It seems almost like whenever I get on octgn to play mage wars nowadays the strategies my opponents use are often at least a tad bit generic. It's obviously not just netdecking, or I would be seeing some of the more fun and interesting strategies being netdecked as well. Where are all the innovative spellbooks?
My suspicion is that not every decent player is also that good at spellbook building, and there are probably a lot of netdeckers out there playing this game. Not that there's anything wrong with netdecking, but I think more of us should be posting more of our competitive spellbooks so that when people netdeck the games are more interesting to watch and to play.
I mean, it's one thing if you're saving it for tournaments, but the global metagame is pretty much exclusively online and the real life tournament scene isn't quite the same since it's not really global. I wish there was an interface that allowed people to play in real life against an online opponent, like a remotely controlled robot or something, except that would not be portable enough.
You see, there are two ways for metagame shift to happen in Mage Wars: Using cards that already exist in innovative and unexpected ways, and using new cards from newly released sets.
Last year there was a long, long period of time in which we waited for the release of Forged in Fire, and during that time the global metagame stagnated. Then when Forged in Fire's release date was only about maybe a month or two away, suddenly the metagame drastically transformed, and this was BEFORE Forged in Fire's release. No one was using the FiF cards on OCTGN (although people were using promos), and the yet game was alive and changing again. I don't know what happened, exactly, but I suspect it was the fact that innovative spellbook builders came back to the game and started playing with their interesting spellbooks which no one had ever seen before.
So, if we want the metagame to be more interesting and dynamic during these long lulls between sets, we probably need to post some of our interesting spellbooks so that people can netdeck them.
What do you think?
I'll be posting some more of my less-used spellbooks soon.