MTG Arena meta guide: Using popular cards to better your strategy

MTG Arena’s meta or rather, metagame can help you determine the most popular decks in the game. Check out our meta guide to help make the game work for you.

In MTG Arena, meta refers to the popularity of decks or cards in the game. It’s basically a system to determine what is being played at any given moment. It works out to be a big game of rock-paper-scissors in that you are trying to determine what your opponent might be playing against you before you even start the match. Of course, playing meta will probably help you increase your MTG Arena rank!

Making MTG Arena’s meta work for you

Tuning your deck or even your sideboard (fifteen cards that can be swapped out between matches) in order to have a better chance in your predictions is considered metagaming. An example of this would be preempting a deck containing counter cards known to easily dispel cast spells by loading up your sideboard with creatures and spells that can’t be countered.

There’s never going to be a sure-fire way to determine what your opponent is going to play, but it’s good to have some preparedness.

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In MTG Arena meta will never be perfect. With sets changing all the time and hundreds of cards available to use in Standard play, there are too many factors to try to calculate. When a new set releases, players immediately start working out the best strategies and finding out the weak links and the strongest cards. More often than not, an exploitable weakness in a card will lead to that card being banned but typically it takes some time before that happens.

Playing percentages

Players ultimately determine how the game is played, through the use of certain types of decks and cards over and over again, and most documented games can even be studied to see how many times that arrangement has caused a win. Popular MTG Arena meta sites all seem to have a section that will show you the meta percentage of a particular deck, so you can determine what’s being played the most out there, and you can use that information accordingly.

Meta may be hard to understand at first, but it is an advanced strategy. Understanding what your opponent might bring to the table before you face them is almost statistically impossible, but it’s good to have a leg up on your competition. Check out the stats of the latest common decks and decide for yourself what your best strategy is.

If you’re looking for a construction guide, you can check out our deck-building guide here.