Something I’ve begun to enjoy, rather than be resentful about, is that I am no longer a top player. My Opinion on the game is treated much differently than it was a few years ago and while this is difficult for my fragile ego to handle at times, I think it has given birth to a new and unique perspective.

Sometimes I question what the Community settles on as being the top tier decks, and often wonder if there is a point they could be missing. For instance, I believed that Tapu Bulu-GX/Vikavolt was the correct play for Memphis Regionals—an event that saw the decline of Gardevoir-GX and rise of Zoroark-GX. At the time, Tapu Bulu-GX was still a joke of a deck, but now it has slowly risen to being a contender at the very top.

I think that one of the most fascinating parts of our game is the way the metagame always finds a way to shake itself. This is not observable only through statistics and results, but also can be seen through communal opinions. Inevitably, these opinions have a way of outdating themselves very quickly and there is almost a metagame of language that one must understand in order to navigate the various social media discussions while receiving the least amount of hostility as possible.

Tapu Bulu-GX/Vikavolt as a deck is one of the most interesting cases of this that I can think of in recent memory. Upon inception, it was almost entirely perceived as a “meme tier” deck with a bulk of the community completely writing it off as a joke. Merely using the word “Greninja” on a public platform will incite an immediate onslaught of Greninja hand jokes, Michael Long jokes, and various other comments that all suggest that is bad and should be avoided at all costs—despite its merits.

The post “Does the End Justify the Meme?” – An Analysis of Community Opinion and Updated Lonzoroark appeared first on SixPrizes.