Quote Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies View Post
You're looking at people "metagaming properly": playing exact copies of the same list in the finals while we see the same decks over and over again.

See, the reason why people aren't going to metagame outside of making specific tweaks for blue mirrors (outside of obvious netdecking) is this: everyone knows that nonblue decks lose to combo. Everyone knows that blue beats combo. If you're afraid enough of combo you will just play a blue deck and be done with it. As long as enough people believe you can beat everything with blue, blue will dominate because "you can beat everything with it."

See the problem here? Blue decks are obviously not bulletproof, but if you're basing your deck choice decisions off of T8 or T16 evidence, there's little to suggest otherwise. Sure, it could be that 17-whatever is chock-full of blue killers, but that data won't show up for possibly weeks. People check a T16, see infinite blue and a couple of other decks, write off the other decks as flukes/good players with bad decks, and assume that infinite blue made it to the top because blue is the best and they should therefore play blue. Then the next tournament has too many blue decks and not enough blue-predator decks, and the latter don't show up in the T16 in large enough quantities to break the pattern because of bad matchups/bad beats/ average pilots. And so the cycle continues.

Plus, in Legacy, it's enormously expensive to switch decks once you've built something (outside of a narrow range of sister decks or building a "budget" option like Affinity or Dredge). It's possible that people are showing up with only blue decks because that's all they've got.

EDIT: I think that people arguing that the metagame is fine because foils exist and people are just too stupid/sheeple to play them are focusing too much on matchups in a vacuum and not enough on the psychology behind a metagame. If you believe that Snapcaster Mage is insane and Delver of Secrets is a better Wild Nacatl, then you have little reason to play a deck like Zoo. Whether or not beliefs like that are "correct" in an objective sense is irrelevant if they are never tested because, say, the meta is such that Snapcaster actually is insane and Delver actually is a better Nacatl. Put another way: sometimes, if enough people believe something, that will inform their deck choices in such a way as to make the belief "true" regardless of whether or not it is actually true in a perfect metagame.
+1. Doesn't anyone remember how fucking hard they had to pull to make Blue decent in Legacy? Anyone remember that whole 'support color' phase it went through? mmm?