Season 6 is coming to an end and guess what, Sustain is here again. Of course the meta is still dominated by all sorts of Feather teams, and we even have Momo teams in the mix at the Top 20. Except for the dominanace of Feather, the meta is pretty diverse at the Top, which makes it fun for players who have the ability and are willing to put in the resources to chase the meta. However, it has to be said that the majority of the player base only play with the teams they currently own and do not chase the meta, which makes each season relative repetitive in terms of gameplay. Let's hope that Parts Upgrade will change that and bring more fun to casual players.
tldr:
Feather domination continues
Sustain is back again!?
Top Anemone teams still on its way up?
Player Base Statistics
Rank # Players Rankings
Challenger 6202 1-6202
Dragon 7697 6203-13899
Tiger 7482 13900-21381
Bear 4132 21382-25513
Wolf 4219 25514-29732
Boar 6009 29733-35741
Hare 8163 35742-43904
Chick 13171 43905-57075
Egg 13949 57076-71024
The total player base for Season 6 has exceeded 70k but it should be noted that about half of the "player base" is below 500 Victory Star, which means they are either players who came and tried out the game and did not go very far or bots that are stuck at low Victory Star brackets (a possible cause of the peak at 400-500 VStars).
On the happier(?) side, there are over 6000 players at Challenger, with another 7000+ at Dragon and another 7000+ at Tiger, which is an indication that a core community of 20k+ players is still around playing the game. Having said that, with so many new games coming into Ronin (and a potential comeback of Axie Classic!?), they may compete with Axie Origins, making it even more difficult for the core community of Axie Origins to grow unless there are significant changes made to Axie Origins.
Archetype Usage
Overall archetype usage
# Matches Played in Days 10-12
2500+ 53
2400-2500 2710
2300-2400 11953
2200-2300 22955
2100-2200 31232
2000-2100 54160
1900-2000 91055
Feather is the new Topaz / Leafy for Season 6 with its dominance at the Top. The Wing Horn version seems to be the more successful one but the Feather Spear versions are not far behind.
Interestingly players at the very top (2500+ VStar) choose to switch to Sustain sometimes, which has an even matchup against Feather and a very good matchup against Sandal at the Top. We also see some Anemone and Confused played at 2500+. Do note that there are only 6 players at 2500+ at the time of writing.
In the Top 50 (2400+ VStar), we see quite a number of archetypes including Feather, Sandal, Brutal Claw, Sponge, Sustain, Momo, Anemone, and Confused. A bit further down in 2300-2400 VStar, we start to see Triple Owl, Fury Aggro, and Perch. We only see significant amount of Poison blow 2200 VStar, while Topaz and Leafy are mostly stuck below 2100 VStar.
Archetype Win Rates and Matchups
Overall Archetype Win Rates
No surprises here. The win rate data aligns well with the archetype usage data with Feather, Sustain, and Anemone being the most successful and most used archetypes at the very Top. Sandal, Brutal Claw, Confused, and Momo are also doing okay at 2400-2500 VStar. The key one to look out for is to 80% win rate for Anemone at 2400-2500 which can challenge Feather for the top spot.
The main anomoly here is Topaz, and to some extent Leafy and Poison, where their win rate is relatively low, yet significant proportion of players are playing these archetypes in low Challenger, possibly becuase of AXP grinding and/or the reluctance in spending more to chase the meta (myself included).
Archetype Matchups
This is the overall matchups for 1900+ VStar, which largely contain data from non-optimal teams. For matchups in each VStar brackets, see Additional Data below.
As usual, Sustain has the most polarising matchups with only 11% win rate against Fury Aggro while having 75% and 73% win rate against Sandal and Cuckoo Buba respectively. The Cleanser effect on this Season's Sustain is a great counter to Sandal which relies on Debuffs, which is possibly why some top players are playing Sustain to snipe Sandal players.
Conclusion
Here we are again, completing another cycle of chasing the meta, this time with the newly buffed Feather, Anemone, and Bleed at the top (together with Sandal and Confused because of the changes with Energy Burst). It is also another cycle of adaptation for Sustain teams to tech for the current meta.
I am exciting to see the new changes for Season 7. Will we finally see Parts Upgrade? Let's hope that the off-season and the wait for the upcoming balancing changes will not be too long. I hope that Season 7 will be the season of spicing up existing archetypes as opposed to another cycle of just buffing underused archetypes to get everyone breeding and buying new Axies again, and leaving their old Axies sitting uselessly in the inventory.
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Additional Data
