From listening to the recent interviews from Boggs and Damon, here are a few things that were mentioned in regards to the meta:
- They are usually a year out in developing the game. Damon also said in earlier interviews that he doesn’t have a great idea on the current meta. People send him reports.
- They have good playtesters, but they’re all over the place. They don’t always predict the meta. (ex/ didn’t see a Whizzard/CTM meta, but Jess was looking strong).
- They test both full cycles and up to a certain datapack, but it sounds like more of the testing is done with the full cycle and cards move in and out of certain datapacks. But they can’t tell if there will be a disturbance in supply chain so they don’t necessary know which datapacks will be out in the wild at certain events. It means that the month-to-month meta may be uncertain.
While @spags may be out of good ideas 
, I think I may have one. I was thinking of this for a some time while keeping tabs on @Elusive’s ban list efforts (and it looks like @ppang was thinking something similar as well from an earlier post):
While Boggs and playtesters, and FFG OP may be too busy and unaware of the current meta, why not leverage the passion/time of the competitive players and form a Players’ Council. We could fold it under ANRPC or Stimhack (or wherever), nominate a small group (3 to 20-ish) of competitive players (I’d nominate Elusive and @SimonMoon, from their current meta analysis efforts). The Players’ Council will put together a list unbalanced/NPE cards, decklists, and data, after the competitive community had a chance to play in each shift in the meta (datapacks, expansions, MWL, etc.). The rest of us co-sign it if we agree to the Players’ Council recommendations. Boggs can take it to his playtesters and maybe do monthly test sessions in the current meta with some decks/cards to focus on. Then, they can decide how they deal with any problems they find (i.e. they may know that a new card will be released and some of our current problems will be solved in that manner).
There must have been something similar to this proposal done in other games, right?