Metagame & Tournament Scenes
No promises any of this made sense: it's a bunch of stuff I wrote in down time at work.
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Even non-nerdy types will understand the idea that games can have odd phases, trends and "higher-level games" than the actual rules. The term nerds tend to use for this is "The Metagame". If you play Magic: The Gathering and note that Green Big-Creature decks are the msot common deck right now, then that's the state of the metagame; if you read books abotu chess moves which prioritise how good and bad certain moves are, you're reading a bout the metagame. When people say that Scottish football teams play a more physical game and European teams.... you get the idea.
All games have this, but nerd games have more pronounced metagames partly because many of them are young and still "in flux". Although chess variants and new spins of Poker come out, the basic games are very old and the rules long standardised and analysed to the point where they are more or less universal the world over, with the stragtegies for specific games and versions thereof well documented. Even then, the individual players can be a factor - a particular high-quality player may choose to focus on a particular strategem, leading to it becoming popular or requiring top tier players to prepare counter-measures for it. Football is a great example of this where natural gifts and practiced skills combined- Manchester United the team is slightly different in capability every year and the best strategy to beat them changes year on year.
It's far more pronounced with games where the rules change periodically, though. Every year three or four new Magic: The Gathering sets are released, and three or four old sets rorate out of use in the standard tournaments. Warhammer 40,000 army lists are replaced periodically and new versions of the core rules produced every five years or so. These sorts of changes change how the game plays not in one big move but in lots and lots of little strokes. With every new Magic set released it isn't just 121 new cards: it's 121 new cards which can interact with the thousands of cards already released, with potential for new decks to arise in which two cards produced almost two decades apart might interact in a game-winning way. With a new Warhammer 40,000 Codex it isn't just that the army covered has new rules - it's that other armies must consider the powers and options of that army and build around it, accounting for the new Space Marine tank or Ork Helicopter they may encounter the next time they fight it on the battlefield. (And if the new edition of rules makes tanks weaker but flyers stronger, they may need to replace their anti-tank unit with an anti-flyer one.)
Metagames are very situational, though. The international metagame can be different from the national metagame and even the local metagame. Maybe "everyone" knows that Grey Knights are the best Warhammer army (either mathetmatically or because, on average, they win more tournaments) but if the best guy who plays in your Glasgow club has a killer Necron force, then the metagame at your club will revolve around dealing with the Necrons. As long as no-one buys into Grey Knights or plays them very well, the fact is mostly irrelevant. If no-one likes my Blue/White Statis deck then they may design decks specifically to defeat mine which do very well - but in a strange rock/paper/scissors, the next best deck will be the one that beats those, and so on as the metagame cycles through. If no-one ever plays a Blue/White Stasis deck this cycle never commences.
The biggest difference might be between casual and tournament play. In Magic in particular, back when I played more frequently the tournament game was NOTHING like the pick-up games we had in Jims Bar - a tournament game would be over in five turns max, whereas casual games could go on much longer, and cards which were difficult to play and set up in short times did not appear in tournament deck. These games often have a storytelling aspect - whether Noise Marines are good or not in the different editions of 40K hasn't really mattered, I've played them because I like the fluff. I mean, hell, I made a Magic deck based around Mr T! That it did OK in casual play was irrelevant, as was the fact a tournament deck would gub it - it was designed for fun. (And I kinda have the urge now to play it again.)
There is nothing more frustrating in all God's green earth than a casual gamer stuck playing someone so indoctrinated into the metagame and the tournament scene that they can't fathom people playing any other way. Not only are "tactic" reccomendations and lectures from the serious player often unwanted, neither side ends up habving fun because they ar elooking for vastly different things. The serious player will feel bored because he isn't being challenged; the casual player will feel like he's wasting his time in an unwinnable fight. The tournament rules and metagame are so different that, in a way, both people are playing different games - I still struggle to imagine how Rob plays Smash Bros without items on or with about half the stages removed for "balance" reasons, whereas he finds the game I play so random as to be an exercise in dice-throwing who wins. Curiously, this sometimes has the effect of penalising the tournament player - played at casual level, the setup is so different from a standard tournament that "serious" players get gubbed because everything they know is irrelevant.
Alas, a stagnant metagame can kill a game, turning from Rock/Paper/Scissors into Rock/Shit. Magic has different tournament types with different banned/restricted lists for different audiences becuasea totally freeform set of deck-building would be a disaster area - sealed deck/draft seemingly being quite popular at GUGS these days in a way it never was when I were a lad, perhaps because it appeals more to the people playing these days. On the flip side, Charles has expressed no real urge to keep playing 40K because his Ork army has been made even more low-tier with the release of 6th ed to the point where he really struggles to get anything done on the tabletop as the game stands right now - the release of new army lists and rules editions since his army book came out five years ago.
