This was a relevant argument 13 years ago when standard was Type 2 and the pro tour was new and shiny. Casuals are just plain going to have to accept that some people are going to play this game to eke out every advantage possible.
That may not be who you are but meh. No amount of complaining or reasoning will ever stop people now from netdecking. You may as well try to bail out the ocean with a spoon.
To your reasoned arguments of why netdecking is bad. NO do not care.
As someone who's been playing since the dark and have been on both sides of this issue over the past 17 years (jeezus that seems so long looking at it)
all i can say is get over it. You have every right to not want to play competitive decks outside of a tournament setting but if someone is putting money down your argument is invalid.
This was a relevant argument 13 years ago when standard was Type 2 and the pro tour was new and shiny. Casuals are just plain going to have to accept that some people are going to play this game to eke out every advantage possible.
That may not be who you are but meh. No amount of complaining or reasoning will ever stop people now from netdecking. You may as well try to bail out the ocean with a spoon.
To your reasoned arguments of why netdecking is bad. NO do not care.
As someone who's been playing since the dark and have been on both sides of this issue over the past 17 years (jeezus that seems so long looking at it)
all i can say is get over it. You have every right to not want to play competitive decks outside of a tournament setting but if someone is putting money down your argument is invalid.
I have finally come to accept that, so...
Some weeks, I'll play my usual home brew just to feel a little creative.
Others, when I get tired of losing (happens about once a month) I'll copy down a deck list, tweak the sideboard for my meta, and go have a chance for a decent night, all the while understanding that it's not a guarantee. It just puts me on a somewhat even playing field.
Funny thing, I find that good players will usually build some similar decks with or without using the internet. It really seems like a natural progression. Doesn't everyone look for cheaper (mana) cards with abilities and effects they already like?
Is that different from copying a deck card by card from a random internet page, sure, but only slightly.
I just don't get the gripe. It's kind of like how I hate tournements because I'm not going to keep up with a list of banned cards, which is a result of nerdrage in most cases. How many poker tournements are going to ban aces, or face cards because they're "too powerful?"
Anyways, I just think that some people don't understand that people will still have "staple cards" in certain types of decks with or without the internet. I didn't need the internet to tell me the first blazing archon I got would be great for my reanimator, as soon as I saw the card in the pack I knew it. Get my drift?
But, if someone wants to blame someone, blame wizards for making pre-constructed decks.
Edit: I just wanted to add that the "winning games with your wallet" argument is moot. Unless someone buys all your cards for you, we all play with our wallets.
i honestly wonder what kind of decks would turn up at fnm if coverage of big tournaments was non-existent. or to take it further, people just all didn't even attempt to make a deck that they saw one time, but instead go out and make a name for their own new crazy concoction.
i honestly wonder what kind of decks would turn up at fnm if coverage of big tournaments was non-existent. or to take it further, people just all didn't even attempt to make a deck that they saw one time, but instead go out and make a name for their own new crazy concoction.
guess we will never know
Eventually? exactly the same, since those are the best decks in format
I just don't get the gripe. It's kind of like how I hate tournements because I'm not going to keep up with a list of banned cards, which is a result of nerdrage in most cases. How many poker tournements are going to ban aces, or face cards because they're "too powerful?"
Did you just compare Aces in Poker to having to fork out $600 minimum to play the best deck during the Caw Blade era?
Did you just compare Aces in Poker to having to fork out $600 minimum to play the best deck during the Caw Blade era?
Honestly each format has its own barrier to entry, if you cant afford it... sorry looks like the formats not for you, either use your "innovation" to figure out how to do without or play something else.
i honestly wonder what kind of decks would turn up at fnm if coverage of big tournaments was non-existent. or to take it further, people just all didn't even attempt to make a deck that they saw one time, but instead go out and make a name for their own new crazy concoction.
guess we will never know
It was called playing magic in the 90s and it was harder. I remember when we had a guy show up and win a tourney with a mag deck (funny term now), he copied some necro list from a inquest or something and stomped the field. It made some players not want to play anymore, if people weren't going to create their deck.
In many ways all we did was have smaller groups of people to play test with. Back than if you didn't play test, you got stomped in a tourney. if you weren't play testing during the week you were behind. Now you don't have to do the homework and just a copy a list and if your a good player you'll do well. All the internet has done is speed up the process of building and network ideas while having up to date information on what the better players and builders are doing.
What I find funny is when I look at lists I think why isn't this being played, or why isn't this card being run as a 4 of. Oh look this weeks SCG winner just ran with the deck changes I was thinking. I am going back to my scars binder and cards I put a high value on in the context of the set I kept as many copies in the binder, other just tossed in the common box. Now some cards seeing play now like spell bombs were just tossed in the common box, but when i see that over a year ago I put as many copies of vapor snag in the binder I feel like ok Im not not stupid.
I was always the deck builder in my group, but my play has never been tight enough. I don't think you need to be a list copier to have a chance to win. I has a version of Conley Woods ramp deck on Modo, it wasn't his exact list, it wasn't as finely tuned as his was, but I don't have the play time or resources he has, but the concept and core cards were there and it was my original idea and it was giving delver decks a problem on modo. I also had a version of our "pro built" decks again not as refined but the core was there. So I don't think it is as hopeless as you must run this to win. I think last year with Caw Blade, it was one deck or go home, but this year standard is open and I see a very healthy standard to come.
