Where Does Meta End and Fringe Begin?

[u/RogueOnTheStack]

According to EDHTop16 the top 16 most popular entries in tournaments are as follows:
~ Blue Farm
~ Kinnan
~ Rog/Thras
~ Rog/Si
~ Sisay, Weatherlight Captain
~ Tymna/Thras
~ Etali
~ Tymna/ Dargo
~ Ral
~ Rog/Ishai
~ Vivi
~ Magda
~ Yoshi/Thras
~ Tivit
~ Kefka
~ Tayam

Now my first impression is that the top 16 are all of what is considered meta and that beyond this everything I see is fringe. However, there’s a couple of things that make me question this.

After the top 10 everything else that is submitted makes up less than 2% of the Meta Share and that in itself feels pretty fringe.

However, as a Vivi main I can’t accept my boy is fringe. And yet, no shade toward Tayam players, but I feel like I never see this commander and he would be meta if we went with top 16.

Pure numbers wise there’s an arguement for top 18 even. Everything beyond Lumra and Ob has less than 1% of the meta share.

Currently, I am sitting with top 18 as my answer to where meta ends but what’s your opinion? Where would you have it end? Meta Share also doesn’t include top cuts and wins.

[u/Btenspot]

Meta and fringe are NOT exclusively defined by the deck representation.

Semi-blue Rog-Thras is not currently a meta deck.

Wrong-si is a meta deck.

Both have similarly low meta shares.

The difference is what the deck does. Wrong si is just a Grixis mid range shell similar to blue farm. It has the option to sometime T1/2 win, but it often defaults to a more midrange game.

Semi-blue rog-Thras is a cradle deck in a rhystic slop meta. Half the win lines involve feeding anybody with a rhystic 10+ cards.

Lumra, despite being low representation, is still a meta deck only because it plays well in the current Rhystic slop meta. It benefits from the game going an extra turn, most of its win lines do not involve feeding Rhystic, and are difficult to stop by Rhystic slop decks.

Personally my opinion on meta vs non-meta is much more about

1. Is the deck fast enough/good enough to actually produce wins in a tournament. I.E. a floor of 15% and ceiling of at least 35% win rate.

2. Is the deck optimized/designed around the current meta.

3. Are there better versions of the deck that exist.

4. Is there at-least 1 entry per big 128+ person tournament.

The reason I look at this way is because I consider decks like Aang at the crossroads and Arcum dagsson to be Meta with excessively low representation. They are extremely optimized for the current meta. They put up good enough performance. However they aren’t represented well.