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Hearthstone8 years agoRadoslav "Nydra" Kolev

Graphical analysis of the HCT AM Summer Prelims metagame

Europe had its moment under the sun last weekend but now it’s time for the Preliminaries across the pond. The double elimination bracket to determine the seeds for the AM Summer Championship will be held August 20-21 to select eight players advancing to the region’s most prestigious tournament of the season.

Last week, we took a glimpse at what the metagame at the very end of the Old Gods cycle had in store by crunching the decks and numbers from the Europe Summer Preliminaries. Today, we’re doing the same for the AM region, hoping that the first week of Karazhan has had at least a minor impact on deck diversity.
 

Yes, so about that...

Realistically, a handful of new cards were never going to disturb the established status quo of Warrior, Shaman, Druid and Warlock. Even if these card were to be extremely powerful, the time to deckbuild and test with them is just too limited for players to take shots at innovating for the sake of innovation and risk being stomped by what we called “the fantastic four”.

That being said, there are minor differences between Europe and Americas. In AM, Druid is leading ahead of Warlock with 2 per cent, while the difference between the two in Europe was 12 per cent in favor of Warlock. Mage sees a palpable upswing and is an outlying #5 in the class popularity, present in 38 per cent of the line-ups. Paladin has also seen a positive trend, with lots of players putting their faith in N’Zoth Controls and even Anyfin Combo decks.

These upswings have come at the expense of Hunter and Rogue, which are now both bottom three, with only Priest being less represented.

 


 

Archetype breakdown

The archetype landscape in the Americas is – you guessed it – close to identical to its European counterpart. The fantastic four of Yogg Druid, Aggro Shaman, Zoo and Dragon Warrior is just as clear cut here. Due to the smaller number of players in Americas compared to Europe, the gaps between those four decks and their cousins from their respective class isn’t as huge but it still doesn’t even come close to a diverse meta of any kind.

While new archetypes have emerged in the Americas – such as Combolock, Dragon Druid, Reno Warrior and a handful of Reno Mages – their numbers are extremely low and will likely not make it deep into the bracket. Overall, we still see more archetypes represented in AM compared to EU, which is a trend that usually goes the other way: Europe tournaments come earlier in the calendar and lay the foundations of the metagame and then APAC and AM weed out the weak and polish to perfection to result in poorer in archetypes but stronger in consistency meta picture. Nevertheless, the difference in the archetype count is so small – just four points – that it’s in no way a solid indication of anything, just a fun tidbit.  

 


Click to expand

Has Karazhan Wing #1 had any effect at all?

In short – no, because adventure expansions rarely shake up the scene so early in their release. With just 25 per cent of the new cards out, talking about brand new archetypes is impossible, which is not to say a few cards haven’t found their way into established builds.
 

  • As expected, many Tempo Mages play with the idea of including one or two [card]Firelands Portal[/card]s. Although a bit expensive and competing with [card]flamestrike[/card] on the 7-mana slot, Firelands Portal is to represent a powerful tempo swing later into the game.
     
  • [card]Cloaked Huntress[/card] has made a smaller impact than Firelands Portal and although it was featured in some Hunter decks, many have chosen to run the same old pre-Karazhan lists.
     
  • Similarly, [card]ivory knight[/card] has found home in N’Zoth decks. The ability to discover potentially powerful spells such as [card]Lay on Hands[/card] or [card]equality[/card] has been considered by some to be worth the risk of getting three crappy secrets into a heal for 1.
     
  • An interesting, non-Karazhan related tech, is the proclivity of aggro Shamans to tech in midrange cards. [card]fire elemental[/card] is seen almost too often for an aggro build, especially considering the latter has been perfectly optimized for the current meta over the course of the last few tournaments.

 

OK, great. Now where can I watch this?

Easy.

Official stream
Taven Hero bracket
Summer Preliminaries bracket

 

 

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