I used to hate net decking but that was because the first time i ever played standard my homebrew pile lost to a tooled affinity deck. i had only ever played kitchen table with friends and never bought a single. actually turned me off of competitive for a while.
now though i think it is necessarily to at least look online for options. One of my best friends in college has taught me a lot of the minutiae of the competitive side of the game. i have always been good at finding cards with synergy of that worked well together without being obvious. basically i would find the shell of the deck i want and he would help me tune it. Now its to the point where we bounce ideas off of each other and both make better decks because of it. I almost never play a deck i havent played against him simply because he can offer a fresh insight on what i am trying to do.
while ill never just copy a list i see online, i see the internet as a vast number of people who can be that second pair of eyes. maybe someone else wants to run a similar deck and has good reasons why card x is better than card y. Ill look on here or other sites and see if people are running something similar and see if theres a card choice that i missed. as someone earlier posted, i would have most likely eventually came to that realization eventually anyways.
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You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it put an evasive creature in its deck over a narrow hate card.
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If a card isn't worth your opponent removing, it's not worth putting in your deck.
I carry tier 1 deck X2 , legacy x2, modern x1, edh x1 and 2-3 causal theme type decks. If someone asks for a throw down before an event, between matches or after, I ask what are you interested in playing against. No fun playing your casual knights deck against caw blade.
I carry tier 1 deck X2 , legacy x2, modern x1, edh x1 and 2-3 causal theme type decks. If someone asks for a throw down before an event, between matches or after, I ask what are you interested in playing against. No fun playing your casual knights deck against caw blade.
I don't know if that's the question here
"Netdecking vs Creating your own deck" is a different argument than "Playing a Tier 1 deck vs Playing a rogue deck"
If you're not a good deckbuilder, I think it's fine to netdeck. The person who builds their own deck is always going to have an advantage because they know the deck more intimately and are able to tweak it to adjust to their playstyle
As for playing a tier 1 deck vs going rogue, I think it comes down to play style. Whatever you can play the best and enjoy playing is what you should build. Tier 1 decks don't have much advantage in an unknown metagame like a local tournament. I've seen xerox'ed tier 1 decks piloted by good players get crushed by an environment full of rogue stuff. In bigger events this question is irrelevant, you play what will get you the win
Looking at the netdecks gives you an idea of the current metagame. Basically, the lemings will copy them, and the innovators will look for ways of either making them better, or bringing some hate against them.
Rogue? That means something that hasn't already been "discovered" at the top tiers.
Can rogue decks be tier 1? Sure. The chances are against it, though, as most of the tier 1 stuff is playtested by multiple sources, and thus tends to be tried and approved as "good". Will a netdeck take you to the championship? Probably not.
As stated in Patrick Chapin's "Next Level Magic", your odds of doing well at a tournament are increased by following the metagame (which includes netdecking), but your odds of doing something truly amazing are better if you go rogue, they just aren't that great for doing "well". If you want to find "the next great deck", you won't do it by following the pack. But, you will have a greater percentage chance of doing well (overall) if you do.
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Currently playing:
Standard: WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern: UR Twinning RU G Venus Fly Trap G U Artifacts Aggro U
Well, here is my latest argument for home brewing over net decking and I think it's a damn good one. In fact, it's almost inarguable.
Last night at FNM, I took an established net deck (Wolf Run Huntmaster) to do battle with. Don't get me wrong, I did okay. But in the last match, the one I needed to win to make top 8, I ran into UB Control. Needless to say, the matchup is almost un-winnable. Anybody who says differently doesn't understand the matchup problems.
As valiantly as I fought, making all the right sideboard moves after game 1, everything I cast either was countered or destroyed with a BSZ. Even my sideboarded Thrun couldn't survive that. I fought him hard game 2. Almost decked him in fact. But in the end, with both of at about 6 cards in our library, he milled me for 6 and that was game.
Under the circumstances (getting 6 drops eliminated by 2cc spells all night) I'd say my play was extraordinary.
But I just had no real chance against that deck.
The week before I took a crazy home brew (after analyzing the meta) and came in 2nd out of 22 people.
Okay, what's my point?
No deck, I don't care how good and established it is, can beat every deck. It's going to have bad matchups. And if you just blindly go into an FNM or whatever event it is you're entering and all you're doing is picking from a list of "top" decks, you're essentially leaving your chances of winning up to the luck of who you draw.
By having a decent idea of what you're going to be up against, you can at least make an informed decision on what deck to play. If your meta is dominated by one or two decks, then your choices may be limited. You may have only one or two choices...play that deck or put together a deck that you think can beat it.
By net decking, you're picking a deck that has already been "figured out" meaning people already KNOW how to beat it, unless it is very new. If the deck is that new, it's unlikely that it's a proven commodity. So you're still taking your chances.
Naturally, to home brew, you have to know how to evaluate a card on its own and interaction with other cards very well. Not everybody can do this. But if you can, it gives you a clear advantage over somebody who blindly picks a net deck because it's performed well in the past.
My choosing Brian Kiblar's Wolf Run Huntmaster, just to prove a point, is living proof of that. I went 2-2 and finished 10th. Okay, but nothing to write home about. I've certainly done better with my own decks.
If you can brew well, it has distinct advantages over net decking.
This is my argument for brewing over net decking.
Obviously, it means you have to be able to do it well. But clearly, if you can, you will be ahead of most people who simply "pick" the "best" deck.
Because the best deck isn't always the best deck.
UB Control lost to a home brew zombies deck last night.
