I get sad sometimes.

I played a lot a while back, around Skellige Warriors/NG Lockdown meta 1.5-2.5 years ago, and started playing again about a week ago. I always liked playing oddball, off-meta, homebrew decks built around cards I found interesting or synergies I discovered myself. My favorite right now is a Witcher Revenant Dragon deck that unironically runs Eyck/Villen/Myrg/Blaze as a package for both ping damage and tall removal while also drafting Ciri, Ciri: Dash, and Quen for carryover./card advantage. I have many offshoots of this deck that add Mages (Yennefer: Conjurer chiefly along with Idarran and some others), Knights (Seltkirk and Anseis for tall removal, Donimir for Idarran/Black Rayla greed protection, Radovid’s Royal Guards to make things stick, Knighthood for cheap tutoring), and the Golden Nekker package among other things. This is just one example of my general deckbuilding philosophy: almost all of my decks follow this trend of building around things I found or experimented with because I think they’re cool, original, or have unexpected synergy rather than being tier 1 meta decks.

This leads me to the thing that makes me sad. Sometimes, I spend a lot of time building and perfecting things only to find out afterwards that they are/were at some point known tier 1 or tier 0 decks that were universally hated in their heyday and still have a negative stigma now. For example, Reaver Hunters – I almost made an entire deck built around spamming them until I happened to see a Reddit post circlejerking hate on them and making them out to be an infestation on the ladder, which stopped me for the time being. Today, this happened again with Meditating Mages spam – I had never seen this deck before and built it as a complete meme, not expecting it to be viable or known at all, but rather piloting and playtesting it with the thought that it’d just be another “haha funny” offshoot I played for variety sometimes… and after much iteration and experimentation, I was really enjoying myself and reached a list that actually seemed on the edge of viable. I intended to post to Reddit for help on improving my haha funny meme mage deck to be more viable, and…

Well, you probably don’t need it explained. Naturally, I got downvoted, and someone mentioned offhand that the deck was oppressive a while ago, and they were surprised it was still playable after “all the nerfs” (which I didn’t even know existed). Searching Reddit’s catacombs of old post logs, and yup… searching any variation of “Meditating Mage” on this subreddit yields an endless treasure trove of pure, unadulterated hate posts and comments complaining about how stupid, oppressive, degenerate, scummy, and unfair my deck is. My deck that I just spent the better part of two days crafting and iterating on, spending a bunch of reward points, ore, and crafting metal to make happen. That I assumed was unique and original and funny because I had never seen it before and didn’t think it was meaningfully viable at a glance.

Sigh… I just want to do cool things in this game but everyone’s so caught up in “the meta” and old metas and new metas and tier lists and netdecking and so forth that I, being completely ignorant to that sort of thing, sometimes happen to just randomly stumble into one of the universally-despised decks just by virtue of experimenting with a lot of different concepts and synergies. Fuck my life, I suppose. It’s really discouraging to spend a bunch of time, in-game resources, and creative energy trying to build something new and unique, only to be immediately bombarded with hate on Reddit because apparently your idea sucked and everyone despises it on contact.

/endrant