Explaining Metagames: Everything You Need to Know! | Player Discussions 

Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying the videos! I understand, playing the meta and seeing the same bonkers and overpowered things isn't always fun (I mention that a little in the video that went up yesterday). I will say though, I think it's a good point to know where you like to be on the competitive scale for a game (which you do), and to understand the skill level and intent of the people you're playing with. It's why EDH in Magic has the CEDH subset - they're still following the rules of the format, but they all agree to go as hard as possible and build the most efficient, powerful decks they can because they like the way those decks play against each other and the mind games of trying to be on top of it. I love tournament play in Yu-Gi-Oh!, but I'm most often playing an off-meta tier 2 or lower strategy with the intent of knowing my opponent's strategy and being able to counter it when they may not quite know how to approach mine. I like those underdog stories. I also acknowledge, however, that I'm probably going to have a hard time making that story a reality, because it's an underdog story for a reason - the opponent is playing a better deck and I decided to step into that ring with something less effective. We both stepped up to win, but for one of us it'll be harder, and I like the challenge that creates. As long as both players are on that same playing field, understanding the terms and not getting upset for losing unless something genuinely unfair or illegal happened (or, y'know, someone was being a jerk), everyone can have fun.

I find super interesting the point of the development of the meta beacuse when konami banned everything in april this year (bye-bye sky striker, orcust, salamangreat, etc) people didn't know what to play and tried to bring back previous top decks (Spyral, gouki, shaddoll) but everyone played their prefered choice (dino, invoked, cyber dragons, mystic mine, E-Hero etc) and thus Spyral couldn't make it's comeback because even with magician souls the playfield was very mixed and couldn't counter all other strategies. It showed that those last 3 months of only meta vs meta who only compete against the other same 2 opponents stranded them in a weird rock, paper, scissors match, where it was always deck A using side-deck options against deck B & C and whoever got to it's counterplay first won. So when all the stronger cards got hit, and people beacame fearless,playing their favoured non-optimal choice, it paid off spyral barely managed to be in top 8 (or didn't even i don't remember that good but cimoooooo reported it) A conclusion to be stated here would be that even if the game designer can make the meta (in videogames being OP items [MMORPG's], characters [bayo ssb4, Overwatch bridgette], weapons [CS:GO R8 at launch, or autosniper, COD BO1 fammas], and obviously as you said any patch that nerfs or buffs, outside videogames like in the tcg's can be the set rotations for pkm & MTG, banlist revisions for YGO & D&D, broken mechanics in tcg's [example regarding YGO would be that during the synchro & XYZ era nekroz and shaddoll came out, both deck strategies attack the extra deck monsters, and since every other deck relies on the extra deck monsters as their win condition because the game is designed that way {use weak main deck monsters to get powerfull extra deck ones}, nekroz and shaddoll dominated since their opponent was punished for just playing the game, an unfair advantage as you stated]) In the end the player base chooses to shape it, be it by being sheeps (lack of better wording netdecking has it uses) or by creating a rich enviroment of options acording their preferences (like the game tells the to do) subbed & like

For meta players the winning is the fun

@@madwheelsgaming2360 That's oversimplifying it if you ask me; no player wants to be playing games that they are losing more often than not, and this can make playing the game become much less fun as a result. I feel that this applies to pretty much everyone who plays a game, be it casually or competitively, both because it lets you win against other people more often, but because it helps people to become better at the game as well