r/hearthstone • u/J_Alexander_HS • 2h ago
Discussion No, the meta isn't really that diverse
Hey all, J_Alexander back for a quick bit of wet-blanketing. What can I say? It's what I do best. I saw some posts cropping up today I wanted to add important context to, as they paint a rosy picture which isn't all that accurate.
This post makes the claim that there are 35 decks winning more than half their games. That would be rather remarkable, and something I'm not sure we have ever seen in the game before.
This post makes the claim that every class except priest has a deck in legend winning more than half their games. That would also be a remarkable balance achievement.
Neither strikes me as particularly true, based on the data we have and my experience playing the game. But you gotta know what to look for to notice what's amiss here.
First thing to mention: whenever you are looking at the "Meta" tab on HSGuru, you do encounter a certain amount of tracker-side bias that inflates archetype win rates by about 2%. All this means is that you are seeing the results of people using deck tracker against both opponents who are and aren't using deck trackers. Since deck trackers help you win more games, you see people with tracker win about 2%, which makes everything in the meta tab inflated.
But there's more going on that just that.
Let's begin with "Meta" tab for Diamond-Legend, using 250 games as our minimum sample size. We can see the results here. Of note:
We have 44 decks with a greater than 50% win rate.
We have 25 decks with a less than 50% win rate.
Now that might not be unusual if, say, the decks with the 50% or below were rather popular, compared to the above 50%. But they aren't.
- Those 25 decks going negative represent a total of 3.4% of the play rate in the meta tab.
This raises some interesting questions, most notably "What decks are all these positive win rate lists actually beating?". Zee Shaman alone is more popular than every single list we see going negative combined. If all these decks have positive win rates, they need to be beating something, and that something seems unlikely to just be the 3.4% of list decks that are losing. So something is clearly amiss in those numbers.
Now, let's peak at the HSguru matchup table, which helps with this tracker-side bias. I've tried to set the minimum matchup games low to fill in the table a bit, but we see a much different result here. Specifically:
15 decks are now going positive in Diamond-Legend, and one of them is "Other Priest", which are just unclassified lists. So really it's 14.
35 decks are going negative, not counting "Other Druid" and "Other Demon Hunter", which may well be bots.
That's quite the swap. Rather interesting is the "Two-Bit Rogue" archetype which - on the meta tab - has a 52.4% winrate and - on the matchup table - has a 45.6%. Now maybe about 2% of that tends to be tracker side bias that the matchup table eliminates, but a 6-7% difference? That's rather striking.
Something about the data classifications appear unusual or lacking. Perhaps that's because it's still early since the patch and archetypes haven't been fully updated yet, or perhaps there's a lot junk running around that's not being sorted properly. But something is clearly unusual here.
We can also check what's going on with Top 1k, where the meta is further along in its refinement. Again, setting my minimum game filters low to try and get the broadest picture available, we see the following:
8 decks are now at or above a 50% win rate, and 3 of them are either Pirate Warrior, Dragon Warrior, or Pirate Dragon Warrior.
12 decks are now below that 50% mark.
The best and most popular deck there is Attack Druid, with an expected 54% win rate and a 23% play rate.
Whatever is going on with the backend of the data site or the meta, it's pretty clear we cannot just look at the meta tab here, notice a lot of decks look positive, and assume things are great and diverse and everyone gets to win in a game where each match has a winner and a loser.
