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>why is it considered pejorative? There are two aspects to playing a collectable card game[1] - building a deck (done on your own), and 'driving' the deck (playing your deck against other people). They generally correspond to strategic and tactical thinking; one tries to solve the problem of "how to win", the other looks to "what is the correct play in this particular instance". Generally speaking, building a deck is considered _much_ harder to do, because the problem space is so much bigger. Coming up with lines (avenues of play that let you win the game), understanding the mechanics that create synergy, understanding how your deck interacts with other decks and how it answers (or ignores) various types of threats, how it addresses common issues (card draw, mana curves, late game vs early game strategies, etc), what to sideboard - these are hard things to do, especially in a game like Magic where there's a non-trivial number of cards rotating in and out of Standard. It's actually even harder than that, because there are multiple ways to win, so you have to add another layer above that. Netdeckers focus exclusively on the mechanics of playing the game using a deck list someone else has come up with. It's a pejorative because a lot of times these players don't understand what they're doing, they just know "person x used this deck to win tournament y, and I watched a stream where they talked about how to play it". This is a bigger problem when playing in the Real World, because these players don't have an understanding of the rules/mechanics of the game that makes the deck "good", which is very frustrating to play with. They outsource a lot of the strategic thought and understanding of the game to someone else. They play very deterministically and don't know how to read the table/how to get a sense of what their opponent's deck is trying to do. You can get pretty far piloting a good deck, but you're never going to be _good_ at the game. [1] I'm going to focus on Magic the Gathering because it's the most well known/popular of these, and is the most copied...because they've spent a long time learning these lessons the hard way. |