Don’t pay attention to the “Shang-chi isn’t actually good” shtick, but I thought the data set they talked about was interesting. Too bad that’s not player accessible, could do some neat data mining.
That methodology is horrible. Brode is either trolling or their data science people are incompetent morons. (Or whydontwehaveboth.gif, I guess).
Sure, it’s easy to believe Multiple Man has a low use rate and a high win rate when used. That’s because it’s only used in low rank games (either rank as in cubes, or as in CL).
The snap.fan stats for season 8 show MM as the 15th highest win rate “when in deck” at 56.85%. It’s also the 22nd least used card (in 0.86% of tracked games). The problem gets obvious the moment we look at Medusa: it’s the most winning card when “in deck” at 59.96%, and used even less (0.79%). And Medusa is just objectively a below-average card: it doesn’t have good stats or any meaningful synergies. With MM or Human Torch you could come up with a (fake) narrative of how good players will be able to abuse the ability. With Medusa, there’s nothing.
What happens when we restrict this to players who are past CL 1000 and ranks 80-100? Medusa is played in 0.08% of decks, and has a 45% win rate. Multiple Man in 0.3% of decks with a 49.9% win rate.
But yes, I would love to have the raw data or samples of raw data from SD themselves, rather than have to rely on aggregates from third-party tracker apps.
There are multiple metrics. Card that appears most often in decks that lose most is interesting, but not proof positive. It could be a good card that goes in every deck. Shang-Chi is a crucial tech card, and most people will have to justify why to exclude him in a deck. Just because he appears in decks that lose a lot doesn’t my mean he’s bad, he may appear in an equal or greater number of decks that win a lot too!
Snap Fan has a win rate metric that is better. It also has actual numbers. So that way you can see, for example, that Silver Surfer has something like a 66% win rate when played. To me Surfer is probably the best card in the game.
Also what @jsnell said. Here’s a link to the data page. Since all I see is the 3000+ pool meta, despite just hitting 2000 today, this meshes more with what I see.
Cards like Red Skull, Armor, She Hulk, Maximus, Lizard, Darkhawk, and leader being great cards? Yeah that squares.
Here’s what that data says about Shang Chi:
4th most played, and positive win rate. Checks out. Sure he’s only like 25th in win%, but for such a utility card that can go in almost any deck you expect that.
For me, tokens are a where the f2p pokes through and I feel it.
Before tokens I had no urge to spend money on the game other than the season pass. My cards were my cards, if I did spend real money, all it would do is level up my collection level and give me a chance for more random cards. And since the game roughly vaguely matches you against similar collection levels in the matchmaking, why do I even want to rush to level up my collection level? There was no guarantee it would give me the power cards so I may as well just make the best decks from what cards I do have and not worry about. This was a great feeling.
Now with tokens… wow. That winter bundle with the 3k tokens for 6k gold would be a total game changer. I could be much much stronger by token-buying a few super meta cards. And yet my deck collection level wouldn’t actually go up by much. So now spending money is a power booster. And same for my opponents. That dude a level 600 might have 3 super power cards you don’t have, and not because they were super lucky. If you got the tokens you can eventually get them in the store with patience.
It unequivocally does not, or at least that is not my experience. Ever since shortly after entering pool 3 I have been pretty much exclusively playing people with full collection endgame decks. And since hitting 1000 CL I know for a fact I have been regularly playing people with CL 4000+ and all that entails. Things like periodically running into streamers/ YouTubers for Snap or people with certain titles and cards/ card backs only available for reaching infinite in seasons before I even started.
It is a factor, for sure, but certainly not the only one. And if conditions are right other factors can and will swamp out your CL in matchmaking.
The other thing is, collectors tokens aren’t direct purchases either. Granted at some level you can somewhat do so, but it’s far from a direct path. Even people dropping money in game will take a long time to get enough tokens as it mathematically takes a month or two, even spending money, to get tokens enough for one pool 5 card.
Passed 1000 collection level today, when I spent my hoarded gold on that Dino bundle in the store. It seemed like a decent deal for the 5k credits, which of course I needed, plus that is a much cooler Dino variant than the base card, IMHO.
I suppose I have to stop calling myself a newbie player, though I’m still missing plenty of key cards. Death for destroy decks, Patriot for tokens, and Black Cat for discard come to mind immediately. But there’s enough in my collection to perform decently at my 40-ish rank range, and I usually can make progress upward, just very slowly. If I wanted to spend more time I could probably move upward a bit more, but usually I’m only playing a few games at a time in between other things.
I must say I’m pretty happy with the F2P model they’ve created. I’ve bought the intro bundle and one season pass, so under $15 spent, and I feel like I’m in a pretty good place with my collection and ability to compete (at lower levels anyway). Spending more money would have gotten me prettier cards, but as far as progression goes, the limiting factor is more the time I’m investing rather than money spent.
As far as I can tell, nobody uses Black Cat in serious discard decks. The only times I see it in play is when created by a location or another card. Here’s the problem: a card that does nothing but discard itself isn’t actually that helpful.
