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Not much has changed for the Epic Era meta since last week. Fury Aggro is still everywhere, especially in mid-Challenger. Feather and Poison are still the strongest. We also see some success with Eggshell Mavis as well as a triple Turnip team. One thing that is a bit different is that Perch is not really making it to the top as players are teching a lot of dispel to deal with Rage and Feather. Another thing is that there are now more players playing Poison than Fury Aggro in Challegner as more Poison players managing to climb to low Challenger.
tldr:
Not much change in the meta compared to last week
Feather & Poison at the Top
Perch not climbing to the Top
Rank # Players Rankings
Challenger 3843 1-3843
Dragon 7176 3844-11019
Tiger 11073 11020-22092
Bear 5161 22093-27253
Wolf 3863 27254-31116
Boar 4703 31117-35819
Hare 8786 35820-44605
Chick 14372 44606-58977
Egg 13359 58978-72336
The growth of player base has certainly slowed down compared to last week. Last week saw a close to 20k increase in player base, whereas this week the increase is down to about 10k. It is still a good number, but for sure not as many compared to the start of the Play-to-Rice Daily Missions.
There are about 1500 players who managed to climb to Challenger in the past week, making the total number of players in Challenger at abour 3800 players. This is similar to that of last season around the same time. Similar trends can be seen for the number of players in Dragon and Tiger, which means that the player base is still relatively stable without much growth or decline.
Only 10 players are above 2300+ when the data was collected. Feather is obviously dominating the top of the leaderboard with some Poison in the mix. Poison is beocming the most popular archetype in Challenger given its popularity at lower Challenger. We can see Poison teams represented pretty evenly across the whole of Challenger. Fury Aggro is still very popular, especially at mid-Challenger, but not as much at the very top.
While there are some obviously popular archetypes, it has to be said that mid-Challenger is relatively diverse if not for the popularity of Fury Aggro. We do see different archetypes such as Perch, Eggshell Mavis, Leafy, Anemone, Pure DMG Sturdy Fighter etc. found in mid-Challenger (above 2000 VStar). It is inevitable that there will always be one or two archetypes that are a bit stronger than the rest, but at least players are playing different things in mid- to low-Challenger. Below is an illustration of the diversity of the meta in the top 1000 (from axie.top).
Feather and Poison are the obvious winners in this Epic Era. Fury Aggro is overall doing well but not at the level of Feather and Poison. Interestingly, optimised Leafy and Eggshell Mavis teams are finding some success, as well as a triple Turnip team that I lumped it into "Sustain". The rest of the archetypes are not really performing too well, with Perch being the main exmaple as players are learning how to play against it.
The matchup spread pretty similar to earlier in the Epic Era and is looking relatively healthy with most archetypes having some sort of counter. The main exception would be Feather, which has close to even win rates for the popular archetypes. That said, Feather does have weaknesses such as Spikes and Sustain, but those are not as popular in Challenger as their power level is a bit lower than the rest.
Poison is really hating Rage (and Bubbles). If not for Fury Aggro and Perch, Poison would have an even better time on the ladder. What is keeping Fury Aggro in check is Feather and Eggshell Mavis. Perch is interesting in that it is very good against Poison but loses to Fury Aggro, Jinx, and possibly Feather, making it difficult to climb at the top.
For many players, including myself, this is probably the end of the season as Mystic items are too difficult / costly to obtain. With the changes with the scrap and crafting systems, perhaps there will be more players who will actually player Mystics items in the Mystic Era.
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# Matches Played in Days 10-12
2300+ 470
2200-2300 2418
2100-2200 11959
2000-2100 31915
1900-2000 69941
1800-1900 137064