Okay, let's look at some facts. There is a major tournament almost every weekend; at this point, most of the strongest strategies have been "figured out". There is a reason that everyone brings the "same ol' decks" each weekend, too. Because they are the most efficient or most powerful things that you can be doing right now. Your argument can easily be applied to any netdeck too, you realize? You brought a deck that obviously had a bad UB control matchup (btw, it is not nearly as bad as you say; post-board you have plenty strong cards against UB). That is not Wolf Run's fault, that is your fault. You could have just as easily brought Naya Pod or Humans, but you decided to bring a deck that has a bad matchup against UB Control and act as though it caused you to misread your metagame.
Here's a nice little example for you. My FNM metagame is all aggro decks and one or two guys who play Wolf Run. Reason says I should just run Esper control and proceed to stomp everyone. I don't need to bring a "crazy homebrew" to beat my aggro meta.
Okay, let's look at some facts. There is a major tournament almost every weekend; at this point, most of the strongest strategies have been "figured out". There is a reason that everyone brings the "same ol' decks" each weekend, too. Because they are the most efficient or most powerful things that you can be doing right now. Your argument can easily be applied to any netdeck too, you realize? You brought a deck that obviously had a bad UB control matchup (btw, it is not nearly as bad as you say; post-board you have plenty strong cards against UB). That is not Wolf Run's fault, that is your fault. You could have just as easily brought Naya Pod or Humans, but you decided to bring a deck that has a bad matchup against UB Control and act as though it caused you to misread your metagame.
Here's a nice little example for you. My FNM metagame is all aggro decks and one or two guys who play Wolf Run. Reason says I should just run Esper control and proceed to stomp everyone. I don't need to bring a "crazy homebrew" to beat my aggro meta.
Did you even bother to read my post? I mean REALLY read it?
I'm talking about people who mindlessly pick a deck to play because it's in the top 8 or whatever, without giving any thought to what they're going to be up against. These people win by pure luck because they've done no preparation other than pick a deck off the rack.
If I know I'm going into an FNM that 21 out of 23 people are going to play Wolf Run, I'd probably be a fool not to just net deck UB Control. But most reality isn't like that. Most metas are quite diverse. I suspected I might see UB Control, but with all the aggro running rampant at our meta (spirits, tokens, humans, zombies, werewolves) I couldn't be 100% sure and I knew Wolf Run had a good matchup against those other decks. Sure, I could have chosen one of those other aggro decks and given UB Control a tough match, but then I'm in a crap shoot with the other decks. So I played the percentages and I lost. Yes, I misread the meta. I'm not blaming the deck. I'm blaming me.
However, somebody just looking at PT Honolulu and seeing Wolf Run as the winning deck and saying, "Wow, this deck won so it must be the best deck to play" without giving any thought to the meta is going to get stomped just like I did. And yes, this applies to any net deck.
So given that fact, why not learn to actually understand and evaluate cards yourself and put together something that you know is going to have at least a 50/50 chance against the field that you expect? Would it kill you to actually understand card synergy and deck building than to just pull something "off the rack?"
Again, can everybody do this? No, of course. Some people don't want to be bothered as they're too lazy. But those same people are also too lazy to do the research to figure out if they can even win at their meta with the net deck they blindly pulled off the rack. And people do this. You know they do. I see it all the time and then they wonder why they get stomped.
Deck building is an art and it's not easy. I'll be the first to admit that. But my best nights have almost always come from putting together my own deck and not just picking the best "net" deck. With a home brew, you pretty much don't have to worry about mirror matches. So, if you test that home brew against the established "top" decks, you'll at least know who your good and bad matchups are. And yes, there it is again, I'm hung up on matchups. I think too many take matchups too lightly. I've seen too many impossible to win matchups in 18 years to know how important this is. This is why I will probably never play WRR at my meta again, at least not until I see this UB Control phase that we seem to be going through end.
And yeah, I get that the deck I'm playing this Friday is going to have the same damn problem, but I at least understand that going in. I accept that this will probably be another 2-2 night.
But people who just pull decks off the rack have no clue how they're going to do because they haven't taken the time to properly evaluate what they're going to be up against.
That is my problem with net decking, the blind doing of it.
If the guy who plays with us (10th ranked in the state) net decks, at least he knows what he's doing and why. He's analyzed our meta almost down to the card and you can bet dollars to donuts that he's picked a deck that is going to stomp most of us, which is why he almost always top 8s, week after week. That's why he's ranked 10th in the state.
And guess what? He home brews too. He knows how to put a deck together. Imagine that.
People who just pick out a deck because it won a PTQ or whatever are playing what I call "Lazy Magic" because they didn't even bother to evaluate the deck's potential performance in the meta they're going into.
I did the exact same thing that you said you hate when people do. I picked up delver, without even considering how it would do in my metagame. Turns out my meta is very very hostile to it. I ended up beating the mirror, RG Wolf Run, WB Puresteel, GW Tempered Steel, and Esper Control in the swiss at FNM. All of those (except for Puresteel which isn't a real archtype, although it was def. an uphill battle with mortarpods and infinite Lingering Souls) are decidedly bad matchups for my build of Delver. I ended up losing to Junk Tokens, and I could have won game 1 if I had played it a bit tighter. So I take a deck that has a bad matchup vs. literally everything that I play against, and go 5-1. Just saying that your whole "bad matchup" point is ridiculous, because bad matchups are 40/60 in general, not 10/90.