What does a discard achieve?
- I pumps up Morbius by two power.
- It can return to game for “free” when Hela or Ghost Rider is played.
- There can special ability that gets triggerd on Discard, like for Swarm and Apocalypse.
- It reduces the number of cards in hand by one. This could have an impact on cards like Strong Guy, Dracula, Ronan. Or there could be situations where you need as few cards in hands as possible for some kind of hand manipulation reason (Moon Girl, Nakia, Jane Foster). None of the latter apply to any discard deck I’ve played against.
So, how does the value from Black Cat show up here? Remember, even if Black Cat discards itself, it’s not free. You’ve used up one of your limited card draws, and are thus less likely to draw the other pieces of your combo.
- Two power for a card draw is a pretty bad deal.
- Ghost Rider’s job is to pull out the one big guy you’ve stashed away in the discard, not a midrange card.
- By definition, Black Cat won’t be triggering these.
- The only one of these effects that actually matters is Dracula.
Discard effects that trigger when played are plentiful, but also give you cards on the board, generally with some solid strength. It’s the cards in hand that are the limiting factor.
Not sure wheter this is good news (you’re not missing a key card!) or bad news (there’s a useless card waiting for you in a reserve!) :-P
Time spent should not be a liming factor. Once you’ve done the daily quests (30 minutes per day?), there’s basically no faster progression to be had. The progression is basically gated on real time, unless you spend money. And the amount you’d need to spend to speed it up noticeably is so ludicrous that there’s no temptation :)
I’m basically fine with the monetization as a “buy some but not all battlepasses” player, now that they’ve got a roadmap for how newly added cards filter down to pool 3.
I’m not spending gold on anything right now since I’ve been hoping they they’d run something like the sunspot bundle that I missed out on (i.e. gold → tokens and credits at a good ratio) for Chinese new year. It looks like they won’t though. It’s four months to Easter, and not a lot of globally recognizable festitivites for them to attach a big bundle to before then. (Valentine’s day?)
Okay, coming full circle as my first token shop offer when they added the token shop has finally popped out out of a random cache for me.
Trying the infamous Baero deck (but I replaced Deathlok with Venom) but having bad RNG luck. I keep getting the high cost cards to begin which throws off my curve. But a couple times I did win with stuff like using Aero to yank people around or dropping Death onto Sinister London.
Sera is in my token shop. Putting a pin on her, as I’m 700/1000 tokens and I dunno if I’ll pull her from a regular cache.
You forgot about Cerebro 7 decks!
Maybe black Cat could be playable in a discard deck that really wants to avoid discarding the wrong card, in a world where other cards like Death didn’t do this better.
They are so conservative about card changes. Let’s make Black Cat a 3/9 for a month and see what happens.
Black Cat can also be Knull fodder.
But yeah it’s main use is get out of the way for Apocalyspe decks or Death feeders.
I don’t really see it. Black Cat discards itself, while Death and Knull trigger on destroys. The tracking for those two states should be completely separate. Is there some interaction I’m missing? (Like the undocumented bullshit with Yondu’s “remove”.)
I wasn’t clear, sorry - I meant progression on the ladder, not in terms of collection.
I played a sequence of about 10 games yesterday in which Black Cat showed up repeatedly, which is why she came to mind. I could just as easily have said Ghost Rider, probably makes more sense!
I was thinking Attuma and mixed the keyword for Black Cat around.
I’ve only seen her intentionally used in a deck like twice. And it really only makes sense in a Hela/ Morbius deck. It can help with getting more procs on the Apocalypse discard, which is nice.
I could see some utility with Sauron though. Still RNG, you need to draw Sauron before Black Cat, but making her 3/7 with no ability would pair nice with Maximus for turn 6, and we all know he definitely sees play. That’s 14 power in 1 lane, or 7 in two, which is very competitive against everything but Sera Surfer for turn 6.
So after hitting Infinite last night I thought I’d spend the rest of the season mixing around some new decks. Figured I’d start with Lockjaw since I’d never used him.
Sadly he is not very good in a meta with lots of Darkhawk and Black Widows around. Darkhawk has really come on strong the last few days and I see nearly as often as Sera.
Lockjaw drawing rocks on the flip is sad times.
But dumping a rock or a Widow’s Bite into Lockjaw and pulling out an Infinaut makes for a happy 8 cubes.
It kept pulling Wasp instead.
I seem to have cursed RNG luck, so Lockjaw just isn’t my thing. Didn’t win a single game in like 10 tries.
That said, maybe Lockjaw discard is? Just put in a fun win with a 42 power Apocalypse with this deck
I do like discard decks in general, and this can really pump Apocalypse and Morbius. It is nearly identical to my Hela deck, just swapping Hela for Jaw, and removing Infinaut for Moon Knight.
I love the swingy-ness of my Lockjaw/Jubilee deck. So many opportunities to use the “AAAARRGH!” emote.
