Balancing Environment: Metagame

Arc and I seemed to have spawned an off-topic thread in the Ultima discussion that should probably go in it's own thread, to avoid cluttering up that thread. Would appreciate it if a moderator could clean it up.

The general question is this:

Why is CmC being balanced towards the casual game? Is this balancing the result of people wanting to balance towards the environment they play in?

While it is completely understandable to focus your attention on the environment that needs it most (read: that is played the most), it seems kind of odd that we have an environment where everything is supposed to be in balance, and yet taboo decks still exist that shouldn't be played seriously, even if they are supposedly 'balanced?'

It seems that perhaps 'taboo' decks the result of such focused balancing on the casual environment. Winged Golem decks and Tri-color rush decks are generally frowned upon, and while a certain amount of those does happen in Casual play, I don't see it as being a good thing for the game. All the degenerate decks rear their ugly head at any tournament that is worth something.

Why is a meta-game for the serious players discouraged? Why is the casual environment the best environment to balance for?

Simply put, the answer to this question is that going directly by the coded rules of the game, the casual environment is the only environment. Since there aren't coded deck restrictions on the game, balance must work on the assumption that people will play with as many copies, as few cards in deck, or whatever other rediculousness they can possibly come up with, simply because they CAN do so. Unless and until the game gets hard coded rules that place top and/or bottom limits on card copies and/or deck size, balance cannot take into consideration tournament play, or any other kind of player based structuring. It'd be like WotC balancing Magic based on the way people play in a game of mental magic, or Bandai balancing YuGiOh around the unplayable God Cards. You cannot balance a TCG outside its actual, built in rules, period.

What you said is very true, we can only balance to the rules that are enforced, specifically by the game.

However, the environment which you speak of, that which is explicitly defined by the rules is *not* the casual environment that is being balanced to.

The environment strictly enforced by the rules, like you have said, is as small as possible, with no restrictions on card limitations. But herein lies the rub. Why are there, then, still taboo decks? Not only that, these taboo decks consist of cards that have been around for a year! Winged Golems and Tri Color rush? Clash / Principalities. Should not this be balanced? After all, have we not been balancing to this environment for years?

Standard Casual, strictly speaking, is *not* the environment the rules enforce by themselves. There are so many other generalities and silent etiquette rules that we abide by to make it the environment it is.

A better analogy, if you want to use magic and WoTC, is that essentially, WoTC should not balance the Vintage Format based on casual Vintage. Casual Vintage has a whole etiquette associated with it, most of them being that if you play with broken cards, I get to punch you in the face, so don't play them, or I will never talk to you again. However, if you look solely at what the rules enforce, what you get is competitive vintage. Thus, They should balance the format based on competitive Vintage.

I'm sure, somewhere, someone is using a Black Lotus to summon a Hill Giant on turn 2. Or that someone, somewhere, is using WYBM on a jelly.

That's great. That's a casual environment. It's fun. But it's not strictly the same environment the rules enforce. Our casual environment has all sorts of little rules tacked on. The environment the rules enforce is really quite competitive, with any number of broken decks being the norm.

That's all with the assumption that people abide by these rules, which isn't generally the case. If someone wants to play a deck, they may mention it before hand, but I don't think I've ever seen them not play that deck because of some silent rules. Then again, I'm not in their heads, so it may be true, but I've definitely never seen anyone avoid decks others find annoying out of sympathy for their opponents if they're having fun.

While the MtG analogy is good, there is one problem with associating it with CMC. There you can pick up your cards and play dozens of other people in the same area. Then, next saturday or whatever, play at some completely different venue and never see that person again. CMC is a small community where that isn't always an option. I know from personal experience I've played decks others don't nessesarily like (as they verbally express it), but they will challenge me again.

One thing that strikes me about your last post is the reference to tricolor and golem rush as not being balanced after being out for quite a while. The problem here is not that the cards are unbalanced, they are. The problem is that the overall archtype of rush or beatstick is unbalanced compared to other styles of play. The reason they remain unbalanced isn't because of some flaw in the balance forum, it's that there have yet to be evolutions in the game for stall/decking/whatever to combat these styles of play. That's not something the balance forum can deal with, that's part of card creation which we have no say over.

Xypherous-Oxide Wrote:However, the environment which you speak of, that which is explicitly defined by the rules is *not* the casual environment that is being balanced to.

Could you give an example of what you mean?

I share Andriex's thoughts on why the deck types beatstick and rush are superior to most other deck forms. There just aren't cards currently to deal with them.