I also don't see much of a point in analyzing an FNM metagame. FNMs are for fun. Who cares if you win one? Putting time into doing well at FNM seems ridiculous to me; I care much more about real tournaments.
I did the exact same thing that you said you hate when people do. I picked up delver, without even considering how it would do in my metagame. Turns out my meta is very very hostile to it. I ended up beating the mirror, RG Wolf Run, WB Puresteel, GW Tempered Steel, and Esper Control in the swiss at FNM. All of those (except for Puresteel which isn't a real archtype, although it was def. an uphill battle with mortarpods and infinite Lingering Souls) are decidedly bad matchups for my build of Delver. I ended up losing to Junk Tokens, and I could have won game 1 if I had played it a bit tighter. So I take a deck that has a bad matchup vs. literally everything that I play against, and go 5-1. Just saying that your whole "bad matchup" point is ridiculous, because bad matchups are 40/60 in general, not 10/90.
I also don't see much of a point in analyzing an FNM metagame. FNMs are for fun. Who cares if you win one? Putting time into doing well at FNM seems ridiculous to me; I care much more about real tournaments.
Fine, I don't play in "real" tournaments. I neither have the time nor the desire. FNM is my competitive play so I want to do my best at it.
Not every magic player is a "Friday Night Magic is not serious magic" snob.
Fine, I don't play in "real" tournaments. I neither have the time nor the desire. FNM is my competitive play so I want to do my best at it.
Not every magic player is a "Friday Night Magic is not serious magic" snob.
Fair enough. That is your outlook, which is different from mine. I don't take FNM seriously because there happen to be a lot of donks that play at mine. At my FNM (TOGIT, if you are curious), there is no reason to analyze the metagame and play the best deck, because you can play anything and do well if you are decent at Magic. No snobbery, just being realistic.
Fair enough. That is your outlook, which is different from mine. I don't take FNM seriously because there happen to be a lot of donks that play at mine. At my FNM (TOGIT, if you are curious), there is no reason to analyze the metagame and play the best deck, because you can play anything and do well if you are decent at Magic. No snobbery, just being realistic.
My FNM is quite different. We have the 10th ranked player in the state playing there (I'm currently ranked around 70th) and almost everybody is uber competitive. In fact, winning there is a battle. In fact, my overall match record since playing with these guys is 93-103. And I consider myself a better than average player. Sure, a lot of my losses are because I "decided" to bring some janky deck one night because it was "fun" to play. And yes, that's on me. But that was in my early days. Today, I don't dare bring a crappy deck to FNM. So the last thing I want to do is bring one that's going to fold to the meta.
I'm actually debating rethinking my thought process on next week's deck because I know if I run into UB Control I'm going to be toast. But the deck is such a blast to play.
Yes, it's hard weighing winning against having fun.
As has been stated before, there's two different arguments going on in terms of netdecking. First, is that it's not a good idea because a lot of players netdeck instead of really understanding what goes into a deck and how it'll work in the local metagame, and it ends up crippling them. I by and large agree with this argument.
The second argument, which I think is a lot more important, is that netdecking is bad because it ruins the fun for the people who are not netdecking. This is something I strongly disagree with. It's not so much that I disagree with the premise entirely...there are plenty of players who would have much more fun if it was a bunch of low-powered decks butting heads against one another...but is it something that we can realistically expect to ever happen, even without netdecking?
I generally don't netdeck. I'll try something every now and then, if it looks interesting, but at most when I read MTG strategy sites it's for the strategy, and not the decks. I'll pass over the decklists and look for the tech and the reasoning behind the tech and apply it to my own decks...although, to be honest the decks I play usually get 0 tech behind them. My current main deck, W/g Township non-tokens came second in MOCS qualifiers, but other than that it's virtually non-existent (although I will insist that it's a better more consistent version of Naya Pod)
In any case, the point is the problem isn't netdecking, per se. The point is that the problem that people actually have with netdecking is that people are showing up with solid decks with powerful cards vs. not so solid decks with less powerful cards. And that's a problem that's simply unfixable..well it's not...but the cure is worse than the disease, per se.
I'm not actually sure what the solution is. Maybe to break up FNM's into competitive and casual levels, but I'm not sure that will work either, or only for bigger stores. I don't think there IS a good solution to this.
"You suck netdecker!" roughly translates to "I'm butthurt because you beat me."
Everyone wants to play the best deck they possibly can, and there are so many possible combinations and so many players, are you really going to be unique? It's hard to realistically believe that you can come up with a powerful deck off the top of your head that hasn't been posted in a hundred different forms to the net already anyways. So what difference does it make where the deck idea came from? If you lose to it, get back to building a better deck.
I highly doubt any of these people complain about netdecks when they're beating them, so what's the deal?
I like to build and play a lot of different style netdecks on MTGO. Like, a lot of them. It helps me understand each different archetype. It lets me get to know their strengths and weaknesses, and I don't have to take forever fine tuning each deck from scratch. I'm still relatively new to things, so it's all a learning experience.
I've also taken ideas from decks that have beaten me before on MTGO, and tried them as improvements to my decks. I'm sure people have, from day one of mtg, been borrowing ideas and trying them out in their own play. Is that really any different than trying ideas found on forums or sites?
"Netdeck" seems to be a term much more used by players who don't have/won't buy/can't afford a playset of the best cards. Even when someone doesn't even netdeck it just gets thrown out there at people who have nice things. Play Geist of Saint Traft and Sword of War and Peace? NETDECKER!!! How dare you beat my budget infect deck with your internet shenanigans!! The whole idea is silly, and anyone who uses the term "netdecker" in an attempt to be derogatory should be incessantly mocked imo.
