articles, in much the same way I enjoy watching a hamster jump in that little wheel and make it go around and around. It’s a great bit of exercise, but it doesn’t get anywhere. It certainly doesn’t help that the only tool to at least offer some sort of accurate measure of the actual decks being played have been removed (namely replays being scorched from the face of MTGO in the name of keeping v.25 breathing), so I hope the people writing those articles will understand that I have nothing but respect and admiration for the effort they put into their work, even if that work has become one step short of futile.

I’m here to tell you - there is no Classic meta.

You see, a metagame – a real metagame – goes beyond the concept of preferred deck lists and possible match-ups. If it was possible to meta-game with mathematical information alone, Magic tournaments could be settled by simple odds-making and the roll of an appropriate-sided die. A true metagame lies in choice as a strategic means to defeat your opponents, by predicting not only the avenues they employ to beat you, but by maneuvering outside of the paths your opponents will try to force you into. A good way to explain that sentence is found within the excerpts of a great movie from ‘07 – Live Free or Die Hard

Matt: “So have we got a plan?”
John: “Yeah, get Lucy, kill all the bad guys.”
Matt: “No, I meant like a way to do that.”

What Classic has right now is more like a proto-meta game. Every deck has a plan: Get Lucy, kill all the bad guys. But there is no real answer to the second question, because going into each and every Premier Event, the player base is presented with the same question, which each player ultimately answers the exact same way John McClane does in the movie; they kick in the door and hope to shoot the holy hell out of everything. Don’t take that too far out of context as a statement that says “everyone plays aggro” (which is not true by a long shot), but more indicative of a general all-purpose sense that is conveyed by those actions. Really, I don’t blame anyone for taking that approach anyway, since it seems it is fairly obvious that it will usually work to get any given player a top 8 finish in the current environment.

To illustrate just how frustrating it is to try and to make meta choices in Classic, let’s look at the interview Dragondung had with a 4th place finisher in a recent PE.

DRAGONDUNG: First off I was wondering what attracted you to the Classic format?
Ace of Drafts: The low number of people in the Premier Events.

DRAGONDUNG: I have seen you in two events so far I can tell...what are your impressions so far of the Classic Meta Game?
Ace of Drafts: Well, without replays it is pretty hard to gauge, but there seems to be a lot of combo, mostly Storm-based. Also a lot of mono-black decks which RDW (RG Aggro) can’t lose to.

Now, I ask you, does Ace of Drafts appear to be the type of person who carefully chose his deck to position itself well in the current metagame? Whether you think he did or not (and the first answer seems to tell you that he, in fact, did no such thing), the second question revealed that Ace of Drafts, in fact, had almost no idea about the Meta at all. Mono-black? The last time I looked, the largest representations in the meta were variants of Threshold, Landstill, RDW, and Flash. Maybe he read Walkerdog’s Mono Black article from a couple of months ago, or perhaps he saw a lot of it in Tournament Practice. And Storm is so underrepresented in Classic it’s practically laughable. It hadn’t had a Top-8 finish in God-knows how long, and I can tell you that the person who rode Storm to the finals in that event, Winston Smith, got a lot of attention within the CQ because we were trying to figure out just how he won with the pile he put together. (It strays heavily from established Storm lists, and while some of the moves I personally thought were genius, some of them were outrageously wacko…) Winston simply got a little lucky as it came together, in that the people he played had no idea what was going on (he recounted how one person boarded in Pithing Needles; there is not a single activated ability in any Storm deck short of fetchlands – not a strong strategy), and knowing Winston, his own play-skill probably had a little to do with it too. That’s nothing against Ace of Drafts or his obviously top-rate skill, either. It’s just exactly what happens when there really is no meta to speak of. There are simply no decisions to make – take your best and run with it. To wit - it seemed to work very well in the very next PE, as he finished 1st.

People who are coming into Classic tournaments such as Ace of Drafts are not uncommon. I recall that at the first PE (since they were reinstated) this was a common response to why they entered – the low count, and perceived easy win. Given enough of these people and the low number of entrants, it is fairly easy for any deck to make Top 8 if it has at least a little bit of power to it. Even with a small number of these entrants from week to week, the effect on the meta game has been essentially to disperse it into a fairly meaningless garble. Not a week goes by where someone doesn’t ask me (or tell me) what they would want to or should play that week. If they want my advice at this point, I’m just down to “Play the best deck you got”. What more could I say? If I went with “You should play Thresh!” they’d probably lose to a couple of Affinity decks that week and curse me. Or I’d tell them to try a Combo deck and they’d run into Landstill all day…or anyone of a about a million combinations that result simply in the luck of your deck choice landing squarely inside or outside what the meta that day is prepared for.

