Are you on the wrong side of the Meta?

Last time, I wrote about why you should not haphazardly change deck configurations or deck choices based on the results of a few past tournaments. In this entry, I enumerate and explain some situations in which maybe you should consider changing your deck or changing decks entirely.

The decision of whether or not to change anything about one’s deck can be considered to rely on three concerns. These are 1.) The cost and benefit expectations of changing the deck (How much will you spend on making the changes versus how much benefit do you foresee reaping from making them?), 2.) The internal integrity of the deck (do you have too many/too few lands? Are you playing bad cards? Etc.), and 3.) Whether or not you on the wrong side of the Meta. As you may guess based on the title of this post, I will focus on the third item.

So, what is the meta? Just like win rates, we can define the meta statistically as a parameter or more accurately, as a set of parameters consisting of percentages of decks that exist in a given environment. For example, let us say that there are 6 of you at the office who play modern regularly and each of you has only one deck. So, the meta at your office is:

Deck	Number of players who own it	Meta %
5-C Humans	2	33.33%
Mono G Tron	2	33.33%
Jeskai Control	1	16.67%
Ad Nauseum	1	16.67%

 Using this as a toy example, we can proceed to describe what it means to be on the wrong side of the meta. One is on the wrong side of the meta simply if the probability that one will be matched with an unfavorable matchup is higher than the probability that one will be matched with a favorable matchup. In the example, one might argue that the player playing Ad Nauseum is on the right side of the meta. He has unfavorable matchups versus 5-C Humans (2/5) but favorable matchups versus the rest (3/5). If you accept that 5-C humans is good versus everything in the list (they are XD), then one might also argue that they are on the right side of the meta. With 4 out of 5 good matchups and one even (the mirror). Jeskai control and Tron therefore would be on the wrong side of the meta. This means that if these six people keep playing every Friday and no one changes decks, those on the right side of the meta will win significantly more times. A caveat to this statement is that we are assuming that advantages between decks are the same. That is, the advantage of Ad Nauseum versus Tron is the same as the advantage of 5-C Humans versus Ad Naus. This is not necessarily true and should be factored in the math for computing whether one is truly on the wrong side of the meta, but we are not doing that to make all of this simpler.

The main takeaway of the example is that if you were one of the three people playing Jeskai Control or Mono G Tron, you should change decks if you want to win more games. Not doing so dooms you to the inevitability of losing more games than you win, and as I discussed in the previous post, Magic is all about the bigger picture: whether or not you can sustain a positive EV as you grind tournament after tournament.

So what are the situations that indicate that you are on the wrong side of the meta? Here are some based on my experience grinding leagues.

You lose many more games than you win

In statistics, parameters are estimated through the use of samples. One signal of a deck being on the losing end of the current meta is simply if your sample win rate is below 50%. However, an important consideration here is the size and nature of the sample that you are basing your estimate on. As I showed in the last article, simply going 0-3 drop in your last two tournaments is not enough reason to drop the deck. That is, a sample of 3 matches is not large enough to reasonably conclude that your win rate is poor. In a nutshell, while a few losses are nothing to worry about, if you just keep losing over and over again and get overall win rates of like 20% even in a sample as small as 30 matches or scrub out of 4 tournaments in a row, then it is time to throw in the towel and choose a different deck.

You keep running into your bad matchups

Sometimes, your win rate is not so bad and may even hover around acceptable levels despite you being on the wrong side of the meta. This can happen if your play skills are simply better than the average player in your area. After all, as I discussed here, choosing the right deck is far from everything in successfully grinding matches. In this case, another signal that may be considered is if you keep running into your bad matchup. For example, suppose you are a competent Ad Nauseum player who has managed to maintain a 60% win rate versus the field. You know that if you just go up against Tron player after Tron player in a tournament, all would be good. However instead, you go up against 5-C Humans in many more matches. While you are still able to maintain a positive EV, recognizing that the meta you are in is inhospitable to the deck you are using can enable you to shift your deck choice into something that will make your EV even higher. 

Your deck is not even in what is recognized as the meta

This last one is tricky because an argument can be made that if the meta for a tournament is known, then there may be a deck that is able to perform well against the meta but is not part of the meta yet. In that case, using this deck may be very advantageous. However, this only typically happens at the beginning of a meta’s development, like after rotation or weeks into the release of a new set. As more games are played and results posted online, the known win rates of each deck do converge to their true values. This means that the decks that show up with some regularity in published 5-0 lists in MTGO are the decks that may be considered “working” in the meta.

Recognizing that one is in the wrong (or right) side of the meta is an important skill in playing Magic regularly. Honing this skill will save you a lot of frustration and tournament entrance fees.

May the shuffler be with you!