Okay. Netdecking is the doom of creative deckbuilding.
Don't tell me I'm wrong. During the Shards block, specifically Conflux, I ran a deck that was literally unbeatable. Even then, nobody tried to copy my deck. Why? Because people liked to have different decks at FNM and see what other people came up with. Now, it's just "go online, find a deck that wins, copy it." This, my friends, is what should never have happened.
There has ALWAYS been architypes. And they will continue to be so. Back in 2000 and before then there was architypes in the game and the Internet wasn't widely used back then. I don't know when this site was founded but magic had been played beforehand.
Going online and copying a SPECIFIC list sucks hard eggs in my opinion. I don't complain about it if I loose to them. But it does suck that a high number of people no longer build their own decks.
The Internet has absolutely changed the game. It has improved it many times over. Think back to the days before magiccards.info, before even the Gatherer. In those times it was a major undertaking to even become aware of the existence of various important cards, if one was new at the game. People were reading each other's cards constantly, because most people were stuck in the same situation: building the best deck they could with the cards they knew about or had. Tournaments were a smorgasbord of the bizarre, and any knowledge one could gleam from experience in this environment was built slowly. There's a beauty in that, but it's the beauty of childhood.
Nowadays I can summon up tournament records, deck lists, numerous articles, spanning entire seasons in the space of an afternoon and without leaving my apartment in Beijing. I can proxy entire top 8s and reconstruct them to figure out why one particular deck was a good choice at that time. This is available to the entire Magic community, and the result is competitive play several orders of magnitude more intricate than that of the past. It is a game in adolescence.
Compare it with chess, a much older and more mature game. Would any participant in an average-sized, weekly tournament object to an opponent that only played established main line opening sequences from published works? I should think not. Players who study the game learn quite early which lines lead to advantageous, balanced, or disadvantageous positions. Someone might come to the tournament who thinks 1. g4 is a fun opening, and might catch a few players unprepared for such an unorthodox situation, but there's just about no chance of that play reaching the top tables.
Magic hasn't received a fraction of the investigation of the King of Games, but the same principle holds for competitive formats. The huge difference in attitude arises, I think, from a misunderstanding of competitive play in the primarily casual world. In the casual world, one plays cool stuff, has fun, it's fun. Nothing could be more ridiculous than researching up a deck list, because putting together that cool stuff is half the fun of it. The competitive world is completely different. 'Building' doesn't have the correct meaning to describe the research, testing, and practice required to field a viable deck (or even to determine a single slot).
There are even competitive formats that focus on deck building skills: Limited. There's even a format, Commander, specifically designed for playing with fun, cool stuff. It seems to me that there's something here for everyone to enjoy. That players in sanctioned Constructed events might have decided to eliminate (or at least reduce) deck construction errors (by utilizing the wealth of information at their fingertips) is part of what makes that format unique and special.
There may be a cultural difference here as well, for I've never noticed a Chinese player object in the slightest way to playing a top-performing list. In fact it's a mark of distinction to be able to identify which major tournament a particular variation was good in. They don't talk about particular cards being good or not. They try to figure out why RG Goblins with 3 Angel of Despair in the SB won that SCG in September, for example.
That may not be who you are but meh. No amount of complaining or reasoning will ever stop people now from netdecking. You may as well try to bail out the ocean with a spoon.
To your reasoned arguments of why netdecking is bad. NO do not care.
As someone who's been playing since the dark and have been on both sides of this issue over the past 17 years (jeezus that seems so long looking at it)
all i can say is get over it. You have every right to not want to play competitive decks outside of a tournament setting but if someone is putting money down your argument is invalid.
I have finally come to accept that, so...
Some weeks, I'll play my usual home brew just to feel a little creative.
Others, when I get tired of losing (happens about once a month) I'll copy down a deck list, tweak the sideboard for my meta, and go have a chance for a decent night, all the while understanding that it's not a guarantee. It just puts me on a somewhat even playing field.
And yes, it's been a very long time.
But you can't live in the past.
Is that different from copying a deck card by card from a random internet page, sure, but only slightly.
I just don't get the gripe. It's kind of like how I hate tournements because I'm not going to keep up with a list of banned cards, which is a result of nerdrage in most cases. How many poker tournements are going to ban aces, or face cards because they're "too powerful?"
Anyways, I just think that some people don't understand that people will still have "staple cards" in certain types of decks with or without the internet. I didn't need the internet to tell me the first blazing archon I got would be great for my reanimator, as soon as I saw the card in the pack I knew it. Get my drift?
But, if someone wants to blame someone, blame wizards for making pre-constructed decks.
Edit: I just wanted to add that the "winning games with your wallet" argument is moot. Unless someone buys all your cards for you, we all play with our wallets.
guess we will never know
Eventually? exactly the same, since those are the best decks in format
Did you just compare Aces in Poker to having to fork out $600 minimum to play the best deck during the Caw Blade era?
Honestly each format has its own barrier to entry, if you cant afford it... sorry looks like the formats not for you, either use your "innovation" to figure out how to do without or play something else.
It was called playing magic in the 90s and it was harder. I remember when we had a guy show up and win a tourney with a mag deck (funny term now), he copied some necro list from a inquest or something and stomped the field. It made some players not want to play anymore, if people weren't going to create their deck.
