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What is the metagame, and how do you win it? The metagame represents the collection of games you'll play over the course of a tournament or league. You win it by reaching a certain level of performance - winning, making the cut, or whatever your objectives are. In order to do this, you have to think beyond a single game, and think about the performance of your deck over several games against different opponents. While it's relatively easy to understand Legend of the Five Rings by simply playing a bunch of games in your local playgroup, developing an understanding of the metagame only comes from playing in the sorts of tournaments that you're trying to understand. Experience is key.
In this article, I'll try and run through the way I think of the metagame, using examples from the current (Reign of Blood-legal) environment. Reading this article isn't going to make you place well in tournaments, but it should give you an idea of the sorts of things to look out for when making a deck.
One thing to consider during deck construction that counts as a metagame factor is reliability. If you play ten games over the course of a tournament, how often will you see no gold? How often will you see nothing but? If your deck relies on a few key cards, in how many of these games will they not show up? Consistency is why most people run 16-20 gold holdings and 16-20 personalities - but even with a balanced mix, over the course of a tournament you're likely to experience a bad draw where you get too few holdings or too few followers.
Therefore, to make your deck more reliable, one option is to run a cheaper deck. That way, drawing few gold holdings hurts you less - you won't have a hand full of cards that cost gold, and you'll still be able to bring personalities into play reasonably fast. The flip side of this is that if you draw only gold, there won't be much you can do with it! Your deck should also be able to survive when you draw too much gold, so you should be able to do stuff without relying on lots of personalities. To make this less abstract, things that allow you to move into undefended provinces, take provinces with 1 or 2 personalities, and get rid of opposing units without bowing/destroying your own units are all helpful when you don't draw many guys.
Possibly the most important metagame consideration, however, is matchups. Every deck will have a pattern of strength against opposing decks - Mantis are strong against Phoenix honour, for instance, while Crab beat Mantis most games and Phoenix honour is strong against Crab. Decks don't have an absolute strength - there will always be decks that can beat yours, even if you win every game against the decks you usually face. When building a deck, you should be aware of which decks you will be strong and weak against- and ask yourself if you're likely to face a lot of decks that you're weak against in a given tournament. To take some examples, in the current environment Lion is strong, and lots of people play Lion. After the first two rounds of a tournament, if you're on course to qualify, you're likely to face a lot of Lion decks. If Lion is a bad matchup for you, you're probably not going to qualify - even if you have a great chance against every single other deck out there. Conversely, if Lion is a strong matchup for you, you have a great chance - those Lions will knock out all the people who might threaten your progression.
To take an example from a different environment, at the end of the Gold arc (Summer 03) there were two really strong deck types - Corrupt Crab blitz and (corrupt or pure) Rat blitz. Both decks were fast military decks, which aimed to take all your provinces with overwhelming force and ran actions to end battles before you had a chance to play all your actions. In tournaments, you had to either play a blitz deck yourself or be prepared to beat these decks - if you couldn't stop them, you had no real chance of success.
Another metagame consideration is surprise. If you run an unusual deck, with an unusual card selection, you gain an innate advantage over many opponents (provided, of course, that you know roughly what's in their decks). Surprise can be a powerful factor - so in the finals of the Winter Warfare storyline tournament, the undefeated Mantis player lost to a Phoenix honour runner who dropped two copies of Be Prepared To Dig Two Graves on a key battle! Be Prepared... doesn't see play very often, and the Mantis player was unlikely to have expected the Phoenix to have the card when he attacked. Had he known that his opponent was playing the card, he might have attacked differently, and could well have won the game by working around it and lowering the risk of it being a game-swinging card. Surprise value can only take you so far, however - there's no point in running weak cards or unreliable combos just because your opponents won't expect them.
The last metagame consideration that I'm going to talk about is meta. This is related to all the above points, but is important enough that I'm going to talk about it separately. Meta cards are cards you run that only help you in some games - like In Time of War, which really only has an effect against an honour runner. When building a deck, you should consider the sort of meta that you're likely to see in other people's decks (and what sort you run in your own) and consider whether you need to include anything to deal with it. So should you run Shrine of the Sun to counter In Time of War? Dismissed to counter Tribute to your House? Can you find cards that stop opponents' meta while being more generally useful (Outmaneuvered by Force in an honour deck, for instance)?
I hope this has been helpful - when constructing decks for tournaments, always consider the metagame. Testing against a wide variety of decks is a big help, but ultimately the best way to learn how to win a tournament is to attend lots of tournaments. Good luck!
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