In the short three weeks it’s been on the air, the Hearthstone Global Games (HGG)—a $300,000 national competition which will broadcast team-based competition for almost half a year—has become the game’s richest tournament in terms of class and archetype diversity.

Dozens of different decks have already been played, the meta evolving week to week and day to day, as the league travels the world to cover every region, from Americas to Asia and we’re not even a third into the first of three stages. The splendor of the tournament appropriately matches the lush, untamed lands of Un’Goro crater, a cradle of life and a land used by the titans to forge life. It’s hard to present this diversity with words alone, so that’s why we called out best friend and other people’s worst enemy: Statistics.

Archetype abundance

We start with some big numbers. 117 best-of-ones over 29 team matches have been played in HGG so far, counting up until and including week three, day one. In those 117 matches, 33 different deck archetypes have been used and every class is represented be at least two. Two classes—Mage and Shaman—have seen as many as six different archetypes, a direct effect of HGG’s multi-cultural clash of playstyles.

These are unrivaled numbers in terms of metagame diversity and there hasn’t been a Hearthstone tournament that has come close to them. This includes the likes of the 2015 Celestial Invitational which forced players to bring and actually play all nine cases, unlike HGG where more than half of team’s line-up remains unused. The Celestial Invitational saw 28 archetypes but still no single class had as many as six different lists. The ESL Trinity Series, another team-based tournament, had 24 archetypes over many more games.

While there are apparently preferred decks to play, few classes are that dominated by a single list as Pirates for Warrior and Aggro for Shaman in the AM Winter Playoffs, for example. The closest to that we have in HGG is Elementals’ reign over the Shaman class, whose games played constitute more than 70% of all Shaman decks.

Balanced class viability

Put together, these 33 deck archetypes result in unprecedented class representation balance. It was often the case in major Gadgetzan tournaments that at least one class was completely missing, or represented so well that it virtually was.

Take Trinity Series once again. Although all nine classes saw play during the group stage, Hunter played only 13 games, or mere 2% of all group stage games. In the AM Winter Playoffs example from before, Hunter was completely gone and Paladin was only brought in three of all 122 line-ups, or 2.4%.

Not the case with HGG. The lowest represented class is Warlock at good 6%, and this is a class you will never see on ladder and which is notoriously struggling to find a universal build. From there, the field is way more equal. Six classes are within 1% or two games from each other, and that includes:

 - Priest, Paladin and Rogue which had exactly one viable archetype during Gadgetzan; and  

 - Hunter which was extinct in the previous meta

Even at #2, Shaman isn’t that far ahead, with just seven more games played compared to Mage. The only real outliner is Warrior, which is enjoying the retained power of Pirates and the successful anti-aggro Quest lists.

The big four

Speaking of outliers, Un’Goro is no exception to previous metagames and high-performing decks have already emerged, even in the unorthodox HGG format and aforementioned Quest Warrior is right at the top.

The deck’s popularity can be explained with its staple, reliable nature. Quest Warrior doesn’t have the classic polarized match-ups, the win-big-or-go-home nature of Freeze Mage, for example. It fends off most aggro decks and its minions are too hard to kill for traditional controls. Even in midrange battles it stands its ground due to the universal effects of Execute and Brawl, which don’t care how durable a certain minion is.

Elemental Shaman comes close second because, like Quest Warrior, it doesn’t have a notorious weak spot. It plays a midrange style, which seems to be the strongest in the Un’Goro meta and incentivizes and empowers on-curve drops, which is already a strong style. Like Warrior, Shaman has his unconditional removal in Hex and lots of AoE against aggro, not to mention the versatility that cards like Hot Spring Guardian bring to the table.

Between its midrange and control variants, Murloc Paladin is a deck which has become a terror to face on ladder and HGG alike. The week two tendencies were skewed towards control, but the midrange build explored in popularity in the recent days, reminiscing of the traumatizing reign of Mysterious Challenger decks in the past. The Murloc Paladin’s power lies with two Un’Goro cards—Gentle Megasaur and Sunkeeper Tarim—which are the embodiment of the Paladin philosophy of being the swiss army knife of Hearthstone.

Quest Rogue completes the top four as another new cool kid on the block, an archetype which has miraculously made garbage cards such as Wisp, Stonetusk Boar and Gadgetzan Ferryman not just playable, but devastating. Quest Rogue still struggles against fast decks which is why its win-rate isn’t particularly high, but given enough time it will complete its bouncing solitaire game and blow you out.

Why did this happen?

Simply put, it’s been a perfect storm for HGG, as three major factors contributed at the same time to create this unparalleled diversity.

First, it’s HGG’s very format. Not only is each team required to prepare all nine classes, but they also have to be spread between its four players and then lock said players in a specific order, without knowing the opponent’s strategy. Once the pairings for each match have been determined, players are given the option to select which of the two classes to play.  

This multi-layered approach to each game makes for a format that is, to put it simply, unsolvable, or at least compared to what we’ve observed with Conquest or Last Hero Standing in previous rotations. There are too many variables to calculate—from meta trends, to player strengths, to team tendencies—for an optimal nine-deck line-up to be calculated. In fact, the way it’s built, HGG welcomes niche or teched decks more so than any other tournament, since lists aren’t public information. This is why this won’t be the last time we’ve seen N’Zoth Paladins, Control Shamans or Elemental Mages.

Second, there’s the unsolved metagame of Un’Goro which has been shifting with rapid speed. This new expansion is by far the most diverse in terms of viable lists of all Hearthstone sets so far, including the positive releases that were League of Explorers and Whispers of the Old Gods, and it’s not even closed to being solved yet. The Paladin class is a good example of that, going from left-for-dead to a ladder god in one week.

Last but not least, there’s the international nature of the competition, which is likely as important as HGG’s format. Regions’ playstyles have always varied a lot and traditionally we’ve had a midrange/control oriented Europe and Korea, faster Americas, and innovative China and APAC. This is the first time we’ve had all regions in the same place and represented by that many countries.

Thus, coming out with a formula that answers the HGG metagame puzzle is a tall order, and we all have to be extremely thankful about that. Diversity is the key to Hearthstone’s longevity and if it’s up to HGG, the game will live a long and happy life.  

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