GwentSlam #2 Infographic
Introduction
The second installation of GwentSlam, a CDPR licensed GwentMasters tournament organized by Lifecoach happened during the final weekend of October in Vienna. The top-notch roster of players competed for a prize pool of $10,000 and the precious Crown Points the came with it. All the players, casters as well as the results can be seen in the top half of the following infographic.
The experience
First and foremost, the tournament was a blast and the organization as well as production quality was another step up; well done! I had the pleasure of watching most of the games and although nerves got to some of the players and nobody played 100% correctly, the games were a blast to watch. It is always amazing to see how the pros read the opponent and make decisions accordingly which is a great learning tool for the less experienced of us.
In contrast to last tournament, Monsters found little representation and Dagon was only brought by one player.
Leaders and Factions
After the armor archetype nerf, Northern Realms got less love this tournament. The faction was brought only by three players. Monsters was also less represented than you could assume (5 times brought) and the rest of the factions were equally represented.
Scoia’tael proved to be a force to be reckoned with high representation and an overall winrate of 69% (75% excluding mirrors!). In contrast, the very powerful Skellige had just a 35% winrate. This was likely because it was the prime deck to target besides Nilfgaard. The latter, with less actual counters, was therefore banned the most times. From Nilfgaard, Emhyr was the only leader that was played. The only faction of which all leaders were represented was Scoia’tael and Brouver Hoog was the prime leader of this faction.
All this showed again that the tournament meta is different from day-to-day ladder play which makes watching those events even more interesting as there are always new techs seen and matchups can take exciting twists and turns that they otherwise might not.
Parting thoughts
GwentSlam, once again, has proven that the oft-discussed coinflip is not that big of a deal when it comes to very skilled players. Both GwentSlam tournaments showed a 50% winrate when the coinflip was won. This stats are in total contrast to the 72% of the GwentOpen in Cologne.
Huge shoutouts to dTitan, a spanish community member who gave me the table with all the stats. Without him, the whole thing would have been not so easy to make. Be sure to follow him here.
A huge thanks to the GwentUp team for letting me use their handcrafted faction icons. Visit GwentUp for their excellent statistical report on the meta.
