(Special Thanks to Oliver "Soulwarrior" Gehrmann for translating Christian Pfeiffer's article. You guys rock! - Mike)


Hello dear DailyMetagame.com readers! Let me start by quickly introducing myself. My name is Christian Pfeiffer and I’m an avid gamer from Leipzig, Germany. I’m the founder and team leader of Bootcamp L.E., Germany’s largest – and by now hopefully best known – WoW TCG playgroup.

We wanted to support DailyMetagame.com as we really like what the crew tries to accomplish with this cool site. Mike gave us a chance to support the site by contributing some content, so now you know who to blame in case you don’t like what you’ll (hopefully) be reading the next 5 minutes. This article is about both the advantages and (this might surprise some) disadvantages of the deck building process in a local playgroup. Without further ado, let’s break this down!

Every time a new set hits the shelves, we’re sitting together, breaking our heads, trying to decide which cards hold the most potential and will support new crazy deck ideas. It’s always lots of work to go through all the cards from the set list, trying to imagine how every single card might work in a particular deck. To be perfectly honest with you, I’m often struggling to see the full potential of a card at first glance; I’ve often discarded cards way too quickly that later turned into key components of extremely powerful decks. Thanks to the other members of my team, this has never been too much of a problem. They love to point out where I’m wrong and teach me the full strength of some cards.

This is how we do it: Right after the contents of a new set become public, we start a thread in our dedicated Bootcamp forum section on Warcraft-TCG.de where everyone throws in their two cents about the best cards. It only takes us a few days to come up with the first deck ideas, so we then start testing the decks against other players on Magic Workstation or in “solo mode” (playing the deck against yourself over and over again). This is one of the best benefits of being a part of a team – everyone has their unique take on the cards and decks and a group can often find out more about the usability of cards than an individual.

Granted, no matter how large your team is, you’ll never be able to come up with a perfect prediction of the metagame for an upcoming larger tournament like a Darkmoon Faire, the Continental Championship or Worlds. You never know for sure what the other players will run...unless you call them, that is (and I know quite a few pro players who seem to do that with a passion). Then again, my experience tells me that even fanatic telephone sessions won’t be worth the effort...

...at least when it comes to preparing for a DMF in Europe. The players from the various European nations tend to favor different deck ideas, so the DMF’s often turn into clashes between the different metagames. Thanks to the language barrier, there isn’t that much exchange between the countries; in extreme cases, you don’t have a deck on the radar that is widely known in one of your neighbor countries! I’m not sure if American players experience the same thing when they’re crossing the borders between states, but I honestly can’t imagine it’s THAT bad.

Let’s take France for example: The French are known for their creative control decks. They were the first to pilot a Discard Priest to a win (at the Darkmoon Faire Stuttgart) and they were the most successful Vor’na players back at Worlds 2007 in Paris – and believe me, it wasn’t just the home advantage that worked in their favor, helping them to overcome most Vor’na players from the other nations.

On the contrary, players from the western part of Germany, which is only a stone’s throw away from France, tend to favor extremely aggressive decks. They live by the quote of a well known World Champion: “Rush is always a great choice in an undefined metagame.”

These two archetypes are polar opposites! But wait, there’s a third archetype, trying to combine the advantages of both aggressive and defensive decks: the mid-range decks. And we haven’t even started talking about exotic strategies like Heavy Equip at this point, but let’s leave them out for the sake of making a point. What I’m trying to tell you is this: one of the fundamentals in every Trading Card Game is that different archetypes are more powerful in a match-up against another specific archetype. It works almost like a game of Rock Paper Scissors. You all know Rock crushes Scissors, Scissors wins against Paper and Paper beats Rock.

Also,

• Very aggressive decks tend to beat slow decks that try to stall and win in the later rounds.
  
  

• Mid-range decks usually gain the upper hand against very aggressive decks and turn the game around come turn 7.
  
  

• Heavy control beats mid range decks as it has little trouble handling the threats of the mid range deck; the mid range players fails to put enough pressure on the heavy control player, giving him enough time to seal the deal.
  
  

As a result, the metagame often develops like this: if an aggressive deck won the last tournament or dominated day 2, you’ll get to see more mid range decks in the following tournament. If mid range wins the next tournament, heavy control will become more popular; at least among players that spend a lot of time thinking about the game, and so on.

The only thing that tends to break this cycle is the release of a new set. Then it’s almost like going back to square one and we tend to see aggressive strategies near the top tables.

Let’s take the Darkmoon Faire Antwerp as an example. Prior to the tournament, we had quite a discussion going on, debating whether “the anti-aggro deck” or a mid-range deck would be the best choice. The anti-aggro strategy was the [Zaritha] Deck, while the best mid-range deck in our opinion was a similar build of what Stuart Wright ran at the European Continentals ([Timmo Shadestep] Rogue Resource Control). Taking into account that there were no tournaments prior to Antwerp where Wrath Gate had been legal, you could rephrase the million dollar question to: would the majority of the players foresee that good mid-range can easily dismantle aggressive strategies like Kuma and run less aggressive decks as a result?

If so, Timmo would be a good choice as it had next to no trouble taking apart most other mid range decks and if you played your cards the right way, even heavy control would fall victim to the devastating hand destruction ([Detect Traps] & [Poach]) combined with resource control ([Band of Vile Aggression]).

Many of us hoped that players would favor mid-range as Turov and Zaritha seemed like very powerful decks. Unfortunately, those of us didn’t take into account the fact that many humans like to act like creatures of habit; lots and lots of players didn’t waste any time to think about the metagame and simply relied on Kuma and other aggressive decks that they had already been playing during the months before the Darkmoon Faire. As a direct result, Christian Kurze had little trouble piloting his Zaritha deck to an unprecedented 17 - 0 record in games, not getting paired against a single heavy control deck all day (kudos also gooes out to Karl Rößler who had been playing the deck for more than a year, and he inspired Christian to run it).

Most of our Timmo players dropped out halfway through the tournament with no chance of making the top spot. So this is the one big disadvantage of a playgroup: Sometimes, you can be two steps ahead of the competition, which in turn puts you one step behind (confused yet?).

There’s no way of telling if the players will continue to act in this rather predictable manner, so we don’t know for sure if aggressive strategies will make out the majority of the metgame in the upcoming major tournaments. Upon first glance at Worldbreaker, I saw quite a couple of cards that would fit well in aggressive decks. Then again, I’ve been wrong before. And to be perfectly honest, the game wouldn’t be as exciting as it is if you could easily tell what will be going on at the next big tournament.

I hope you had some fun reading about the pros and cons of participating in a playgroup. I’m looking forward to seeing or even playing against you in one of the upcoming bigger tournaments! Be sure to give us a shout out in-person or on the Bootcamp’s Facebook page.

-Christian Pfeiffer

Christian Pfeiffer is one of the founders and the team leader of the Bootcamp L.E. – Germany’s largest local playgroup, featuring various Darkmoon Faire winners as well as the reigning World Champion. He keeps the group together and organizes trips for the more than 20 members to major tournaments around the world, giving them global exposure.