Before commenting on playrates of decks, be sure to check both the ‘All Ranks’ and the ‘4-Legend’ spreads. You’ll notice some differences that might account a bit for why some folks’ complaints aren’t resonating with others.
https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/wild-vs-data-reaper-report-16/
So Wild enthusiasts, what’re your thoughts?
Wardrum are you secretly the Brode?
The list is very consistent to what I see 5 onwards.
Warlock has seen somewhat of a diminished playrate due to the growing rate of face aggro. Hunter, Paladin, Mage, and to some degree Warrior have all seen a lot of play with pirates, burn damage, and mechs smashing face as early as turn 5-6. Kingsbane has turned from infinite drawn out value to pirate aggro.
The meta is diverse, but the slow decks feel at disadvantage due to the punishing nature of Warlock’s endgame and the mill rogue play style. Definitely aggro is the ideal playstyle here. Better matchups, faster games, easy win conditions, forces people to play defensive and prevents them from cheating minions without risking themselves of dying from aggro.
That’s a negative, bud.
jades and reno decks died?
even shaman is still alive?
aluneth is tier 1?
My fond dislike of Big Priest is not pleased. I knew there weren’t many control decks in the meta with Big around, but seeing the only non-Priest control decks at legend being Evenslock, Cubelock, Mechathun and Renolock (and even Reno getting an unfavorable analysis) kinda hurts. Especially at the lower levels, it’s all Big and aggro, with warlocks being the only ones contesting somewhat.
Kingsbane’s winrate did take me a little by surprise. I was aware how good it was, I was not aware of its huge 4-to-legend popularity, holding the top slot. It’s kind of amazing the play rate is that high, actually, considering it is hit or miss against other aggro like Evens Sham and Odd Pally which are also popular. Yet it makes sense in hindsight - there’s Warlocks around which are solid versus most aggro, but not versus Kingsbane, so whatever aggro v aggro matchups Kingsbane doesn’t win in, it makes up in eating Warlocks.
Aluneth Mage getting special mention is another surprise. Considered to be strong against Kingsbane, plus Big? They’ve always been a decent challenge, but I’ve not run into nearly enough of them to form an opinion.
Well, at least the aggro decks are diverse.
About what I expected.
Big Priest is down 1% in popularity since last time and has slid even more from 4 - Legend breakdown and is slipping out of tier 2 at that level.
Paladin being the best class by that dramatic of a position does surprise me a bit, I thought Warlock was #1, but it appears to not be crazy from my experience as the playrate of the class is 10.6% (all) and 13.9% (4-L) which means it hasn’t broken the meta at all.
The diversity in the Warlock class is cool to see and exactly as I thought
Even Shaman will probably continue to improve. I’m playing a suboptimal build (no Jade) and the deck is 7-3 at r5-r4. The deck still feels very powerful and would barely need a nudge to jump back to #1 overall I think.
Mechathun Warlock is everywhere. That’s why Reno decks dissappear.
What I think is that wild reports are not accurate due to low number of data
You can see that on the wild winrate matchup table with the high number of white spots where they didn’t have enough data to evaluate most matchups
SECOND problem is that they group a high number of different decks into one “archetype” (for example “reno lock”, “even shaman”), there are a LOT of variations in these decks, you can’t just pick all warlock decks that have reno and kazakus included and treat them as if they were the same thing
I remember when I was playing the midrange recruit paladin during the un’goro meta, VS said pirate warrior was favorable over mid pally, BUT I ran 2 golakka crawlers in my deck, so my midrange pally was actually favorable over piratr warrior
THIRD problem is that the VS app only collect data from those with the app installed, which means a very minor portion of the playerbase (myself NOT included)
FOURTH problem is that they create these “tiers” and put decks into it based on its winrates, however the difference between decks of different tiers is 1~2%…that’s an insignificant difference and could very well be considered null based on the standard deviation of the data which is much higher in wild than standard due to low amount of data
Final conclusion: Tier lists are stupid
Fair point on Wild. The data numbers are not what they are in Standard AND are collected over a longer period of time so the data is less ‘fresh’ and therefore could have old data giving false information on the current meta
Not sure how this is really an issue. These are guidelines and for them you need to group information on archetypes. There is no way to really break-out every variation as, you can see on HSR, most variations are 3-5k games at most in Wild over the course fo a month.
Actually, incorrect. Vs collects the data from the opponent’s deck by using a “card correlation” to predict which deck the opponent is using and using the opponent’s data as the basis for playrate and win rate (I believe… can someone verify or not on win rate). This is how Vs tries to eliminate self-selection bias from the data.
