Gwentslam #3 Infographic
Introduction
The third iteration of GwentSlam was, as expected, once again fantastic. The line-up of player, the casters and hosts as well as the stream and production quality were excellent; so huge shoutout to Lifecoach and his crew for bringing consistently such top notch content.
The dust has settled and the pool is cleaned, now is my time for some number crunching. Don‘t forget, the dataset analyzed is has not a huge sample size and conclusions drawn can be flawed.
THE COINFLIP
To get the hottest topic of Gwent out of the way, the Coinflip in tournaments is not an issue. Balancing Golds by making them vulnerable might have done the job good enough, at least at high level play. We saw still a 72% winrate (WR) at the GwentOpen #1 when being on the red coin (playing second).
After the Gold Immunity Patch, at GwentSlam #1 and #2 it WRs were an even 50:50 for the blue and red coin. The last two tournaments, the GwentOpen #2 and GwentSlam #3 even showed a slight advantage for the blue coin (playing first) with 53% and 51% WR respectively.
The sample size is only reasonable with a total of around 125 for post immunity patch tourneys (just marginally over 30 matches each). Big numbers still have to prove if this translates to normal ladder play.
###
MATCHES
Most matchups were very well balanced leading to a 3-2. Only Polish player Tailbot achieved a 3-0 in his semifinals against eiSloth. He also was the only one who reverse sweeped his opponent, Austrian player Shaggy, in the first quarterfinals of the tournament. He seems to generate a record of this as he also scored a 3-0 against irohabit in the GwentOpen #2 atop being able to reverse sweep the no.1 ladder god Adzikov. Sadly, as a side note, fellow Polish competitor Adzikov once again could not translate his ladder success in this offline event.
FACTIONS AND LEADERS
Nilfgaard, Monsters and Northern Realms decks were chosen by all players. The least brought faction by the players was Scoia’tael which only champion Dyuhaaa jammed into his lineup. All other players chose Skellige over ST.
Scoia’tael, Brouver Hoog to be more concrete, scored the highest faction win rate (WR) though but was played the least. This does not surprise because first, the only player who chose ST won the tournament.
Monsters underperformed with the lowest WR of all factions. Unseen Elder, the surprise winner of GwentOpen #2, was a big letdown leading to this demise. The consume leader was the most played of all with the second lowest WR (33%) with only King Bran performing worse (21%). Eredin on the other hand performed exceptionally well with an overall 75% WR. Again, the winning player Dyuhaaa was the only one piloting this leader so stats may be biased.
Skellige’s Crach an Craite, although little played, performed very well winning two thirds of the time.
Nilfgaard with Emhyr var Emreis as the only represented leader was banned in most matchups – and rightfully so. The few games that were played on this leader showed his power with a 63% WR.
Northern Realms was the only faction with all leaders represented. Henselt was least played but had the overall best WR (75%) alongside Eredin from the Monsters faction. Radovid disappointed (40% WR) and the most represented NR leader, Foltest, performed slightly above average. Nonetheless, NR seems to hit the sweet spot of card design with all leaders being competitively viable AND even different archetypes seing play in for example Foltest.
All in all, niche leaders performed better than the meta leaders suspecting that they were expected and teched against. Nilfgaard being the exception here as the Emhyr Spies deck is not particularly vulnerable to any tech and exceptionally strong leading to the heavy ban rate of 64% of all bans.
this article was written by OtakuMZ
