Building to Win: Six Key Principles to playing in your local Meta
By: Levi Perry aka Senator Spike
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
When I first started playing commander consistently, I was living in Wisconsin. The local game store I was playing at had about five people not including me that were frequent in the store. Of those five players, two players in particular would win a lot of the games. In this group, for the most part, everyone had a similar budget and pool of cards to work from, so it wasn't a situation where anyone was buying wins or pub stomping. As I learned more about commander I noticed that both of those players had particular style of play that they enjoyed. The first player, let's call him Mike, would run a lot of decks with instant speed interaction. This could be a counter spell, spot removal, protection, or even a simple Brainstorm. Vedalken Orrery was his best friend. The second player, we’ll call him Bob, always had stax pieces in his decks. If you were playing against Bob, you should be prepared to be slowed down. As I built decks I started evaluating cards differently.
One of the earlier decks I built to play in the shop was a Surrak, Dragonclaw deck that was a simple Temur Stompy deck list. The beauty of it was that it got around the counter spells thanks to Surrak, and the Stax effects really didn’t affect me as much because of the creature strategy. Because of this, I was able to squeak out wins against opponents that had a lot more experience in this game. Mike, Bob and I became friends and I would ask them a lot of questions and recommendation for decks. Learning from them, I started adding stax pieces and counter magic to my decks. Around this time, I learned about a new MTG club at the University and I started going once per week. That is where I learned about the difference between local metas.
I would play games with this new group with my decks that were built to be super resistant against counter magic and stax, I was getting blown out by the other players. The decks they were running were either very aggressive decks that could simply take me out before I could get going, or value engine decks that would simply out pace me not caring about outside interaction. So once again, I had to adapt my decks to accommodate what was around me.
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
When I first started playing commander consistently, I was living in Wisconsin. The local game store I was playing at had about five people not including me that were frequent in the store. Of those five players, two players in particular would win a lot of the games. In this group, for the most part, everyone had a similar budget and pool of cards to work from, so it wasn't a situation where anyone was buying wins or pub stomping. As I learned more about commander I noticed that both of those players had particular style of play that they enjoyed. The first player, let's call him Mike, would run a lot of decks with instant speed interaction. This could be a counter spell, spot removal, protection, or even a simple Brainstorm. Vedalken Orrery was his best friend. The second player, we’ll call him Bob, always had stax pieces in his decks. If you were playing against Bob, you should be prepared to be slowed down. As I built decks I started evaluating cards differently.
One of the earlier decks I built to play in the shop was a Surrak, Dragonclaw deck that was a simple Temur Stompy deck list. The beauty of it was that it got around the counter spells thanks to Surrak, and the Stax effects really didn’t affect me as much because of the creature strategy. Because of this, I was able to squeak out wins against opponents that had a lot more experience in this game. Mike, Bob and I became friends and I would ask them a lot of questions and recommendation for decks. Learning from them, I started adding stax pieces and counter magic to my decks. Around this time, I learned about a new MTG club at the University and I started going once per week. That is where I learned about the difference between local metas.
I would play games with this new group with my decks that were built to be super resistant against counter magic and stax, I was getting blown out by the other players. The decks they were running were either very aggressive decks that could simply take me out before I could get going, or value engine decks that would simply out pace me not caring about outside interaction. So once again, I had to adapt my decks to accommodate what was around me.
Over the last few years, for work I have moved a lot for work and personal reasons. Because of this I have needed to become adept at changing my decks to match the local meta around me. Over the several times I have done this, I have come up with six key principles for adapting to a local meta.
1) Know Thyself. Similar to my favorite Sun Tzu quote from above, if you don’t know what your deck is good at or your strengths as a pilot, that is the very first thing you need to do. I am likely to write an article on how to determine your strengths as a player soon, but in the meantime, play as many games as you can to build up some experience and learn what you like.
2) Know thy Enemy. This is where things get interesting. In a local meta, there are players that usually have a higher win percentage than other players. This could be for a variety of reasons. Maybe they have more money invested in their decks, maybe they have more time invested, maybe they have been playing for twenty years and simply know a lot about the game and have a lot of battles under their belt. Regardless of what it is, you need to diagnose who those people are because it will be the best use of your time to build to play against them.
3) Find their “Type”- Every player has a type of game that they like to play. Some are very straight forward like a player that only likes tribal decks, some people might really like combo decks, spell slinger, aggro, ect. Sometimes people really like to play with one style, other times it is a matter of a comfort zone in which players will build to what they know well. As you play these games, look for patterns in the decks. Which decks are they playing most frequently? Are they all the same style? Colors? Archetype? By identifying patterns, you are able to determine what is needed to counter that plan. If its combo decks, maybe counter magic or spot removal. If it is aggro, it may be ghostly prison effects and board wipes. If it is a control strategy, it might be some protection of your own to keep your board intact.
