Jackalopespam took some time away from the new baby to crunch the numbers on the Roll For The North Tournament that took place on September 19. He was kind enough to share his thoughts in a guest article.
Take it away Nick!
Roll for the North Meta Analysis
Disclaimer: I was not able to participate in the event nor did I watch all of the games that were streamed. Some of the assumed main win conditions may be wrong because of this.
You may have seen some of my previous work where I’ve crunched some numbers on Earth X Origins or MoDPDM at UKGE. My intent is to provide a snapshot of the meta of what’s winning, what’s popular, and the team links.
This time I present to you the results for Roll for the North and some of my outside looking in thoughts on the tournament. This one in particular had some interesting teams, perhaps better than the previous tournaments as I’ll point out. Note that when Win Rates are presented they are per game, not per round.
In this tournament I categorized teams into 4 groups based on their win conditions, named by the card that seemed to be the focus. As predicted the big three contenders were going to be Becky, God Catcher, and Thor. Everything else was labeled as Other. I used the following support pieces to distinguish between the hybrids that formed between Becky Lynch, God Catcher, and Thor.
- Becky Lynch: Booker T, Jerry Lawler
- God Catcher: Under Surveillance
- Thor: The Collector (global), Instant War
The big three accounted for more than half the teams and each one was represented at about the same proportion. Individually each win condition had a collective Win Rate above 50% with Becky Lynch above 60%. In fact, Becky Teams beat all of the rest, God Catcher beats Thor, and all three beat up on the collective Others. This isn’t really surprising, but the pecking order seems to be Becky Lynch, God Catcher, Thor, and then the rest. This is further evidenced by the top half of teams being predominantly Becky Lynch and God Catcher.
In the Other category there was a wide range of win conditions. Aside from Orbital Strike, none of the win conditions repeated themselves. This gave us 12 very different teams to represent the off-meta attempts at competitive play. What really surprises me in this category isn’t what people played, but more what was missing. Nobody attempted to play Green Lantern, Iceman, Hope/Rachel. Previous tournaments have at least had a few players running these win conditions, but this time none even tried. A majority of these Other teams focused on direct damage strategies, but there were a couple pushing combat damage through a modern Fish Slap or Drow Mercenary.
One of the teams that sticks out to me was the 9th place team that used Create Bonfire as it’s main source of damage. It was further supported by a Moon Knight (Doctor Strange) to repeat the action. It’s not really a win condition that people are talking about, but it certainly held its own during the tournament. Specifically, it beat two different Thor teams as well as a Becky Team. It did lose to a pair of God Catcher teams. So round after round this team faced the big three all day and finished with a winning record. The only other team to face the big three teams every round was a God Catcher team in 2nd place.
My final thoughts, I think the players going for the win are certainly focusing on the big three. There is a lot of variety outside of that. I’d like to see some of the other big-name cards like Green Lantern and Iceman make a bigger showing. They’re some of the best cards for direct damage in Modern right now and were completely ignored. Otherwise, combat damage is certainly topping the charts right now and the bigger the beat stick the better.
What did you notice? Did anything stand out to you?
– Jackalopespam