Normally that’s the strategy I follow. This year was different, I was trying to be game the system with my maindeck. It nearly worked, but I may have had a better win percentage overall with the more normal strategy. It was a judgement call.

You can’t effectively metagame at big events. Even the best metagame power rankings are only approximations. However, at small events where you are well informed it can work out. It did work very well in previous weeks, as I noted in those articles. The problem this week was that I didn’t have the same level of information on local players as previous and was punished.

I’ve said many times that metagaming is high risk high reward and it depends on how well informed about the actual metagame you are. When you do get it right you’ll cruise to victory as I did Weeks Four and Six. When you don’t, you bomb out just like Weeks One and Seven. Normally I don’t bother gaming the system, but this year I tried something different.

For example, 3 company players
To align yourself to be a bit better vs them makes you a bit worse vs the 27 other deck.

That’s the control dilemma though and why I stopped bringing control in modern.

It’s frustrating and rarely lines up

Trying to predict your matchups strikes me as a masturbatory effort in futility. I get that you’re going to build a 75 that is better or worse vs various decks, but how you pick which ones you want to shore up might as well be a coin flip as this pseudo-science crystal balling.