From Essential Magic.
Hayden here, and I just want to say a few things about this article before we delve any further. This guy gets it. The author, like myself, started playing Magic in 1994. I have seen firsthand the evolution of the game and the rise of net decking. I find this article to be so good, I'm going to repost all of it. Cheers.
I started playing this game back in 94, right between Unlimited and Revised. I got into tournament type play about a year after I started. Type 1 was the primary format, with occasional Type 1.5 and Type 2. This was when you could buy Black Lotus for $100 and a Mox would set you back $60. I live near a college town, and there has always been a fairly large group of Magic players in the area. We would go to the tournaments every Tuesday evening, and play. You had everything there, people playing all sorts of Blue/White control variants (almost all of them with Moat[/moat]), White Weenie Aggro, Land Destruction, Discard ([card]Hymn to Tourach got REAL old), and Gabe with his ever present Juzam Djinn.
However, there were several very very good players that would bring what would be now called a Rogue deck. When you had to play these guys, it didn't matter if you had look in Scry magazine and prepared for the top level tournament decks, you were in trouble. I am not saying that their decks won every tournament, but they were really excellent deck builders. They were playing in the top level amateur tournaments and even in professional events. You had to build decks not only to deal with the 2 or 3 decks you knew were going to be there, but also the decks that you didn't know. Everyone, if you wanted to be at all successful, had to build decks that maybe drew rough inspiration from the current decks, but you had to build against the unknown. You could occasionally get away with a bad play (not very often against the best players) because you were both packing something the other wasn't expecting. Your decks had to be creative, attempting to use cards in unexpected ways (sometimes with poor results). You were constantly looking for the advantage over your opponent.
Decks that did well generally wouldn't do as well the next time, because people would start building to exploit a weakness. Decks were constantly changing and evolving until they reached their pinnacle. If it was good enough, they were taken to a top level tournament, but most died in those hard fought battles in a little hole in the wall sub shop. Everyone trying to create the perfect card interaction.
On the way home, we would discuss what we saw played, and what worked and what didn't. What ideas others had, and if/how they could be improved to get a bigger advantage. You very rarely talked about the mistakes you made in a match (unless it was colossal mistake), but what card interactions were needed to generate advantage.
Around Weatherlight/Tempest this started to change. You would go every week and instead, out of 30 people, there being 20 different decks, there was only 10 different decks. This just kept up. Finally, I quit playing tournaments. You would go, and you might have 1 or 2 people playing Rogue decks, mostly because they didn't have the cards to build the meta-decks. Most of the decks were very very similar. Sure, there might be 3 cards in Deck A that were different than Deck B, but they were effectively the same deck. I started to get frustrated, seeing the same decks over and over. Also, Type 2 started to become the primary format and I just didn't have the money to buy cards all the time. I mostly dropped out of the game.
Over the next few years, I would occasional go to a tournament. A friend of mine would build a deck and ask if I wanted to play in a tournament. If I agreed, we would get together the night before so i could test the deck out and see how it played. We would run through the deck a few times, testing it against the meta so I knew what I would see the next day. 4 or 5 matches through, i would have played against every deck in the meta, and knew exactly what I would see the next day. Generally, I did pretty well, won more than I lost.
Finally, I got a really good job and I wanted to get back in the game. Scars of Alara had just dropped, so I bought back in. I kept building decks and losing. Finally, a younger friend of ours asked me why i kept losing, and I said I don't know how to build decks anymore. He said, what do you mean, just look on the internet.
That floored me. All the creativity was gone from the game. You just looked on line and build basically what was there. At the time, it was Jund mostly.Naya Zoo would do okay sometimes, Turbo Fog was alright. When Zendikar dropped, Boros showed up, and Esper control became tough (Jace TMS helped a lot). Other things, like vampires would popup, and was decent for a middle of the pack finish.
Now, we look at the meta, and there are what 5 decks, maybe 6 that are top tier competitive decks: Black/Blue control (although this is being replaced with Tezz decks), Caw-Go, RDW, Kuldotha Red (this could be grouped with RDW, but Kuldotha Red is a combo/aggro deck, not pure aggro like RDW), Eldrazi Ramp (haven't seen one do any good in a while though), Valakut Ramp (same results as Eldrazi Ramp). As Eldrazi Ramp and Valakut Ramp have started phasing out, Black/Red Vampire has shot up the charts to replace them. Like Jund, Caw-Go is really starting to dominate the format, meaning more of these decks are showing up.
Why is Caw-Go arguably dominating the format at the moment? The answer is Net Decking. Caw-Go is a good deck, there is no question about it. It was created in response to the Black/Blue control decks that were starting to become common. Caw-Go (and its later incarnation, Caw-Blade) was designed to deal with other control decks. It has the pieces to deal with aggro, and since it is control, it slaughters combo (except Kuldotha Red, since that combos turn 1). As it kept winning tournaments, more and more people started playing it. It now feeds its own popularity. At any given tournament, there is going to be a few of these show up in the top 8 (believe there were 3 in Paris). There are decent odds that a variation of Caw-Go is going to win any given tournament.
Net Decking is causing this to happen. If everyone didn't get most of the deck ideas online, people would be trying to build different decks. However, this has promoted people to play better. You can no longer rely on having a better card interaction than the other guy. You know what he is playing almost as soon as he drops his first land, and immediately start adjusting your play to counter act what he is doing. Against top tier opponents, your play has to be near perfect, or you are going to lose. Even the smallest misstep in play can cost you the game and in turn, the match.
After the match, my friends and I no longer discuss which decks were neat ideas, but what minor play mistakes we made. Deck construction is no longer that important (although i keep trying to come up with different stuff). You can just look online to find the deck, now you have to learn to play perfectly. I spend 2 or 3 days test playing decks, not to see how they work, but to learn to use the cards in the most effective manner, learning when to mulligan a playable hand because it isn't optimal against the deck I am playing against. Learning what to sideboard in and out against different meta decks. The feel of play is no longer the same.
I am not saying that the old idea (construction over play) is better than the new idea (play over construction), but it is different. We used to complain about a friend for being a rules lawyer. Now though, everyone has to know the rules forwards and backwards to be able to succeed at the game. The knowledge of the game has moved from before the game to during the game.
The one clearly good thing that has come of this is that in a lot of ways, it has taken money out of the equation. Since you know what is going to be played, and everyone is playing basically the same decks, having a bigger collection no longer gives you an advantage. Even the people that have very large, very expensive collections are beaten on a regular basis just because their play style isn't as tight as it needs to be.
Will the landscape ever change back to the old way? I don't think so. I think until this game dies out, we will continue to see this trend. However, to the other explorers like me, that try to find unexpected interactions, don't give up just yet. You never know, you may be the person that finds the next Jund, and live in infamy for being the person that broke the game for awhile.
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