Sunday, August 3, 2014

Vanguard Random #1: Whats up with this "Meta" word?

(Disclaimer: This is more of a pet peeve of mine because the slang meaning is so close to the original meaning that I feel it could convey wrong information. Not trying to pick a fight with anyone.)

Meta...

You guys use this word but I don't think you know what it means.

Meta. {Cardname} is so Meta. Meta-deck. I've heard alot of these getting thrown around and it just is a bit odd to me.

Meta refers to something that references itself. In this case when you say Meta you mean "Metagame" or the game about the game. Kind of confusing right? Almost like Inception D: Basically the Metagame is the collection of decks that you expect to see play and Metagaming is predicting that Metagame state (or meta) and making the according adjustments. Where as the slang Vanguard meaning is that meta=top tier. My guess the transition occured when someone overheard another person talking about a tournament meta and saying something like "The meta is mostly _____" and then this person is like ooooh meta thats such a cool word i gotta tell all my friends "that _____ is meta".


So that brings me to why it bothers me, when I hear statements like "Vague is so meta" or "Thats a meta deck" in reference to vague I assume they are saying that their local tournaments comprise mostly of or have a high amount of vague decks in comparison to the other stuff. (if you take 10 decks then 2-3 of them will be vague would constitute a high percentage of the meta) but I assume thats not the case for a lot of people because vague is pretty expensive and a lot of people have their little pet clans and maybe even if they do own Vague they play a different deck because they don't wanna be that guy. In these cases you might say "Vague is so meta" which its not actually a big part of your local metagame at all and thats the reason it bothers me.

Just wanted to give a little background to people who just throw the word around without really knowing where it came from.

Bambi

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