Without the capability to make an informed decision on which deck to play, one would hope that the “Best Deck Meta” would emerge. I’m sure most people reading this are aware of the “Best Deck Meta” – where one deck is slightly dominant over all others, which causes a reaction to either bring that deck, bring a deck that beats that deck (the “Anti-Deck”), or bring a deck that plays well against the Anti-Deck, in hopes of seeing more of it than the “Best Deck”. However, those that have followed Classic for the past few months will know that once Flash was taken down via restrictions, there really is no deck that has emerged as the best deck. What happens in this is case is…well, you’re looking at it when you look at Classic Top 8 results. Take your pick. You can guess out of any of a dozen decks, and may Lady Luck shine upon you.

Without information, and with the jumbled up mish-mash of deck choices you are likely to see in a tournament, it also becomes really hard to bring an innovative deck to the table. For example, if you are Adrian Sullivan, about to enter a Vintage tourney where all the decks, essentially, have one weak spot, you can create the Sullivan Solution and rip a tourney to shreds. But to play that kind of a deck you need to have a predictable metagame, where you are relatively sure than no one is bringing anything that might actually stand in the way of a turn 2 or 3 Dimir Cutpurse (such was the case with the Vintage meta at the time.) Since it’s nearly impossible to suppose anyone could ever predict the Classic meta in such a way, that kind of innovation remains stifled. The only kind of innovation these days is in finding new and exciting sideboard configurations that might increase your decks’ chances against the myriad of match-ups you might face - that is to say, not much innovation at all.

Meta? The current standard meta is in a state of heat-death. Nothing can really happen to the state of this little universe without some kind of outside force to kick-start a kind of chain reaction. What kind of force is likely to do that?

Why, of course: More options.

Huh? More options? Didn’t you just tell us that there were too many options? Well, it’s true – there are a lot of options, but they are all pretty much the SAME options. The current deck offerings have a very limited range of scope when playing each other. The aggro decks don’t win all that much slower than the aggro-control decks, which don’t control all that much less than the pure control decks, which don’t really control the anti-control measures the combo decks employ, which don’t out race the aggro decks all that much. The minute a much more powerful options becomes available, many of the decks simply won’t play the same – or at all.

Let me give you an example. The current format is devoid of any truly powerful artifact mana acceleration. I’m not talking about Lion’s Eye Diamond (which fits in a couple of decks as combo enablers), but things like Lotus Petal (which fits in a LOT of decks.) Sure, it helps Storm and other combo decks. But there are a lot of situations where Petal can be the difference between a win and loss and NOT specifically in combo decks. Take for example, the Thresh vs. RDW matchup. On turn one, RDW sends a Bolt to the dome; Thresh responds on its turn by popping a fetchland, popping a Lotus Petal, and playing a 3/4 Tarmogoyf. Not a turn two 2 or turn 3 ‘Goyf, a turn one 3/4 ‘Goyf. RDW isn’t going to be able to race that. The complete absence of this one thing – a totally universal bit of mana acceleration (that happens to pump ‘Goyf) - serves to really limit one avenue of playing the game, because it would put some combo and ‘Goyf enabled decks at a level that RDW will quite simply have trouble competing with. (Please, let’s not read too much into that – I’m not predicting the demise of RDW with Tempest; I’m just making an example).

Now, let’s imagine the Thresh Deck is playing against a Mishra’s Workshop deck Suddenly, even a turn one 3/4 ‘Goyf looks paltry in comparison to what Workshop can accomplish. It goes on and on like that. The game is only peppered with a smattering of these types of powerful, game altering cards and most of them we still haven’t got. The thing about these very powerful cards is that in, the long run, they require a type of commitment that ensures you can’t play any deck where the game plan is just “get Lucy, kill everyone else”. If you think you are going to see a lot of deck type A, you might pick deck type B or C, and even though deck type D, E, F, G and H are all viable decks, you don’t bother to play them based on the expected meta.

And that’s what this meta is really missing – there are no bad choices from week to week. As long as you pick a tier-one deck (of which there are many), you are just as good to go as anyone else.

Now, I won’t deny that there is a kind of enjoyment to this kind of one size fits all proto-Meta. For one thing, if you are the type of person who just enjoys the game and has the ability (and the means) to play lots of different tier-one decks, you might really thrive in this environment. But if you are the type who enjoys trying to “solve the puzzle” from week to week, and especially if you are the type of person who enjoys writing about a meta to help guide those who like to follow, then you’re in for a bad time. Classic’s current heat-death meta really isn’t worth trying to figure out or write about.

(PS. Yes, I do realize the irony of concluding an article about the Classic meta by saying it’s not worth writing about. : )