Put Your Meta Where Your Mouth Is

[lordbrooks]

I'm a meta dabbler. Tournament reports are fun to check out, and what the broken list du jour is, and how you can sometimes win all the time as long as you don't roll 1's. I only dabble in the meta because the physical nature of our hobby makes what is happening locally very important, and what is happening globally marginally important. The distance between me and Adepticon is so wide, it's literally battle reports from the other side of the galaxy.
Time between the stars is wide, and aeons themselves are weird in the warp. Responding to theoretical forces that do not exist locally means that you will generate weaknesses by creating unneeded strengths. While new rules may make formations and tactics possible, they are only achievable with significant investments of money and time. Time and distance affect battles that occur across the millenial expanses of the 40k universe just as much as they do in our historical re-enactments of these future engagements.
It was easily six months before a game of Sixth edition went smoothly in my gaming group. Even the best of us still get confused about the difference between stunned and shaken crews. So we still aren't familiar with all the parts where the rules get a power crowbar stuck in them and pulled apart in the BRB, much less in everybody's individual codex. The pace of miniatures is glacial, where the time between concept and three-color fielding is often months. The function of time in understanding and implementation means that theory often overruns practice.
Our Catechin Commander, Sky-Marshal Noir, played me a game just after sixth edition came out. As much as I despise his over-armored Chimeras and their multi-lasers, I asked where they were. I figured he'd found a way to pull an outflanking deepstrike with them. “Cans aren't in the meta. First Blood point.” I shrugged my shoulders. I was happy to see those things snug in a case because forums thought they were a liability. My list hadn't changed. But bad advice had changed his list to my advantage – responding to illusory threats in the actual battlefield.
So, if I'm the only guy you know who plays CSM(you have a bad gaming group, because CSM are the best army), and you know I don't have Heldrakes, then your local meta against CSM does not involve Heldrakes(I have Heldrakes). If the guy who plays Tau just bought three riptides, then your local meta involves a lot of riptides all the time in three weeks. Regardless of how few Tau players were in the top ranking at WarGamesCon, the one you play against is probably going to be in them at the hobby shop.
If we have access to a healthy gaming group, most of us can expect to battle about ten other people sometimes, and 3-4 of them regularly. These are battles with quantifiable threats. Everybody talks shop. We all know what the other guys actually have. For the majority of battles you engage in, you play in an pocket of the hobby that is largely static. You develop over time the list that works against all the types of chicanery and bull**** only a group of friends can come up with.
As Imperial Commander Rumsfeld said, “You go to war with the army you have.” You're saddled with the bad decisions you've made and damnit, you blended the bone with a blue wash so it looks just amazing. You have to field it. It looks better blown up anyway. Everyone you know is going to war with the army they have, and those are the armies you fight. When you play in a tournament, you bring what your local meta produced to fight what other local metas produced. The guy who recreated the Necron/Drago list or the Scythe/Cattacomb list or whatever dominated somewhere else? He'll lose because no one will play games against a jerk like that. You've crawled to the top stepping on your friends faces. That means something. Experience trumps theory nearly every time.
So what's your local meta? What is it producing that will affect the bigger scene?

[Pssyche]

I don't care about "Meta".
I play Eldar.
I've got 18K painted and based and I'm not afraid to use them...

Full stop.

[DarkLink]

Well, CSM isn't the best codex. In fact, it really only has a few really good units, mainly the black mace prince and the heldrake. A couple of really great units do not an op codex make. They're more of an ally army for Daemons, really.