MM #2: The Metagame: Playing the Game outside of the Game

Recently, I’ve been playing more and more tabletop games, ever since I discovered the tabletop game club at Champlain College. I’ve also played a couple of card games there including Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh. For the uninitiated, both games have the principle of collecting cards from booster packs or pre-made decks, then building customized decks in order to battle other players. Both games are so popular, that there are officially sanctioned tournaments where players can win considerable cash prizes.

With this sort of possibility, players naturally want to make their deck the best they can and be able to play the best they can. There are several factors for players to consider: the types of decks that are most played at tournaments, cards that either become limited or banned, new card sets coming out and the street value of cards. This sort of information gathering and communication between players is known as the Metagame.

Early examples of how players stayed informed.

In the early days of CCGs, especially for Magic, keeping up on the latest trends meant magazines such as Inquest and Scrye to find out about the latest cards and strategies as well as your local game and hobby shop. Printed price guides also existed in order to compare the price of certain cards. Even with different set rarities, the values of cards were primarily based on their usefulness in the game, which in turn, raises the demand for them. As for finding out about new cards, aside from maybe a few previews in magazines, there was no way of doing so.

With the advent of the internet, many things changed. While in many cases, it meant that information published in magazines was now available online, this also meant that much more information could be circulated online. However, one of the biggest changes in this is that it is a lot easier for information about upcoming sets to be leaked online. Last year, I was able to find out about the entire Worldwake expansion a month before I saw it in the shops. This means that players have much more time to plan ahead, find the powerful cards from those sets and be able to get their hands on them while the prices are relatively low.

Left: Dark Depths. Right: The Card that causes it to become worth $25.00 more.

Speaking of prices, thanks to the internet, prices for cards can update rapidly. Although in the case of many cards, they change over time, if a new, devastating combo is discovered, it can increase the demand for the card, and thus, the cost. One example is the card Dark Depths. It was considered too slow to work with and too easily dealt with. It was only worth around $4.00. However, once a card released in Zendikar, Vampire Hexmage, allowed all the counters to be removed from it as early as turn 1-3 depending on the format, the price shot up all the way to $30.00 in less than a month. This, combined with the ease of gaining new information about future cards through the internet, makes the metagame even more fast paced, especially if you want to play both competitively and economically.

Nintendo Power: Giving Players the Power

I opted not to talk about a magazine with groundbreaking political or economic knowledge. Although I do read magazines with such information at times, for the most part, I glance at them when I’m idle somewhere such as the dentist’s waiting room. However, for my magazine, I choose to look at one that was a large part of my childhood: Nintendo Power.

The Issue that started it all

Near the end of every month, I anxiously awaited for my mom to look through the mail and pull out the latest issue of Nintendo Power. As a kid with a Super Nintendo, a Gameboy and later a Nintendo 64 and Gamecube, it was important for me to learn about the latest Nintendo games available. Not only that, but each issue had tips and tricks for games that I owned which proved useful on many occasion.

My favorite section was the classified information section. This contained cheat codes that would otherwise never be discovered by normal gameplay. At the time I read the magazine extensively, the only other way to learn about games was to talk with friends about it, so having the knowledge from the classified information, so knowing the information from that section made you the coolest kid on the block.

However, as technology got more advanced, I got older as well and I eventually cancelled my subscription to Nintendo Power. For one, the internet, especially a site called GameFAQs, had a goldmine of information concerning the latest videogames, not only for Nintendo Systems, but others as well. With the internet being my primary source of information these days, Nintendo Power doesn’t really cut it anymore. However, for its time, it was invaluable.

For more information about Nintendo Power, watch the Angry Video Game Nerd’s look back on it.