by hsdecktech - 6 years ago     show comments

Earlier today, Blizzard brought back the ever popular “Choose Your Champion” campaign. As in prior seasons, players can choose one player competing in the tournament and win prizes based on that player’s performance.

There are a lot of ways you can choose your champion: you can pick your favorite personality, you can base it on who has the best hair, or whoever is named after your favorite color. Or, since the brackets and decklists are public, you can try to make something out of the players’ lineups and see if you can try to “break the code.” As with recent seasonal championships, former Well Met! host and current Blizzard Associate Esports Editor, Kevin Hovdestad, has written up a great official blog post helping us out with this. In this article, I will continue with Kevin’s analysis and try to guide your choice for Champion, should you wish to go the “break the code” route.

Caveat: I have a mediocre track record when it comes to choosing champions, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt, but it’s a fun thought experiment so let’s go through it together anyway.

The first step in crafting (or reviewing) a lineup is trying to figure out the metagame. The metagame, in this case, is all 16 lineups. Here are some of the basic stats:

Overall Class and Deck Distribution

Priest: 16 decks (11 Cycle Razakus, 3 Dragon Razakus, 1 Inner Fire Dragon, and 1 Spiteful Dragon)

Warlock: 15 (8 Control-lock, 6 Cubelock, and 1 Zoo)

Rogue: 12 (all Tempo Rogue)

Druid: 15 (9 Aggro, 6 Jade)

Paladin: 3 (all Murloc)

Mage: 2 (both Big Spell)

Hunter: 1 (Aggro, no secrets)

Shaman + Warrior: 0 (of course)

Some things of note:
Everyone brought Warlock and Priest, except for Ant, who chose an all-aggro lineup and picked Murloc Paladin over Zoolock. This is not particularly surprising and follows the recent trend of most tournament competitors brings Warlock and Priest in all their lineups. This means that all the players likely crafted their lineups with a Warlock and/or Priest ban in mind.

A more surprising development is that everyone brought some type of Druid except for Orange, who was the only one who brought Hunter.

Rounding out the popular classes, twelve players brought Tempo Rogue which, depending on if you count Dragon Razakus and Cycle Razakus as one archetype, means Tempo Rogue is either the most popular archetype or second most popular archetype.

Overall, 11 of the 16 players brought Priest, Warlock, and Rogue, and only one of those players chose not to bring some type of Druid (meaning that 10 of the 16 players brought the same four classes–albeit with different archetypes).

One last wrinkle: teammates Hoej and Surrender did not bring the same lineup; they both brought Aggro Druid, Cubelock, and Razakus, but Hoej preferred Murloc Paladin over the more popular Tempo Rogue.

“Best” Lineup for the Metagame

When so many players bring similar lineups, it is a little easier to try to determine what the “best” lineup to face the other lineups in the tournament is. This can, in turn, help limit our pool of players to look at when choosing our Champion.

If we look at the matchups of the most popular decks, we can see expected positive and negative matchups:

Decks that are positive versus Tempo Rogue*: Aggro Druid, Big Spell Mage, Razakus Priest, and Control Warlock.

Decks that are positive versus Razakus Priest: Jade Druid, Dragon Priest, Zoolock, and Exodia Mage (which nobody brought).

Decks that are positive versus Control Warlock: Aggro Paladin, all Priests, and several decks that nobody brought.

Decks that are positive versus Aggro Druid: Razakus Priest and Control Warlock.

Decks that are positive versus Jade Druid: Aggro Druid, Murloc Paladin, Dragon Priest, Tempo Rogue, all Warlock.

* All matchup assessments are based on recent Vicious Syndicate data.

This means that the Razakus Priest, Control Warlock, Tempo Rogue, and Aggro Druid lineup, banning Priest and teching against Control Warlock seems well positioned. Control Warlock’s only bad remaining matchup is the Murloc Paladins, which both Aggro Druid and Tempo Rogue have game against if you happen to run into one of the three people who brought it. Meanwhile, Aggro Druid cleans up opposing Tempo Rogues. Properly teched, you should be able to beat your opponent’s Control Warlock with one of your three decks. If they ban Control Warlock instead of your Razakus priest, then your only common bad matchup is Jade Druid, against which both Aggro Druid and Tempo Rogue are favored.

Of the 16 players, only 5 brought the Razakus Priest, Control Warlock, Tempo Rogue, and Aggro Druid lineup: Purple, Muzzy, Neirea, Surrender, and JasonZhou. All five of those players are highly decorated, highly thought of in the community, and experienced enough to make a great Champion. But! We can only choose one, so let’s see if we can narrow it down just a bit more.

Who Has the Best Matchups

Finally, we look at the brackets of the players to see who of the players we are considering seems to have the best matchups. Choose Your Champion awards packs based on how far players get, so you might think it is better to pick someone likely to make it out of the group stage over somebody in a tough group but whom you like to win the whole thing if he makes it out of groups.

With such a talented group of 16 players, there are no “easy” brackets or “brackets of doom.” All players are of roughly the same skill level. So, since we identified the lineup we like best against the field in general, we’re looking for a player whose bracket most closely matches the field as a whole.

Muzzy and Jasonzhou are in the same bracket, so picking either of them based on their lineups feels like betting on both black and red. However, if you think either one has a skill edge, or if you like the specific construction of either’s lineups, then you might still go with either of them. Unfortunately, Jasonzhou’s specific decklists seem the best tuned to beat Control Warlock with a guaranteed strong matchup in either Razkus Priest or his own Control Warlock.

Neirea and Surrender are in the same boat (that is, in a bracket together). They also are in there with two players who did not follow the majority lineup that we think their lineups are good against, so their path looks a little rocky.

That leaves us with Purple, the amazing player recently back from his sabbatical of sorts. Purple’s bracket includes Ant (who has probably the most unexpected lineup) and Sintolol (who is runner up for most interesting lineup), but also ShtanUdachi (who brought exactly what we are looking to target).

None of the choices have the ideal lineup to face their initial bracket, and like I said above, all are great picks, but I’m putting my packs on Purple. Even though he’s facing some unexpected opponents in the group stage, he does not have to face a “mirror match” like our other possible picks do and the unexpected lineups might just be unexpected because they are not as good.

So, what do you think? Let us know which Champion you’re picking in the comments below! And make sure you tune in next week for all the HCT champs action!