Team NoProsHere Specialist Meta Report #1

by ecoutepasca, MegaHertz and Siveure

Team NoProsHere is proud to issue the first edition of our report on the Standard Hearthstone Specialist tournament meta. The data analysed today is from the 25 first official Masters Qualifiers.
Each of these events was open to 224 players. They consisted of 8 Swiss rounds (in which a total of 43250 Hearthstone games were played), followed by a single elimination bracket for the top 8 players. Players generally need a 7-1 record in Swiss to be seeded on the playoffs bracket.

Classes Popularity

Hunter is by far the most popular class, with almost half of the field, and yet it is not overplayed. Its 52,5% win rate over 18276 games played give players no reasons to choose another class. Warlock’s 47,7%, however, doesn’t justify it being the second most popular class. Cubelock and Evenlock have made numerous appearances in the top 8, but those numbers are not impressive relatively. Priest is almost as played as Warlock, and much more successful at reaching playoffs.
Paladin was played by many players in an attempt to counter hunter, and they did indeed succeed at beating hunter. However, paladin performs much worse against priests and warlocks, which combined make up a significant portion of the metagame. Unless hunter takes over to a much greater level than it already has, paladin is unlikely to succeed in this metagame.
Mage and Warrior are polarizing classes that perform average globally.
The sleeper is Rogue, very much underplayed considering it has 50,6% win rate and the best top 8 / popularity ratio of any class.
Druid is pretty much dead. It is unpopular, wins less than 50% of games, and Elfandor and pksnow are the only 2 who were able to pull off a 7-1.
And that’s it for the 8 classes of Hearthstone.

Top Success

The stats at a high level are in part a function of what is being played at entry level, so as expected a lot of players qualified with hunter. Note that once you are in the elimination phase, Cube Hunter seems to work better than Midrange Hunter, probably because the meta gets slightly slower. This dynamic could also explain why Odd Mage, Even Warlock and Even Paladin tend to collapse in the last rounds, while Cubelock, Odd Paladin and Gallery Priest thrive. Once again, Miracle Rogue is the sleeper, with a surprising performance from a deck that less than 5% of the field is playing.

Tier List

Due to the nature of the data, we cannot make a tier list that is entirely based on data. We had to look at the decks and evaluate how much they are carried by numbers versus actual performance. It is ultimately an arbitraty tier list written by a panel who looked closely at all the data available.