[swiftcoder]

> But this must be the case for all competitive games right? At some point the meta has been figured out and there is no real way to deviate from that.

I think this is only true about games with too few variables (not really the case for MTG), or games where too many variables can be controlled (which various MTG formats suffer from).

Historically this has not been that big a deal for the RTS genre specifically. If you look at a game like SC2, the skillfloor to actually execute the meta builds is so high that player with good fundamentals can win with a suboptimal build, versus a player with a fully meta build executed imperfectly. Plus there are almost always cheese builds that only work if the opponent doesn't expect them - not a reliable source of wins, but sometimes all it takes to clutch a tournament series

[mrgoldenbrown]

SC2 achieved this with balance patches - Blizzard paid close attention to the meta and when it got stale/boring, they adjusted things to keep games interesting and varied. They did their best to make this the case for low and high skilled players.