Metagaming Etiquette

As everybody knows, nobody likes a metagamer. Metagaming is considered cheap by most players. Getting called a "metagamer" is not a compliment. Note that I'm talking about casual play between friends, not tournament play. In a tournament, anything goes and nobody's going to care if you do one strategy or another; everybody is trying to win. But otherwise, creating one deck for the sole purpose of beating a specific other deck and nothing else is what's frowned upon. First of all, it's not going to be able to beat anything else. It's made solely to spoil somebody else's fun.

That, however, is its own punishment, because it does not improve your skill. Anybody can throw together a random pile of cards that's designed to beat one deck and nothing else. What improves one's abilities is forging a strategy that is able to handle the aforementioned opponent but still stand up to the rest as well. Having to make the compromises between the focus on thwarting a particular enemy strategy and maintaining general effectiveness is what creates good judgement and deckbuilding skills.

There's also no point to playing such a deck that's metagamed completely against one deck. Why? Well, if your deck is designed solely to beat mine, and it doesn't have to worry about anything else, and all the cards are picked specifically for the purpose of thwarting other cards in my deck, then of course it's going to win. But then why bother even playing? What would it prove? It doesn't prove that one player is more skilled than another, or that they have designed a better deck. It just shows that, obviously, a deck designed with cards designed to beat a certain strategy is going to beat it. If somebody was doing that with me, then I wouldn't play with them, or just use another deck. At which point their scheming will have been for nothing, or they'll switch to another deck that's metagamed for that deck, and I'll have no reason to use that one either, and so on, ad infinitum. You shouldn't be worried about losing to an unfavorable matchup. It presents a learning opportunity that will let you tune your deck better to its weaknesses.

MAINBOARDING
It doesn't matter what kind of deck you stack if you're stacking it.

Then there's the matter of maindeck design. The maindeck is designed for the general match, and the sideboard is for bringing in something specific to a certain strategy you've anticipated in the second and third game. Once again, it rewards skill, since a good player will have prepared a good sideboard and be better prepared going into the next match. If they phoned it in then their sideboard will be useless. Some players prefer not to bother with a sideboard, and just modify their maindeck before each game to suit the deck they're playing against. This makes me want to drive that player's head through the wall. Not only does that remove a critical element from the game, but it is also cheap because it basically foregoes the match of the two original decks competing against each other and replaces it with the metagamed deck designed to beat my original deck.

Generally a player who does that does it under the impression that it's helping them, but it actually isn't. Who it actually helps is the player with the bigger card collection. Instead of just limiting the help we're going to bring into the three round match to fifteen cards, we now have access to every card we own. You might swap in a few cards here or there that you've brought along to suit the person you're going to face, but now I can just as easily go through my entire collection and find just the right cards that completely annihilate your deck. And since there's no limit on what we're changing, there isn't any component of skill in it, so each player can just grab handfuls of whatever card we want and throw it in, instead of the selection being limited by the our selection of fifteen cards which require the choices to be narrowed by the our judgement.

If you're the worse player, then it only hurts you. If you're the better player, you don't need that assistance anyway because you should be skilled enough to design your deck. In either case it's unnecessary.

Also, if you know beforehand, when you're designing your maindeck, that you won't be using a sideboard but can bring in anything you want, it does not force you to make choices in how you design your deck. It doesn't really matter what you put in there because you can just change it whenever you want. You don't have to worry about having made it too set on stopping aggro decks to have game against control, because as soon as you run up against that control deck you can just swap everything out and make it into an entirely different deck. The decks themselves become meaningless. Knowing that you only have so few cards to bring in later forces you to decide beforehand what your deck is going to emphasize because it can't go after everything at once, and that it only has so much reinforcement coming in from the side later on.

Will these players ever get better by taking the easy route? No. Their skills will stagnate and they'll get left behind instead of developing themselves and their decks in adjustment to what they face off against through their play experiences, giving them a wealth of knowledge and wisdom to call upon when they need it.