4) Keep your game plan. One reason I am having you focus on the players with higher win rates is your deck only contains 100 total cards. You don’t have room to counter everyone and everything (take that as a challenge if you want I suppose). A huge mistake I see players make when adjusting to local meta is by going too far into it. It speaks to the Ship of Theseus’ Paradox. Every piece you take out of the deck for a tech piece is another card that deviates slightly from what you are wanting to accomplish. At some point the scales will tip from playing to win, to trying to not lose. As soon as your decks are playing in that defensive manner, you will definitely live longer, but eventually there will be a combo, or a craterhoof behemoth, or an alternate win condition that will do the job well enough to knock you out of the game.
5) Stay Fluid. As you might have noticed, the easiest player to prepare for is the player that never changes their ways. As soon as people start catching onto what you like to do, your commander nights are going to be a lot more challenging. When I go out for a commander night, I bring ten different decks with me and I have a personal rule that I never play the same deck twice in a night. Some have these decks overlapping strategies, but it allows me a versatility in gameplay for what I am in the mood for. This also has the positive effect of not giving the people around me as much to work with as far as stopping me because the gameplay and archetypes change at the drop of a hat. For example, I like blink effects in commander. You get an effect right away and then you have a creature left over that you can attack with, block with or blink again. If someone plays a Topor Orb against me, it would be effective against that deck, but not the Voltron deck, stax deck, Humans matter deck, or food token deck I also have with me. The more versatile you can be in magic, the harder it becomes to prepare for you.
6) Be ready for the counter. Through this process, know that adaptation, like in nature, never ends. As you change your playstyle, your opponents will inevitably have to change their playstyles as well. When they do, pay attention so you can be aware when it occurs and have a way planned to respond to it. It is almost like a dance back and forth, unless they never change their plans up which would result in you winning a lot more games. But in the likely event they do adapt to you, embrace it. Iron sharpens iron and it will only make you a better commander player at the end of the day.
1) Know Thyself. Similar to my favorite Sun Tzu quote from above, if you don’t know what your deck is good at or your strengths as a pilot, that is the very first thing you need to do. I am likely to write an article on how to determine your strengths as a player soon, but in the meantime, play as many games as you can to build up some experience and learn what you like.
2) Know thy Enemy. This is where things get interesting. In a local meta, there are players that usually have a higher win percentage than other players. This could be for a variety of reasons. Maybe they have more money invested in their decks, maybe they have more time invested, maybe they have been playing for twenty years and simply know a lot about the game and have a lot of battles under their belt. Regardless of what it is, you need to diagnose who those people are because it will be the best use of your time to build to play against them.
3) Find their “Type”- Every player has a type of game that they like to play. Some are very straight forward like a player that only likes tribal decks, some people might really like combo decks, spell slinger, aggro, ect. Sometimes people really like to play with one style, other times it is a matter of a comfort zone in which players will build to what they know well. As you play these games, look for patterns in the decks. Which decks are they playing most frequently? Are they all the same style? Colors? Archetype? By identifying patterns, you are able to determine what is needed to counter that plan. If its combo decks, maybe counter magic or spot removal. If it is aggro, it may be ghostly prison effects and board wipes. If it is a control strategy, it might be some protection of your own to keep your board intact.
4) Keep your game plan. One reason I am having you focus on the players with higher win rates is your deck only contains 100 total cards. You don’t have room to counter everyone and everything (take that as a challenge if you want I suppose). A huge mistake I see players make when adjusting to local meta is by going too far into it. It speaks to the Ship of Theseus’ Paradox. Every piece you take out of the deck for a tech piece is another card that deviates slightly from what you are wanting to accomplish. At some point the scales will tip from playing to win, to trying to not lose. As soon as your decks are playing in that defensive manner, you will definitely live longer, but eventually there will be a combo, or a craterhoof behemoth, or an alternate win condition that will do the job well enough to knock you out of the game.
5) Stay Fluid. As you might have noticed, the easiest player to prepare for is the player that never changes their ways. As soon as people start catching onto what you like to do, your commander nights are going to be a lot more challenging. When I go out for a commander night, I bring ten different decks with me and I have a personal rule that I never play the same deck twice in a night. Some have these decks overlapping strategies, but it allows me a versatility in gameplay for what I am in the mood for. This also has the positive effect of not giving the people around me as much to work with as far as stopping me because the gameplay and archetypes change at the drop of a hat. For example, I like blink effects in commander. You get an effect right away and then you have a creature left over that you can attack with, block with or blink again. If someone plays a Topor Orb against me, it would be effective against that deck, but not the Voltron deck, stax deck, Humans matter deck, or food token deck I also have with me. The more versatile you can be in magic, the harder it becomes to prepare for you.
6) Be ready for the counter. Through this process, know that adaptation, like in nature, never ends. As you change your playstyle, your opponents will inevitably have to change their playstyles as well. When they do, pay attention so you can be aware when it occurs and have a way planned to respond to it. It is almost like a dance back and forth, unless they never change their plans up which would result in you winning a lot more games. But in the likely event they do adapt to you, embrace it. Iron sharpens iron and it will only make you a better commander player at the end of the day.
Thank you for reading!
If you have a topic or question you would like to see covered in the blog, send me an email at thoughtvesselshow@gmail.com
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