Looking at the warlords seen in the two tournaments, there aren't too many surprises. Sharn and Onoskelis stay the most popular and powerful archetypes, with Sh'Lara appearing as a popular flavour of the week for the tournament. Marianas and Prometheus also saw a slight uptick, with Marianas lists taking two unique forms.

Other mid/high tier lists included Adramelech, Castiel, Michael, and Alero. Although only one pilot brought each of these lists, all 4 had some degree of successful placement, as expected. 

Sh'Lara and Prometheus saw more unfortunate results, with only 2 pilots making top 8 between the 7 who brought either deck. Whilst both decks have a ton of potential and power, they're both more complicated lists than potentially given credit, and newer pilots on either archetype may struggle to bring either deck to the top.

Archetype representation combines every deck/warlord into it's respective game-play archetype.

• Aggro

  • Sharn, Prometheus, Marianas Relics

• Midrange

  • Sh'Lara, Marianas Majik, Alero

• Control

  • Onoskelis, Ethelhime Cold Brew, Michael

• Combo/Burn

  • Adramelech, Castiel, Mal'ady Mausoleum

Using this metric we can see how both Control & Combo style archetypes were able to translate into top 8 placements more consistently than Midrange & Aggro. The combined top 4 from both tournaments saw 2 pilots on each archetype, which speaks more favourably towards Combo/Burn style archetypes. 

This chart breaks down the performances of the top 16 (top 8 from both events) and the decks that made top 8. The Y-Axis here covers the number of players on any given deck, and the X-axis covers the game win%, with the deck "bubbles" being scaled by the number of players.

• In this way, the larger bubbles have slightly more accurate results, but still represent an ultimately small sample size.

There are two markers for Sharn as well. "Sharn Aggro" covers all results for Sharn in the top 8 between both events, whilst Sharn Viviana just shows the performance of the Sharn Viviana style lists pre-SRL seen at the Nerdz BFG.

Castiel and Michael had identical results, and were absorbed into a single category for visual clarity.

Due to the sample size of just 16 decks, data can be unreliable, as seen with the 88%+ game winrate of Adramelech, but it does point to many of the rough trends in the metagame. Constant performers like Onoskelis and Sharn continue to stand as markers of the metagame, but other A-Tier lists including Adramelech, Sh'Lara, and both Angel Warlords, are easily able to find top placements, while other mid tier decks like Ethelhime, Marianas, Alero, and Mal'ady are able to put up finishes comparable or better than our two S-Tier warlords.

Ultimately the metagame coming out of these two tournaments is looking healthy and open, with plenty of potential for various decks, including rogue brews, to take on the best decks and pilots in the metagame.

One other piece of data I intend to cover comes in the form of match ups between different warlords. With 17 warlords in the game however, a lot more data will be needed to be able to report with any degree of confidence. Stay tuned for the future for more data analysis towards placements and performance in the metagame, and future data-driven insights.