I was at Diamond 3 when I made this post. I think the stats being given here are faulty. I can believe it has a 47% win rate (although it doesn’t make sense that it would be so overused if it wasn’t above 50%), but the usage is way higher than 5%. I’m not talking about one specific net deck where all 30 cards are identical. I’m talking about decks that use the same base cards, with any variations. As long as they’re spamming plagues, it counts in this statement.
This is D4 - D1 in the past 24 hours.
https://imgur.com/gallery/UokZktF
We’re not being overrun by DKs…
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Maybe you’re seeing a ton of them because you’re supposed to beat them and climb… like you lost to a couple good decks so it’s putting your win on a tee…because they should be free wins unless you’re playing something too weak to be playing at D4 and below.
Well, unfortunately the data I have TODAY for population admittedly isn’t a random sample. I’m assuming that Plague DK players are as likely to have a deck tracker installed as any other archetype (which would make sense, you’d want to track the Plagues in the opponent deck). But there is potential selection bias in the sample that might (or might not) make it significantly off from reality.
Vicious Syndicate uses a method that corrects for this problem, and they usually put out reports on Thursdays. So we’ll have much higher confidence tomorrow. But it’s pretty rare for even HSR to be off by more than 2% or so (not saying it’s never happened).
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i concur. unlike before the nerf, my winrate now is at less than 50% (D4 to D1)
Isnt it pretty much the most similar style to the old blood DK? People absolutely loved blood DK and playing a slow grindy game trying to kill their opponent over 40 turns with that one thing that dealt 3 damage at the end of turn. I suspect all those people were former blood DK players who noticed they could relive the magic without crafting a bunch of new cards.
Absolutely not.
Plague DK (at least the version the topic is mostl likely about) is very fragile and lacks all that ‘tankiness’, healing and so on that blood DK is notorious for.
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It is definitely dominated in usage. I beat it very often. It’s just boring to play against the same thing so much. It could be now that they changed “no duplicates” cards to be based on start of game, it will start to fade. But it hasn’t happened yet.
Ugh… And who exactly prevents you from climbing higher, where budget beginner decks — the only thing some of them can afford, perhaps — are less prevalent?
Have you even read the post where I listed probably the primary reason for the deck’s popularity?
A certain competitive niche in the ‘meta’ wasn’t even it (there you’d meet more of ‘rainbow’ DKs).
I finished at Diamond 3 before the reset, without trying very hard. Is that low?
Based on data report 12,7% of decks in D1 to D4 are death knights. Warrior is more popular.
Death Knight has taken a massive hit in its play rate. While the class seems perpetually popular at lower MMR brackets no matter what happens, its presence at higher ranks has nosedived. It’s almost irrelevant at top legend.
https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/vs-data-reaper-report-292/#tab-663602
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Diamond 3 = you are basically saying “I play at a low mmr and my opinion is irrelevant when I say that DK is op” (just after a patch nerfing it to the ground).
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For the most part, probably yes. The climbing experience depends also on the amount of bonus stars you have and such.
If you follow the link Makke provided above, it says that it is based on this many games from people with a deck tracker installed:
| Overall | 1632000 |
|---|---|
| Top 1K Legend | 53000 |
| Legend (Excluding Top 1k) | 562000 |
| Diamond 4 to 1 | 358000 |
| Diamond 10 to 5 | 270000 |
| Platinum | 154000 |
| Bronze/Silver/Gold | 235000 |
So by the end of the month (data collection ended on April 30), just over a third of players with trackers have made Legend, and just under 60% of players with trackers are Diamond 4 or higher. (In both of these cases I am weighing players by games played, so someone who plays twice as much counts twice as much.)
I wouldn’t say that you’re low, but finishing the month at Diamond 3 is extremely average. If you had the perception that Diamond 3 is high, it absolutely is not. The rank system is mostly designed with the same goals as participation trophies, it’s a lie to make average people think they’re better than they are so they are more likely to buy microtransactions. But being average without really trying means that you’d probably be better than average if you tried. 
don’t flatter, it’s someone complaining about an awful archetype on the internet. He’s below average while farming poor decks post ladder and still only made it to Diamond 3.
I already told him it’s a 47% winrate deck with 5% popularity (I was off a bit, turns out 7% popularity, and I nailed the winrate before the report came out). What more do you want?
I maintain that “average” is the more accurate description. I mean, technically someone in the 49th percentile would be below average, but that’s so close to average that average is the better phrasing. He might also be slightly above average. I can’t tell that much from his ending rank, it’s only an estimate.
That’s not even the point here (by the way, that data might be strognly biased — e.g. casual players are less likely to install a tracker in the first place; I personally do not, while I don’t think reaching Legend in modern HS is veru challenging).
If the guy finished at D3 while playing casually, most of the games probably were below D5, which even a deck that barely qualifies even as mediocre, such as that ‘loaner’ Plague DK in question (I assume), could probably reach, thus it could be quite common in that player’s climbing experience.
A second person getting on my case for not being mean enough to a Diamond player I called average? Something is horribly wrong with this community. If you want to keep pushing me to be meaner than I like, well, be careful what you wish for.
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Nope, pointing out that you’ve excessively focused on a wrong aspect of the problem, in my opinion.
Once again: it’s not about where the guy ended up, it’s about where the bulk of the games were played — and that is probably the lower ranks.
By the way, the connotations of the word ‘average’ might vary.
It used to mean just ‘ordinary’, good old ‘middle-of-the-road’. In Swedish, for example, it’s still mostly a compliment, while being too good or exceptional sounds like a negative thing, especially to an average bozo (which is quite a controversial thing, to put it mildly, as well, but that’s another matter). In English, however, there’s been this tendency for creeping hyperbolisation (you are absolutely shocked if a cat suddenly jumps in front of you on a street, you’re starving if it’s time for dinner and your stomach gently reminds you of it etc), paired, I guess, with humongous narcissism in cases like this — think of the irony of factoids, from the repertoire of typical ‘British scientists’ studies (like those about navel lint etc), that, say, 85% (or something along those lines) of professors fancy themselves as above average. Thus, ‘mediocre’ has become colloquially synonymous with ‘lousy’ and not just ‘middling’, ‘ordinary’ and such.
In this light, depending on the viewpoint, terms like ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ can be either a subjective insult or just a statement of an objective mathematical figure, more or less.