State of the Meta 2013-04-25

The Stockholm meta has been fluctuating lately, it's been a slow progress. We've added another regular day for gaming on Sundays with a less competitive approach where our more casual Methuselah can play and try out new ideas and possibly have a beer while gaming, but for this article I'll be focusing on the Wednesday games which are ruled by the league matches.

The league at the moment is a very close competition; we had an early shift in the meta when the league started to more aggressive decks this resulted in less and less assistance disciplines (obfuscate, necromancy, obtenebration) and more delivery mechanisms (dominate, presence, votes etc.). Thus the rise of the Lawfirm as a strong archetype

The shift in meta occurred slowly but was speeded up with the arrival of the Sunday games, slight intercept, larger reactive packages, slight stealth, slight combat etc. All deadly to slimmed Lawfirms when they arrive in large doses, a whole table of durdle with slight intercept will slow you down and stop before the gamewin is decided.

This has given a rise to the stealthvoters, tables in Stockholm are heavy on votes at the moment. It’s a good counter vs durdles with slight intercept since the inherent stealth with slight support is enough to break through, you can deal damage across the whole table which speeds up the game and aids even low delivery decks. At the moment I’m trying out a Pot-Pre voter, while really bad a few month ago when it died before having time to do anything due to the insane aggression at that time, it gets more time for the setup now and the slight support delivers enough throughput. ( Pot-Pre HotPot )

Durdle/toolbox decks are also the bane of AUS weenies or stickmen since they need an active predator without hitback in combat to be able to get maximum efficiency. Stealth votes also do well vs these types of decks in general, crosstable ousting them or just stealthing past. This should give a decent window of opportunity for combat decks, while they were outgunned when the meta was hyper aggressive, the slower tempo should aid them in games. The different types of combat decks are of course a question of taste, but both potence or animalism rush combat and ally combat have been doing well and we should be seeing a rise of these types of decks. I will be keeping an eye out on the league to see if my analysis has been correct.

/Myrdin