In many ways all we did was have smaller groups of people to play test with. Back than if you didn't play test, you got stomped in a tourney. if you weren't play testing during the week you were behind. Now you don't have to do the homework and just a copy a list and if your a good player you'll do well. All the internet has done is speed up the process of building and network ideas while having up to date information on what the better players and builders are doing.
What I find funny is when I look at lists I think why isn't this being played, or why isn't this card being run as a 4 of. Oh look this weeks SCG winner just ran with the deck changes I was thinking. I am going back to my scars binder and cards I put a high value on in the context of the set I kept as many copies in the binder, other just tossed in the common box. Now some cards seeing play now like spell bombs were just tossed in the common box, but when i see that over a year ago I put as many copies of vapor snag in the binder I feel like ok Im not not stupid.
I was always the deck builder in my group, but my play has never been tight enough. I don't think you need to be a list copier to have a chance to win. I has a version of Conley Woods ramp deck on Modo, it wasn't his exact list, it wasn't as finely tuned as his was, but I don't have the play time or resources he has, but the concept and core cards were there and it was my original idea and it was giving delver decks a problem on modo. I also had a version of our "pro built" decks again not as refined but the core was there. So I don't think it is as hopeless as you must run this to win. I think last year with Caw Blade, it was one deck or go home, but this year standard is open and I see a very healthy standard to come.
I used to hate net decking but that was because the first time i ever played standard my homebrew pile lost to a tooled affinity deck. i had only ever played kitchen table with friends and never bought a single. actually turned me off of competitive for a while.
now though i think it is necessarily to at least look online for options. One of my best friends in college has taught me a lot of the minutiae of the competitive side of the game. i have always been good at finding cards with synergy of that worked well together without being obvious. basically i would find the shell of the deck i want and he would help me tune it. Now its to the point where we bounce ideas off of each other and both make better decks because of it. I almost never play a deck i havent played against him simply because he can offer a fresh insight on what i am trying to do.
while ill never just copy a list i see online, i see the internet as a vast number of people who can be that second pair of eyes. maybe someone else wants to run a similar deck and has good reasons why card x is better than card y. Ill look on here or other sites and see if people are running something similar and see if theres a card choice that i missed. as someone earlier posted, i would have most likely eventually came to that realization eventually anyways.
I don't know if that's the question here
"Netdecking vs Creating your own deck" is a different argument than "Playing a Tier 1 deck vs Playing a rogue deck"
If you're not a good deckbuilder, I think it's fine to netdeck. The person who builds their own deck is always going to have an advantage because they know the deck more intimately and are able to tweak it to adjust to their playstyle
As for playing a tier 1 deck vs going rogue, I think it comes down to play style. Whatever you can play the best and enjoy playing is what you should build. Tier 1 decks don't have much advantage in an unknown metagame like a local tournament. I've seen xerox'ed tier 1 decks piloted by good players get crushed by an environment full of rogue stuff. In bigger events this question is irrelevant, you play what will get you the win
Standard:
GU Prophet
Legacy:
WBU Shared Fate
Trades
Rogue? That means something that hasn't already been "discovered" at the top tiers.
Can rogue decks be tier 1? Sure. The chances are against it, though, as most of the tier 1 stuff is playtested by multiple sources, and thus tends to be tried and approved as "good". Will a netdeck take you to the championship? Probably not.
As stated in Patrick Chapin's "Next Level Magic", your odds of doing well at a tournament are increased by following the metagame (which includes netdecking), but your odds of doing something truly amazing are better if you go rogue, they just aren't that great for doing "well". If you want to find "the next great deck", you won't do it by following the pack. But, you will have a greater percentage chance of doing well (overall) if you do.
Standard:
WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern:
UR Twinning RU
G Venus Fly Trap G
U Artifacts Aggro U
Legacy:
B Reanimator B
WU Stoneblade UW
EDH
WBGGhave, Guru of SporesGBW
URGRiku of the Two ReflectionsGRU
WUBRGScion of the Ur-DragonGRBUW
Casual
Far too many to list
Last night at FNM, I took an established net deck (Wolf Run Huntmaster) to do battle with. Don't get me wrong, I did okay. But in the last match, the one I needed to win to make top 8, I ran into UB Control. Needless to say, the matchup is almost un-winnable. Anybody who says differently doesn't understand the matchup problems.
As valiantly as I fought, making all the right sideboard moves after game 1, everything I cast either was countered or destroyed with a BSZ. Even my sideboarded Thrun couldn't survive that. I fought him hard game 2. Almost decked him in fact. But in the end, with both of at about 6 cards in our library, he milled me for 6 and that was game.
Under the circumstances (getting 6 drops eliminated by 2cc spells all night) I'd say my play was extraordinary.
But I just had no real chance against that deck.
The week before I took a crazy home brew (after analyzing the meta) and came in 2nd out of 22 people.
Okay, what's my point?
No deck, I don't care how good and established it is, can beat every deck. It's going to have bad matchups. And if you just blindly go into an FNM or whatever event it is you're entering and all you're doing is picking from a list of "top" decks, you're essentially leaving your chances of winning up to the luck of who you draw.
By having a decent idea of what you're going to be up against, you can at least make an informed decision on what deck to play. If your meta is dominated by one or two decks, then your choices may be limited. You may have only one or two choices...play that deck or put together a deck that you think can beat it.
By net decking, you're picking a deck that has already been "figured out" meaning people already KNOW how to beat it, unless it is very new. If the deck is that new, it's unlikely that it's a proven commodity. So you're still taking your chances.
