Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27029853-20161129155535/@comment-454133-20161129180311

I should also briefly mention that I think bad meta fosters bad players. When perfectly crafting a fleet within the meta (usually looking up the best fleet online) matters more than your strategic and tactical choices during play, we have a problem. I've fought at least one tournament player who clearly didn't know how to play the game effectively, was bad at flying his ships, and didn't know the basic rules of the game, but he'd won some very pretty (and apparently expensive) dice and other rare stuff at tourneys by essentially bringing a faceroll turret fleet. And he kept bragging about it. ;)  I think this was part of FFG's incentive to move away from turrets in the new releases -- they don't emphasize flying ability nearly as much as other options.

In my experience, discreet games like Magic can be even worse when there's a deck that dominates the meta, because there's no skill you can bring to the table to try to even the odds, the way you can with tabletop game.