The first competitive season of Gwent Masters Season 3 has come to an end and it’s time to see what has been going on in the Viy-infested meta. One of the major unannounced changes in the 8.1 patch was the ability to see the faction MMRs through in-game profile pages, which makes for an incredible opportunity to analyze the data in more detail.
Writing: Minuano
Editing: Wusubi, Sebodunum
First of all, let’s take a look at the general overview:
As you can see, only in a span of roughly 4 weeks, the Top 1000 players of Gwent played over 375,000 games, which is an average of approximately 375 games per person and that’s about 13.4 games played each day for every player! Assuming an average of 12 minutes per game, this means that an average Top 1000 player put 75 hours into Gwent this season and just over 2.5 hours per day.
Next up, we can look at faction highscores, which is something that was made possible due to the recent unannounced addition to Gwent with the 8.1 patch as explained earlier. Just in case you were wondering about the names to put a face to those highscores:
- NR - 2709, Bart933
- SK - 2686, Mya-Mon369EX
- MO - 2693, BigKukuRUzina35
- ST - 2714, Mya-Mon369EX
- NG - 2716, theshaggynuts
- SY - 2593, Nik_r
Then we have the “Percentage of Games Wasted,” which might be confusing. This metric shows the percentage of games from total games played that didn’t contribute to a player’s Top 4 faction scores and were thus, “wasted.”
Using the 12 minutes per game average gives a rough estimate of about 482,557 minutes wasted, which is about 335 days’ worth of playing Gwent that only made you realize that a faction isn’t going to work out for you.
The rest of the data is pretty self-explanatory and we will be going over it in detail down below.
Let’s take a look at faction playrates:
In spite of all the bad rap that Viy got, we can see that MO wasn’t even in the Top 4 most played factions last season! Now, despite what that might say about selective memory, Viy was still inarguably a big part of the meta last season and it was “the” deck to beat, as we saw many decks packing multiple forms of tall punish just in case they encountered it.
However, near the end of the season with the discovery of the Lockdown deck using Kolgrim and Ciri: Nova, NG’s playrate spiked to high heavens and stayed there until the season ended. As per usual, SY had to endure yet another tragic season with a playrate of 3.38% in Top 1000.
Next up, we will take a look at faction winrates and PAT4Fs (popularity amongst Top 4 factions):
First thing to keep in mind is that these stats are cumulative, meaning they represents the total sum of everything that happened in the Top 1000 since the season started until it finished. As we can see, SK had a winrate of 57.34%, which is quite fascinating since it was also the second most played faction.
Lippy with multiple forms of tall punish performed well against MO and the Warrior version of Ursine Ritual, a deck that emerged late into the season, was a very tough nut to crack for NR Witchers.
NR consisted of almost exclusively Witchers and the main difference between the NR decks was the 5 provision flex slot and which tall punish they were running between Geralt: Yrden, Geralt of Rivia and Geralt: Axii; sometimes Prince Anséis or even Bloody Baron would find their way into the deck.
It should be no surprise to anyone that NG has such a high PAT4F. The two main versions of Lockdown (Masquerade Ball and clog with Kolgrim and Ciri: Nova) were both efficient decks to beat Viy and had decent matchups across the board. Given the greedy nature of Lockdown, there was very little you could do against a good NG player when they drew what they call in the industry as “the absolute nuts.”
Lastly, let’s take a look at how each faction performed in the average MMR department:
Keep in mind that these averages were calculated only for the players who had actually finished their placements for the respective faction, meaning that the peak score of a player who played 10 games with SY, for example, wasn’t factored into the average peak MMR for SY.
SK came out on top with an average of 2492.14 MMR. This, combined with the fact that the faction had the second highest playrate and the highest winrate, definitely made SK the most reliable faction to climb with last season, which makes it all the more fitting that shinmiri2 was the most efficient player in Top 1000 with an efficiency score of 3.425.
As a bonus, here are some interesting graphs for you to take a look at. If you have any suggestions about other stats that you would be interested in seeing, please join our Discord and let us know!
All of the graphs represent cumulative stats of the Top 1000 players in Pro Rank and were acquired in the transition time between the last season and the current one to give the most accurate data possible.