I got a bit more serious this ranked season, tracking my matches as I play.
I don't usually do this. In previous seasons, there's always handful of top-tier decks, which means that you know what to expect when queuing up for a game in ranked mode.
This season is different. In the competitive scene, there are easily 20 meta-viable archetypes right now, each with a decent chance of winning tournaments. The deck with the highest meta share is Hydreigon at less than 8%, a far cry from its peak of ~17% in B2 / Fantastical Parade. All of them have winrates that hover around 50%, so there is clearly no one dominant deck.
So I thought to track my games and see if there are any trends, any way to counter the meta (spoiler: not really).
I started at the bottom of ultra ball 4, at 690 points. I'm currently sitting at 823 point having just entered master ball. It took me 36 matches for this climb, with a win rate of 55.6% (20 / 36).
I swap my deck every 3 games, which means that I cycled through 12 decks:
my decks
- zoroark
- altaria-greninja
- sceptile
- hydreigon
- sleep lucario
- lucario-hitmontop
- altaria-gourgeist
- oricorio-magnezone
- manetric-zeraora
- flygon-goomy
- suicune-baxcaliber
- blaziken
Here's the full data:
match data
no.,my deck,opp deck,outcome
1,zoroark,sceptile,W
2,zoroark,sleep altaria,L
3,zoroark,hydreigon,L
4,altaria greninja,sleep vaporeon,W
5,altaria greninja,poison sceptile,L
6,altaria greninja,vaporeon milotic,W
7,sceptile,altaria greninja,W
8,sceptile,blaziken,L
9,sceptile,oricorio magnezone,W
10,hydreigon,rampardos goomy,W
11,hydreigon,hydreigon,L
12,hydreigon,suicune baxcaliber,L
13,sleep lucario,altaria greninja,W
14,sleep lucario,hydreigon,L
15,sleep lucario,charizard,W
16,lucario hitmontop,(dc),W
17,lucario hitmontop,venusaur celebi,W
18,lucario hitmontop,lucario hitmonchan,L
19,altaria gourgeist,sleep lucario,W
20,altaria gourgeist,gardevoir,W
21,altaria gourgeist,poison hydreigon,W
22,oricorio magnezone,sceptile,L
23,oricorio magnezone,sleep lucario,L
24,oricorio magnezone,zoroark,L
25,manetric zeraora,blaziken,W
26,manetric zeraora,lucario hitmontop,L
27,manetric zeraora,oricorio magnezone,L
28,flygon goomy,blaziken,L
29,flygon goomy,leafeon,L
30,flygon goomy,lucario hitmontop,W
31,suicune baxcaliber,charizard,W
32,suicune baxcaliber,hydreigon,L
33,suicune baxcaliber,sceptile goomy,W
34,blaziken,sceptile,W
35,blaziken,lucario hitmontop,W
36,blaziken,blaziken,W
Note that the extremely small sample sizes mean that individual deck's win rate is meaningless here.
All in all, I played against 21 unique archetypes:
opponents' decks
- sceptile (x3)
- sleep altaria
- hydreigon (x4)
- sleep vaporeon
- poison sceptile
- vaporeon-milotic
- altaria-greninja (x2)
- blaziken (x4)
- oricorio-magnezone (x2)
- rampardos-goomy
- suicune-baxcaliber
- charizard (x2)
- venusaur-celebi
- lucario-hitmonchan
- sleep lucario (x2)
- gardevoir
- poison hydreigon
- zoroark
- lucario-hitmontop (x3)
- leafeon
- sceptile-goomy
The most repeats I faced off against were Hydreigon and Blaziken at 4 times each. Right below them would be Sceptile and Lucario-Hitmontop, tied at 3 encounters.
more aggregate stats on opponents' decks
Deck count by condensed archetype:
- Sceptile - 5
- Venusaur - 1
- Leafeon - 1
- Blaziken - 4
- Charizard - 2
- Suicune - 1
- Vaporeon - 2
- Magnezone - 2
- Altaria - 3
- Gardevoir: 1
- Lucario - 6
- Rampardos - 1
- Hydreigon - 5
- Zoroark - 1
Deck count by type:
- Grass - 7
- Fire - 6
- Water - 3
- Lightning - 2
- Psychic - 4
- Fighting - 7
- Darkness - 6
- Metal - 0
- Dragon - 0
- Colorless - 0
With such variety in my games, I believe this has to be the most diverse meta in Pocket. (I only joined towards the tail end of WoSS, but I heard that previous meta had been completely dominated with Darktina.)
Unfortunately, such diversity means that it is harder to counter opposing decks without making your deck weaker into all the other decks.
However, IMO it is still possible to make some micro adjustments. For me, the main one I made was to include one copy of Chingling in some of the decks that don't typically run Chingling e.g. Magnezone, Blaziken.
A sizable fraction of my opponents were running rare-candy stage-2 decks. Naturally, Chingling shuts those down. Another significant chunk ran variants of Lucario, which meant taking weakness damage from Chingling who is Psychic type.
Most importantly, it decreases your odds of a bad start when going first, something that some of these decks struggle with. For example, a typical Blaziken runs 2 Torchics and 2 Castforms, which means starting with Torchic half the time. Adding Chingling would mean having a bad start 40% of the time when going first.
In a nutshell, the ranked meta in Pocket have never been more diverse, which does make for less stale gameplay IMO. There are still some annoyances like Lucky Ice Pop and Sleep Scam, but I'd say it's a fair trade.
If there's one main downside to this diversity, it is that battling just got harder for the average collector / casual battlers. Gone are the days where you can pilot just that one top-tier deck while keeping only 2 or 3 key match-ups in mind.
But enough about the meta. What decks are you running?
