"Banmeong;c-1907482" wrote:
The meta is always changing. CLS is not meta anymore. Case closed.
That's... not how things work. At all.
First off, "meta" has multiple definitions.
Definition 1: The metagame. The game around the game environment. The set of factors you have to consider based on the actions of other players. Whether or not players commonly use a team is more or less independent of whether a team is arena viable.
In fact many teams become viable because completely different teams are commonly used in the metagame. During early Palpatine meta, I used Thrawntroopers because all those debuffs fed them a lot of TM. There were a lot of matchups that team fared poorly against, but because Palpatine was so prominent, I could consistently count on climbing against Palpatine teams. Antimeta is arena viable because of other factors present in the metagame, even if they are not themselves a big factor in the metagame. It's how Rex stuck around through like nine metas. It's how the Thrawn/Magma loop took a hold when Traya dominated. And it's a large part of the current Grievous/T3 lineup's success, capitalizing on the ubiquity of Devan and the many, many debuffs he applies to his own team. Grievous is viable and successful right now largely because someone else is the singular, defining unit of the hour.
Definition 2: The Most Effective Tactic Available. Funny thing? This can vary from person to person because not everyone has the same tools available to them at any given time, and "effective" depends strongly on choosing a goal, making that pretty mutable. If you're not part of an hSith guild and you're six months out from maybe unlocking Traya, then no matter who the dominant team is, Traya is not the most effective tactic available to you in the short term.
The extremely specific definition you're using would be the single most globally dominant team as the "meta." But that very specific definition is not a good prescriptive, and just because something doesn't fit that very specific definition does not mean it isn't arena viable. The definition you're using is primarily of value for historical purposes, like earlier when I said Rex persisted through nine metas. Which is to say Rex had his own meta that ended droid meta, and persisted through GK/Zarriss, Wiggs/Chaze, Thrawntroopers, Titans, Nightmare, JTR, Nightsisters, Bastila, and though he'd been in decline for some time, he really only left the leaderboards around the time Traya came into prominence. Even though he was not the singular dominant team, he was not "the meta," there were people who stayed on the leader board for a year and a half with Rex teams.
So no. Not being the current singular dominant meta team does not mean the case is closed on the question of whether CLS or anyone else besides Devan is arena viable right now.
And while I see CLS as a team on the decline and unlikely to be thrown a bone any time soon, we have at least three teams who aren't the dominant meta but are absolutely viable in a Devan-dominant environment in Kevan, Padme, and Grievous.
