This weekend the Historic Metagame Challenge will take place on MTGArena (May 17-20) and it will not be the only one on our radar because even the Standard Metagame Challenge will arrive, just a couple of weeks later (May 31-June 3).
It's already been a few years I’ve been participating at this type of event successfully, so today I'm not here to give you advice on which deck to play (cough, cough... Izzet Wizards is a solid choice), but for an aspect that in my opinion is a priority, namely the mindset and the attitude to face this kind of challenge.
What is the Metagame Challenge and why is it a thing?
Before to go further, however, let's explain to those who don’t know and perhaps are going to try this event for their first time, what the Metagame Challenge is and why I suggest to play it. It’s a special constructed event (it can be any format and lasts only 3 days), with a Best-of-Three structure and where the ideal thing is to get 7 wins and 0 defeats.
Sadly there is no room for mistakes since you are eliminated when you lose the first match, but, don't worry, you can rejoin as many times as you want by paying again the small entry fee: 2000 gold or 400 gems. The advantage, however, lies in the possibility of winning huge rewards for each victory achieved, up to a maximum of 30 booster packs with the desired 7 victories. And it’s exactly this that makes the Metagame Challenge the favorite and most awaited event for the free-to-play players, who can expand their collection and at the same time get rare and mythic wildcards by opening prize packs (thanks to “the wildcard wheel”).
5 Tips to succeed at the Metagame Challenge
Based on past experiences and mistakes I’ve made too, I have for you 5 small tips that could be useful to achieve a good result in any generic Metagame Challenge.
#1 Do not rush
Every Challenge remains online for 72 hours, which may seem like a long time, but actually it is not for everyone. You may have stuff to do or the weekend is already taken and, considering the matches are BO3 and therefore long, we tend to play very quickly in order to play as many runs as possible.
The result, however, often translates into several runs of 2, 3 or 4 victories, the rewards of which are not enough to justify the many hours spent.
It is much better to play calmly instead, surely making fewer runs, but with pondered game choices that could lead you to achieve 5, 6 or, why not, the full 7 victories.
Even in case of a defeat, there is an advantage: you have time to understand and analyze what didn't work out. It may have been due to a missplay of yours; maybe it’s time to change something in your deck; or maybe it was just bad luck and it will be better next time!
#2 Prioritize a deck that wins quite fast
Although we have just said to play slowly, at the same time it’s advisable to use a deck that doesn’t win too slowly in order to repeat more runs and safeguard mental energies.
If you are a Control player, I am not telling you not to play it, on the contrary, everyone should prioritize what you know how to play best, but maybe don't dedicate all your time only to it and use a faster and less demanding alternative, perhaps for bit of mental rest between a run and another.
#3 Don't be afraid to change a few cards
You chose instead to play the deck that went 12-1-1 in the last big event, but which now, in your hands, is not working as you expected.
You are not understanding why certain choices are made, what certain cards are for or how to win in certain match ups, but obviously you blame yourself, so you keep repeating run after run with the same 75 cards, even though something else seems better to you.
For me we should try to follow our guts and change what we don't like with what seems relevant to us.
This doesn't mean that we are right or that we are better players than the person who achieved the big result. This almost certainly will not be the case, but, due to our way of playing or maybe even just for a change of the meta (for the reason seen before the Metagame Challenges tend to be more aggro than usual), these changes could lead us to do better.
It's not important to find the perfect deck, but that one that works and it’s perfect for us!
#4 Don't panic if you're losing resources
Okay, you're playing the Metagame Challenge but things are not going well for you! So far your best result has been 2 wins while, in the meantime, you have already lost 8-10k gold.
This is certainly not a good thing, but you don't necessarily have to give up. A negative start can happen to anyone, but you may try to understand what it is due to and you can remedy it.
Just string together a couple of runs with 5 and 7 wins, for exemple, and you've already turned the corner with +4k gold and +40 booster packs.
The point is these Metagame Challenges are special events and are not permanently available. Once online it’s better to try them out rather than give up too soon and if, in the worst case, you would have lost resources, you’ll have time to redo them playing on a regular basis... meanwhile you wait for the next Challenge!
#5 If anything works, try something already worked
I'll leave the worst case scenario for last! The format is maybe kinda unexplored and during the week you prepared a couple of decks for this event but now none of them seem to work: perhaps because your preparation was superficial and your deck is not well built or due to a different meta than you predicted.
There is still one last thing you can do before to give up, which is to search online for someone’s list who has already knocked the Challenge out. There’s no shame in doing this and the ideal would be to find more people who are having success with that particular deck, so you have a good chance it is actually effective in that current metagame, just shaped in the event.
There are plenty of places to choose from, but I would name Twitter, where in real time many Magic users are used to post their lists and the successes achieved with them.
That’s all for today, folks! Good luck to everybody for the weekend and have a profitable farming!