--
Even non-nerdy types will understand the idea that games can have odd phases, trends and "higher-level games" than the actual rules. The term nerds tend to use for this is "The Metagame". If you play Magic: The Gathering and note that Green Big-Creature decks are the msot common deck right now, then that's the state of the metagame; if you read books abotu chess moves which prioritise how good and bad certain moves are, you're reading a bout the metagame. When people say that Scottish football teams play a more physical game and European teams.... you get the idea.
All games have this, but nerd games have more pronounced metagames partly because many of them are young and still "in flux". Although chess variants and new spins of Poker come out, the basic games are very old and the rules long standardised and analysed to the point where they are more or less universal the world over, with the stragtegies for specific games and versions thereof well documented. Even then, the individual players can be a factor - a particular high-quality player may choose to focus on a particular strategem, leading to it becoming popular or requiring top tier players to prepare counter-measures for it. Football is a great example of this where natural gifts and practiced skills combined- Manchester United the team is slightly different in capability every year and the best strategy to beat them changes year on year.
It's far more pronounced with games where the rules change periodically, though. Every year three or four new Magic: The Gathering sets are released, and three or four old sets rorate out of use in the standard tournaments. Warhammer 40,000 army lists are replaced periodically and new versions of the core rules produced every five years or so. These sorts of changes change how the game plays not in one big move but in lots and lots of little strokes. With every new Magic set released it isn't just 121 new cards: it's 121 new cards which can interact with the thousands of cards already released, with potential for new decks to arise in which two cards produced almost two decades apart might interact in a game-winning way. With a new Warhammer 40,000 Codex it isn't just that the army covered has new rules - it's that other armies must consider the powers and options of that army and build around it, accounting for the new Space Marine tank or Ork Helicopter they may encounter the next time they fight it on the battlefield. (And if the new edition of rules makes tanks weaker but flyers stronger, they may need to replace their anti-tank unit with an anti-flyer one.)
Metagames are very situational, though. The international metagame can be different from the national metagame and even the local metagame. Maybe "everyone" knows that Grey Knights are the best Warhammer army (either mathetmatically or because, on average, they win more tournaments) but if the best guy who plays in your Glasgow club has a killer Necron force, then the metagame at your club will revolve around dealing with the Necrons. As long as no-one buys into Grey Knights or plays them very well, the fact is mostly irrelevant. If no-one likes my Blue/White Statis deck then they may design decks specifically to defeat mine which do very well - but in a strange rock/paper/scissors, the next best deck will be the one that beats those, and so on as the metagame cycles through. If no-one ever plays a Blue/White Stasis deck this cycle never commences.
The biggest difference might be between casual and tournament play. In Magic in particular, back when I played more frequently the tournament game was NOTHING like the pick-up games we had in Jims Bar - a tournament game would be over in five turns max, whereas casual games could go on much longer, and cards which were difficult to play and set up in short times did not appear in tournament deck. These games often have a storytelling aspect - whether Noise Marines are good or not in the different editions of 40K hasn't really mattered, I've played them because I like the fluff. I mean, hell, I made a Magic deck based around Mr T! That it did OK in casual play was irrelevant, as was the fact a tournament deck would gub it - it was designed for fun. (And I kinda have the urge now to play it again.)
There is nothing more frustrating in all God's green earth than a casual gamer stuck playing someone so indoctrinated into the metagame and the tournament scene that they can't fathom people playing any other way. Not only are "tactic" reccomendations and lectures from the serious player often unwanted, neither side ends up habving fun because they ar elooking for vastly different things. The serious player will feel bored because he isn't being challenged; the casual player will feel like he's wasting his time in an unwinnable fight. The tournament rules and metagame are so different that, in a way, both people are playing different games - I still struggle to imagine how Rob plays Smash Bros without items on or with about half the stages removed for "balance" reasons, whereas he finds the game I play so random as to be an exercise in dice-throwing who wins. Curiously, this sometimes has the effect of penalising the tournament player - played at casual level, the setup is so different from a standard tournament that "serious" players get gubbed because everything they know is irrelevant.
Alas, a stagnant metagame can kill a game, turning from Rock/Paper/Scissors into Rock/Shit. Magic has different tournament types with different banned/restricted lists for different audiences becuasea totally freeform set of deck-building would be a disaster area - sealed deck/draft seemingly being quite popular at GUGS these days in a way it never was when I were a lad, perhaps because it appeals more to the people playing these days. On the flip side, Charles has expressed no real urge to keep playing 40K because his Ork army has been made even more low-tier with the release of 6th ed to the point where he really struggles to get anything done on the tabletop as the game stands right now - the release of new army lists and rules editions since his army book came out five years ago.