Geez, five hours and 50+ replies. Smmenen sure knows how to rile up the crowd with a good shout of "Yer shit!" And now the e-bomb! This is great! =)
I think the earlier statement about needing only a few hours per week of testing deserves attention.
Smmenen:
Quote If people don't test, they won't get better at a deck and their testing will be skewing their metagame understanding. This doesn't require quitting your day job - it only requires a few hours of good testing a week. That's really what I think it boils down to.
In Type 1 especially, people are usually pursuing it as a hobby or, heaven forbid, a game. A few hours per week will yield at most a couple dozen games. This is not enough to produce highly optimized decks like something you would expect at a Pro Tour. If that is what you are looking for, you're in the wrong format. The prize support simply isn't large enough to get players testing in that manner. Also, there is a lot of intricate knowledge behind a Type 1 deck. Most people are not eager to switch all over the place as you are, since they notice tangible declines in victory playing decks they are unfamiliar with. This means that the testing they do isn't as valid as if it were done after the player was fully competent with the deck, so they'll conclude different things. Not everyone has Paragons for playtesting partners.
As to 'metagame coherence', the reason our format is blatantly more fragmented than the others is its small size. Waterbury was considered *huge* at 110 people, whereas a PT format will have that size of data churned out constantly from PTQs. It's easier to establish the best decks when the tournaments are closely bunched together and there are fewer differences among decklists of the same archetype. Differences in local metagames based on player preference also make a much larger difference in Type 1, where card acquisition is actually an issue for some people or some decks.
