We've had the latest draft pool for about two months. Things are starting to settle into place and I've played enough games to perhaps say some meaningful things about the current meta game. Let's start off with some basic stats. What are people playing?

Faction Pair Distribution AN 23% NU 22% NT 19% UT 16% AU 15% AT 4% *All stats in this article are based on a sample of 196 games played in Expert Draft

AN is the leader in popularity, probably due to a combination of effects. Many players have been drawn into Nekrium for the chance to pick Death Currents, which is both a way to fight off build-a-monster strategies and also win late game attrition battles. Bumping the starting life total up to 120 in the last rebalance has made leveling strategies more viable as well, and naturally favors Alloyin. Add in several strong first pick heroics in Onyxium Phantasm, Forge Oracle, Necromoeba, and Portal Shade and you have a recipe for a successful faction pairing.

Dysian is a close second in popularity but feels further away in power level. I think NU's success is due mostly to players' familiarity with the faction pair as well as having many strong first pick options. The build a monster strategy can still work, despite the fact that Death Current exists, and can lead to a lot of free wins against decks that aren't prepared for it.

NT, the third Nekrium pairing, rounds out the top half of the meta. Byzerak has been my personal favorite in the new format, both in terms of win rate and playstyle, and I don't really have a history of liking NT very much. The current pool has a good mix of offensive threats and defensive tools, offering a huge amount of flexibility in how you can approach each game. You can play an aggressive tempo strategy or an attrition based long game, depending on what best counters your opponent's deck. It's well suited to go up against many of the other players in the format.

On the other end of the spectrum is Oratek, sitting at less than 5% of decks played. AT is a bit of a mystery to me because most of the decks I've drafted have looked fine on paper. They're full of quality cards, underdrops, win conditions, etc, but they usually have mediocre finishes. There seems to be something missing that can tie together the mechanics from the two different factions. Mobility is a common theme but Alloyin isn't offering anything that Tempys needs to make Mobility good. In fact, I think NT and UT mobility decks are more potent than the AT variety. Oratek used to be the home of Defender decks, but Alloyin lost its animators in the rebalance and Tempys no longer needs it to pull off the strategy. But the nail in the coffin is the lack of first pick heroics that would lead players into the pairing. There are basically zero first picks that make me want to go AT. Even AU, another lack-luster pairing, has Esperian Scarab and Esperian Steelplate to draw players in. All of the good Tempys and Alloyin heroics are better served in other decks. Something as basic as an Oratek Warhammer would do a lot to attract players to the faction pairing.

If you total up the percentages, you can see that nearly 2/3rds of decks being played right now are Nekrium. If you've followed draft at all since the rebalance, you can probably guess why. The elephant in the room. The big spell that was supposed to be the savior of draft but has possibly done more harm than good. Death Current.

So how good is Death Current, really? It can be tricky to evaluate the power level of an individual card in a draft environment but I have some stats that might help. My current method looks at how often my opponent and I played Death Current in each game, categorizes each game by the differential (a -2 Death Current Game vs a +4 Death Current game, for example), and calculates the win percentage for each category. If a card is very powerful, you would expect to have a higher win percentage in games where you played a lot of them compared to your opponent, and vice versa.

I made a chart of three different cards, Snowdrift Alpha, Death Current, and Windborn Hellion. Alpha is there for a comparison to a card that is truly broken in draft. The advantage that you get from playing that card on level is ridiculous. I included Hellion as an example of another rare in the current draft pool that people consider to be very good but not busted. The individual data points are a little hard to follow, especially with the limited data set, so I threw in some trend lines.

In this context, Death Current doesn't look so bad. There does seem to be an advantage to be the one playing more Currents but it doesn't look that much higher than Hellion. And it's nowhere close to Snowdrift Alpha levels.

Now this is just one measure of power level. Death Current is notoriously situational, and in the situations where it is good, it tends to be very good. I have absolutely played games where Death Current was the primary factor in winning. Furthermore, power level is only one factor in whether or not a card is good for draft. I suspect a lot of the frustration with Death Current is tied to the perceived fairness of the card. To many players, it doesn't seem fair that a card can blow up two of your most powerful creatures without giving you a chance to respond, regardless of its potential downsides. If the ceiling on a card is too high, it doesn't really matter what the floor is. Players will still hate it (see also, Stinging Invocation).

I hinted at it briefly above but there has been one other significant change in the format since the rebalance and that is the speed of the game. It's not surprising that increasing the starting health total by 20% would slow things down. Prior to the rebalance, my games averaged 11.4 turns, meaning they typically ended in the middle of rank 3. I played a lot of UT aggro in that format and tried to make rank 2 as powerful as possible. Since the refresh, my average game length has increased to 12.7 turns, which takes games closer to the end of rank 3. There's not a huge difference in average number of turns but there is a significant difference in another stat.

One thing I like to track is win rate based on who plays the first leveled card. I've been interested in first turn advantage for a while and these stats are one more clue as to what's going on. Take a look at how the advantage of playing the first leveled card of a rank changed before and after the last rebalance.

First leveled card Last Season Current Season Rank 2 Rank 3 Rank 2 Rank 3 Me 80% 69% 71% 80% Opp 55% 57% 62% 46% Win % Gap 25% 12% 9% 34%

In the Prowler/Twin meta, whoever had the initiative in rank 2 had a huge advantage, mainly because of how aggressive the format was. My win rate was 25% higher when I played the first level 2 card, which I could use to build momentum and set up plays. There was still an advantage to playing the first level 3 card but is was actually smaller than playing the first level 2 card. The player who had the better rank 2 would often have so much momentum that even if you dropped the first level 3 bomb, it wouldn't be enough to recover the board. In the current meta, it's flipped. The initiative advantage in rank 2 is barely there, just 9%, but playing the first level 3 card is huge. To be clear, this stat isn't about games where one player hits their leveled cards and the other player bricks. It's simply who gets the first one on the board. These stats tell me that the health change (and a few card changes) were enough to prevent rank 2 momentum from carrying too many games but not enough to help players recover from bad draws at the beginning of rank 3. Your interpretations may differ.

That's about all I wanted to cover. I think the current draft meta is pretty good but has some room for improvement. At the very least, it's been a significant change from the previous three months of drafting. Hopefully the review has been helpful and can give you some direction in what you want to draft. See you in the queues.