If we had something like Quick Sand: all monsters with 40 or less attack destroyed, then we would have a work around for weenie rush.
CMC is ran by one person and there's only so much he can do.

Weenie rush has a lot of counters. Beatstick rush also has a lot of counters. Generally though, they're not the same counters (or a counter to one has a lesser effect on the other).

Something like your Quick Sand ability would be heaven to anyone running Golemrush. And it'd kill off anything remotely snipey as well

If you're bothered about weenies, run Boardroom Avengers. Or Brick Walls. Or Minefields (especially with Hyperspace). Or Mountain Ranges. Heck, there's a ton of counters, and they're not just your niche cards either.

Beatsticks are more of a problem than weenies, though they aren't without their own counters, but there are far less (Duplo).

???

Yes.

Brick Wall / Diplo combo.

Cool, it has a name now.

Well, I named it that the first time I faced it in Jackpot. It's not exactly in circulation...

But with your help (note: addressed to all readers) this can become a commonly used term.

I now declare this thread to be dedicated to this new terminology. Go forth and spread the word™!

Although I agree to a certain extent that many cards could stall golems/tricolour beatsticks, it is however, the fact that these cards are severely underpowered when taken out of the matchup against golems/tricolour, would not warrant the inclusion of them in the first place. If an entire deck was dedicated against facing off golems, then of course it will have the advantage in that particular matchup, but due to casualness of the environment, when not facing golem decks, often it will just roll over and die.

For this whole golem deck examples, I am very much reminded of the MTG Mirrodin standard season, in which one particular deck: Affinity, simply beat every other decks. That season spawned one of the lowest in tournament/FNM appeareance. The last time that happened, was when every deck in standard killed consistently on turn 2/3. Affinity was pretty much an aggro deck that exploded out, finished strong, and particularly hate resistant. People that I played previously would not even play Affinity in casual games, simply because it was capable of beating down most other decks in about 3-4 turns. The entire deck also required chump change, as no particular cards cost a large amount to acquire. What did WoTC do? They banned a large number of cards so that the metagame became balanced (as you can't really issue a recall on all ravagers/disciple of the vault/skullclamps).

It is different for CMC, particularly since all the cards are virtual, are stored in a database, and can be modified upon the players consensus. But I still suggest for a system that, through restrictions, even through implementing on having only 4 copies of a particular card could solve this whole golem issue.

While in the prime tournament, I was finding trouble facing birds (they could be the golems in our example). Even after running duplo up the wazoo, it was actually very easy for a bird deck to deal any of the defensive threats, simply because duplo doesn't trade 1 for 1 or 2 for 1 for a bird. It just buys time. Time to do what? Usually to find a board clearer or a large threat, however, that is almost impossible to achieve for the duplo deck. But that's probably for another thread at another time.

Fixed

Out of curiosity, what was it that penetrated your duplo defences? Was it the birds, golems and demons? Or was it gloops, firebolts, smashed hopes and tremorcalls?

If the latter, then you faced a more hybrid deck than a simple beatdown/rush, and so your comparisons may not be quite so fair.

I can understand your problem during a prime only tournament, but that was in a prime only tournament. In a system where that is an extreme rarity, there are bound to be a few imbalances in one set. To continue the MtG analogy, it would be comparable to one block of magic that only had white and red fliers, so they could dominate color decks. Within certain sets there will be prevalant themes, and in Prime it would be beatsticks. However, when you add in other cards into your Diplo deck, you can keep it alive for longer and have ways to kill the opponent.

Honestly though, there is one major problem with stall decks right now: limited ways to kill the opponent. Beatstick decks and stall decks both get you field control. The problem being that for beatstick decks your way to acquire field control is also your win condition, with stall it isn't. It always requires other cards (invisible attackers, direct damage, card draw for decking) and most of the time it's very expensive. That's why miasma and soulsphere work so much better at countering beatsticks than stall, their way of acquiring field control (speed summon to feed soulsphere, weenies spammed to make use of miasma or snipers which can still attack) is also their win condition. It's my personal belief that we saw a holy banisher ability on a wall, we'd see a huge revival of stall decks. Want some proof of my theory? Look at what happened to the metagame when Cane came out. We suddenly had a viable sniper that also would deck the opponent in a stall set up, and those decks flooded the environment.

Guess I got a tad off topic there >.>

If it's any consolation, Prince appears to be somewhat more balanced on it's own. You have Melrak Soldier/Angelic Warrior/Winged Golem, but the set includes locations, ability/spell immune, and unique abilities like Prince Glomp, Starsword Paladin, Honor Burrower, etc. It would probably have been a better set to base a tourney on.