Naturally, to home brew, you have to know how to evaluate a card on its own and interaction with other cards very well. Not everybody can do this. But if you can, it gives you a clear advantage over somebody who blindly picks a net deck because it's performed well in the past.
My choosing Brian Kiblar's Wolf Run Huntmaster, just to prove a point, is living proof of that. I went 2-2 and finished 10th. Okay, but nothing to write home about. I've certainly done better with my own decks.
If you can brew well, it has distinct advantages over net decking.
This is my argument for brewing over net decking.
Obviously, it means you have to be able to do it well. But clearly, if you can, you will be ahead of most people who simply "pick" the "best" deck.
Because the best deck isn't always the best deck.
UB Control lost to a home brew zombies deck last night.
Imagine that.
Okay, let's look at some facts. There is a major tournament almost every weekend; at this point, most of the strongest strategies have been "figured out". There is a reason that everyone brings the "same ol' decks" each weekend, too. Because they are the most efficient or most powerful things that you can be doing right now. Your argument can easily be applied to any netdeck too, you realize? You brought a deck that obviously had a bad UB control matchup (btw, it is not nearly as bad as you say; post-board you have plenty strong cards against UB). That is not Wolf Run's fault, that is your fault. You could have just as easily brought Naya Pod or Humans, but you decided to bring a deck that has a bad matchup against UB Control and act as though it caused you to misread your metagame.
Here's a nice little example for you. My FNM metagame is all aggro decks and one or two guys who play Wolf Run. Reason says I should just run Esper control and proceed to stomp everyone. I don't need to bring a "crazy homebrew" to beat my aggro meta.
RRDWR
GW Aggro
Did you even bother to read my post? I mean REALLY read it?
I'm talking about people who mindlessly pick a deck to play because it's in the top 8 or whatever, without giving any thought to what they're going to be up against. These people win by pure luck because they've done no preparation other than pick a deck off the rack.
If I know I'm going into an FNM that 21 out of 23 people are going to play Wolf Run, I'd probably be a fool not to just net deck UB Control. But most reality isn't like that. Most metas are quite diverse. I suspected I might see UB Control, but with all the aggro running rampant at our meta (spirits, tokens, humans, zombies, werewolves) I couldn't be 100% sure and I knew Wolf Run had a good matchup against those other decks. Sure, I could have chosen one of those other aggro decks and given UB Control a tough match, but then I'm in a crap shoot with the other decks. So I played the percentages and I lost. Yes, I misread the meta. I'm not blaming the deck. I'm blaming me.
However, somebody just looking at PT Honolulu and seeing Wolf Run as the winning deck and saying, "Wow, this deck won so it must be the best deck to play" without giving any thought to the meta is going to get stomped just like I did. And yes, this applies to any net deck.
So given that fact, why not learn to actually understand and evaluate cards yourself and put together something that you know is going to have at least a 50/50 chance against the field that you expect? Would it kill you to actually understand card synergy and deck building than to just pull something "off the rack?"
Again, can everybody do this? No, of course. Some people don't want to be bothered as they're too lazy. But those same people are also too lazy to do the research to figure out if they can even win at their meta with the net deck they blindly pulled off the rack. And people do this. You know they do. I see it all the time and then they wonder why they get stomped.
Deck building is an art and it's not easy. I'll be the first to admit that. But my best nights have almost always come from putting together my own deck and not just picking the best "net" deck. With a home brew, you pretty much don't have to worry about mirror matches. So, if you test that home brew against the established "top" decks, you'll at least know who your good and bad matchups are. And yes, there it is again, I'm hung up on matchups. I think too many take matchups too lightly. I've seen too many impossible to win matchups in 18 years to know how important this is. This is why I will probably never play WRR at my meta again, at least not until I see this UB Control phase that we seem to be going through end.
And yeah, I get that the deck I'm playing this Friday is going to have the same damn problem, but I at least understand that going in. I accept that this will probably be another 2-2 night.
But people who just pull decks off the rack have no clue how they're going to do because they haven't taken the time to properly evaluate what they're going to be up against.
That is my problem with net decking, the blind doing of it.
If the guy who plays with us (10th ranked in the state) net decks, at least he knows what he's doing and why. He's analyzed our meta almost down to the card and you can bet dollars to donuts that he's picked a deck that is going to stomp most of us, which is why he almost always top 8s, week after week. That's why he's ranked 10th in the state.
And guess what? He home brews too. He knows how to put a deck together. Imagine that.
People who just pick out a deck because it won a PTQ or whatever are playing what I call "Lazy Magic" because they didn't even bother to evaluate the deck's potential performance in the meta they're going into.
I also don't see much of a point in analyzing an FNM metagame. FNMs are for fun. Who cares if you win one? Putting time into doing well at FNM seems ridiculous to me; I care much more about real tournaments.
RRDWR
GW Aggro
Fine, I don't play in "real" tournaments. I neither have the time nor the desire. FNM is my competitive play so I want to do my best at it.
Not every magic player is a "Friday Night Magic is not serious magic" snob.
Fair enough. That is your outlook, which is different from mine. I don't take FNM seriously because there happen to be a lot of donks that play at mine. At my FNM (TOGIT, if you are curious), there is no reason to analyze the metagame and play the best deck, because you can play anything and do well if you are decent at Magic. No snobbery, just being realistic.
