tldr:
Bubble Aggro, Poison, Jinx, and Triple Owl popular at the top
Shield, Snake Jar Turnip, Sleep Poison, Earwing Wing Horn, and Fury Aggro also found at the top
Jinx, Sleep Poison, Fury Aggro, Earwing Wing Horn, and Poison are the 5 most popular archetypes on the way to Challenger
Player Base Statistics
Rank # Players Rankings
Challenger 1082 1-1082
Dragon 4313 1083-5395
Tiger 10636 5396-16031
Bear 4974 16032-21005
Wolf 5998 21006-27003
Boar 38520 27004-65523
Hare 22943 65524-88466
Chick 21660 88467-110126
Egg 12056 110127-122182
Shifting the meta reports a day early as it fits better in my busy schedule these days, still we can a close to 20k increase in player base compared to last week. We see a peak at Tiger at expected but it is interesting to see that the Boar peak is a lot higher compared to Egg and Chick, which are usually the highest peak as new players just play a few games and quit. It seems like more players and staying throughout the season and move themselves up to Boar.
Archetype Usage
Overall archetype usage
Bubble Aggro seems to be the team to beat at the top. There were some games played at 2200+ by since have dropped back down to below 2200 VStar as there are no players at 2200+ VStar at the time of writing. It is a pretty diverse meta at the top with Bubble Aggro, Poison, Jinx, and Triple Owl with above 10% usage at 2100-2200 VStar. There are also Shield, Snake Jar Turnip, Sleep Poison, Earwing Wing Horn, and Fury Aggro in the mix.
If we look at high Dragon to Challenger, Jinx, Sleep Poison, Fury Aggro, Earwing Wing Horn, and Poison are the 5 most popular archetypes you should expect to see on your way up.
Archetype Win Rates and Matchups
Overall Archetype Win Rates
The main trend here is that Snake Jar Turnip is not doing very well at the top. Sleep Poison is also not having the best time compared to the rest of the archetypes at the top.
Clover, Ramp Tiny Fan, and Ramp Sandal are also having pretty good win rates at the top, suggesting that they may have the potential to push further up.
Archetype Matchups
The top 5 most popular archetypes do not seem to have matchups that are too polarising against each other, which is nice for the average player where the game is not just determined by the matchups. Having said that, there are always extreme matchup spreads for some archetypes such as Snake Jar Turnip, Shield, Spikes, Mit Sleep, Eggshell Mavis etc.
Bubble Aggro seems to be in a good spot against the popular archetypes with at least close to even win rate. Ramp Tiny Fan seems to be a good way to counter Bubble Aggro and has pretty good matchup spreads across the board, probably because most players that play the archetype have optimised teams.
Conclusion
The Epic Era meta seems to be in a pretty good spot. While there are always things to improve, the balancing has been pretty good so far. Just that the costs of Runes are quite a bit more than before if you want to highest level possible. For this reason, I really hope there will not be Charms upgrade as it will just costs too much to upgrade every charm in a team.
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