As for card dependency matrixes they work for MOST decks but it does cause some weird issues at other times. Unsure on how stringent Wild is with them but in Standard, for instance, Vs couldn’t differentiate Control and Cubelock in Standard during K&C for a long time because there was so much overlap if Cube ansd Doomguard were not played.
This is a valid criticism fo the Wild data (see above to point one thoughts) and that is why Vs’ Wild data is much more of a general guideline to me than their Standard data. The Standard data I’m willing to bet on the Wild data I look at as an approximation.
For instance:
That is the type of granularity that I think we can get from the Vs Wild data but nothing more.
umm… should I be relying on Meta snapshot or VS reports? Cuz Meta snapshot says that Pirate Warrior is tier 3, Odd paladin is tier 2, Mech hunter is tier 3 and so on
They do solely use opponent data for play rates (this creates an unbiased sample), but they use both for win rates. Otherwise the win rates would be skewed too low (opponent data) or too high (tracker data). Same reason HSReplay’s win rates are always 5% above what is reasonable.
They apparently calculate each matchup from both sides (tracker on one side vs tracker on other side), and then take the simple average of the two calculated rates.
It may not be perfect, but it’s better than anyone else (that I know of) is doing to correct for the bias.
The individual matchups may not have a large enough sample to confidently state a win rate for each, but the final tiers and win rates are still quite accurate. It’s just that you have to take them in context. As has been stated, they must be taken with a grain of salt if poor builds are dragging down the win rate (Miracle Rogue), or if slot choices have a drastic impact (Reno Lock). But for stable decks without many slot choices, it’s pretty reliable.
I was going to include a link, but I cant. So you’ll have to go to VS, and add “/drr/faq-data-reaper-report/” to the URL.
I personally prefer Vs but for Wild the data isn’t as solid as Standard and, again, the difference in these tiers (2 to 3, 1 to 2) isn’t drastic. Tier 1 to tier 4 is but not 1 tier differences.
Like this?
https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/drr/faq-data-reaper-report/
For future reference, you can add links to your posts by pasting them between two `` or by using the </> button (Preformatted text) in the format bar above the text box.
Actually, the most effective Mechathun Warlocks deck includes Reno. They fused.
This is exactly what I expected to see.
Even and Odd decks are still a thing (and always will be) in wild. Nerfs to cards in order to hurt these decks don’t really have as much power as people think because other cards can take the place of those.
For example, even Shaman is still a tier 1 deck despite nerfing FTT which was a major player in the deck. Something else will just take its place and have almost no effect.
I think seeing that nerfs to cards not hurting these decks further supports the idea that the decks will forever by a thing and will only gain in strength with every new expansion. The more cards we introduce, the more powerful these decks will become.
It will be interesting to see what wild looks like after this next expansion. I think it’s obvious that there will be cards that will make them ultra powerful or else they wouldn’t haven’t rotated these 2 cards out a year earlier than normal.
A month or 2 after release I bet Baku and Genn in wild will be the top 6 out of 10 decks.
I didn’t realize my Renolock had slipped all the way to T4. Apparently I need to craft Mechathun ![:roll_eyes:](https://dacy5cilkxabf.cloudfront.net/en/hearthstone/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")
I’ve also been playing Mech mage, and it irritates me to see that Hunter has a lock on the premier mech deck. (Jan Brady voice): “Hunter, Hunter, Hunter!”
The popularity of bigpriest did drop… but it always gets boosted mid season… probably because start of a season most are using aggro decks to climb and mid season most control are climbing…
Renlock still is verry viable. If teched right. You brann dirty rat an mechathun to concede. A jade druid to concede with teching gheist. Cubelock kinda sux… if you pull a 10 mana sheepblast then you win. Or pop their nzoth…
All decks mentioned in vs t3 t2 t1 are strong and almost dont do much less from each other…
I long to april tho… i really do… i need freshness into both formats. For me i still enjoy the game. But the joy is declining with little baby steps. But still its declining
Yeah this ranking is bullsh1t, I’ve got 3 players on my list playing renolock already on legend, 11 days into the month.
Other decks are quite off as well
For the record, I’m not here to push these numbers on to anyone, just providing discussion material.
Also, your post highlights a very common misconception that whatever winrate a deck has on a vS tier list is what you’re going to get with it when in reality that is the average performance of the deck.
Many people back in Un’Goro to Elemental/Jade Shaman to legend with very respectable winrates despite it being a lower Tier 3/4 deck, it just wasn’t as easy/autopilot as something like Pirate Warrior.