RRDWR
GW Aggro
My FNM is quite different. We have the 10th ranked player in the state playing there (I'm currently ranked around 70th) and almost everybody is uber competitive. In fact, winning there is a battle. In fact, my overall match record since playing with these guys is 93-103. And I consider myself a better than average player. Sure, a lot of my losses are because I "decided" to bring some janky deck one night because it was "fun" to play. And yes, that's on me. But that was in my early days. Today, I don't dare bring a crappy deck to FNM. So the last thing I want to do is bring one that's going to fold to the meta.
I'm actually debating rethinking my thought process on next week's deck because I know if I run into UB Control I'm going to be toast. But the deck is such a blast to play.
Yes, it's hard weighing winning against having fun.
The second argument, which I think is a lot more important, is that netdecking is bad because it ruins the fun for the people who are not netdecking. This is something I strongly disagree with. It's not so much that I disagree with the premise entirely...there are plenty of players who would have much more fun if it was a bunch of low-powered decks butting heads against one another...but is it something that we can realistically expect to ever happen, even without netdecking?
I generally don't netdeck. I'll try something every now and then, if it looks interesting, but at most when I read MTG strategy sites it's for the strategy, and not the decks. I'll pass over the decklists and look for the tech and the reasoning behind the tech and apply it to my own decks...although, to be honest the decks I play usually get 0 tech behind them. My current main deck, W/g Township non-tokens came second in MOCS qualifiers, but other than that it's virtually non-existent (although I will insist that it's a better more consistent version of Naya Pod)
In any case, the point is the problem isn't netdecking, per se. The point is that the problem that people actually have with netdecking is that people are showing up with solid decks with powerful cards vs. not so solid decks with less powerful cards. And that's a problem that's simply unfixable..well it's not...but the cure is worse than the disease, per se.
I'm not actually sure what the solution is. Maybe to break up FNM's into competitive and casual levels, but I'm not sure that will work either, or only for bigger stores. I don't think there IS a good solution to this.
Everyone wants to play the best deck they possibly can, and there are so many possible combinations and so many players, are you really going to be unique? It's hard to realistically believe that you can come up with a powerful deck off the top of your head that hasn't been posted in a hundred different forms to the net already anyways. So what difference does it make where the deck idea came from? If you lose to it, get back to building a better deck.
I highly doubt any of these people complain about netdecks when they're beating them, so what's the deal?
I like to build and play a lot of different style netdecks on MTGO. Like, a lot of them. It helps me understand each different archetype. It lets me get to know their strengths and weaknesses, and I don't have to take forever fine tuning each deck from scratch. I'm still relatively new to things, so it's all a learning experience.
I've also taken ideas from decks that have beaten me before on MTGO, and tried them as improvements to my decks. I'm sure people have, from day one of mtg, been borrowing ideas and trying them out in their own play. Is that really any different than trying ideas found on forums or sites?
Don't tell me I'm wrong. During the Shards block, specifically Conflux, I ran a deck that was literally unbeatable. Even then, nobody tried to copy my deck. Why? Because people liked to have different decks at FNM and see what other people came up with. Now, it's just "go online, find a deck that wins, copy it." This, my friends, is what should never have happened.
There has ALWAYS been architypes. And they will continue to be so. Back in 2000 and before then there was architypes in the game and the Internet wasn't widely used back then. I don't know when this site was founded but magic had been played beforehand.
Going online and copying a SPECIFIC list sucks hard eggs in my opinion. I don't complain about it if I loose to them. But it does suck that a high number of people no longer build their own decks.
Nowadays I can summon up tournament records, deck lists, numerous articles, spanning entire seasons in the space of an afternoon and without leaving my apartment in Beijing. I can proxy entire top 8s and reconstruct them to figure out why one particular deck was a good choice at that time. This is available to the entire Magic community, and the result is competitive play several orders of magnitude more intricate than that of the past. It is a game in adolescence.
Compare it with chess, a much older and more mature game. Would any participant in an average-sized, weekly tournament object to an opponent that only played established main line opening sequences from published works? I should think not. Players who study the game learn quite early which lines lead to advantageous, balanced, or disadvantageous positions. Someone might come to the tournament who thinks 1. g4 is a fun opening, and might catch a few players unprepared for such an unorthodox situation, but there's just about no chance of that play reaching the top tables.
Magic hasn't received a fraction of the investigation of the King of Games, but the same principle holds for competitive formats. The huge difference in attitude arises, I think, from a misunderstanding of competitive play in the primarily casual world. In the casual world, one plays cool stuff, has fun, it's fun. Nothing could be more ridiculous than researching up a deck list, because putting together that cool stuff is half the fun of it. The competitive world is completely different. 'Building' doesn't have the correct meaning to describe the research, testing, and practice required to field a viable deck (or even to determine a single slot).
There are even competitive formats that focus on deck building skills: Limited. There's even a format, Commander, specifically designed for playing with fun, cool stuff. It seems to me that there's something here for everyone to enjoy. That players in sanctioned Constructed events might have decided to eliminate (or at least reduce) deck construction errors (by utilizing the wealth of information at their fingertips) is part of what makes that format unique and special.
There may be a cultural difference here as well, for I've never noticed a Chinese player object in the slightest way to playing a top-performing list. In fact it's a mark of distinction to be able to identify which major tournament a particular variation was good in. They don't talk about particular cards being good or not. They try to figure out why RG Goblins with 3 Angel of Despair in the SB won that SCG in September, for example.
Overall record: 139-98-15
Total number of matches: 252
Win percentage ignoring draws: 58.649789
Win percentage including draws: 55.158730