This year was quite exciting in terms of the high ladder, lots of players went to high mmr with various archetypes across multiple factions. And since Gwent’s ranking system commits players to explore at least 4 different factions, it makes the high ladder very interesting, and we could see multiple interesting decks emerge during the year.
We have acquired some stats from lerio2 of Team Legacy, and created a tierlist of the top performing factions of this year. You can see how many times were those factions able to reach certain fmmr treshholds. (2600-2650, 2650-2700, 2700-3000)
6. Monsters (63, 11, 0)
Monsters were underwhelming this year, with only 4 times reaching tier2 in the meta, and never being able to become a tier1 deck. In those few times when they were decent, it was thanks to decks like Vampires, Arachas Nekker, Cat Koshchey, and Frost.
It seems like that those Monsters decks were waiting for their saviour, Dagon all along to bring back their old glory.
5. Northern Realms (113, 43, 6)
Northern Realms had it quite good at the first half of the year, there were 6 times an NR deck has reached the tier1 spot, but it tuned down by the end of the year. In those times NR was represented strongly by deck Alumni, Siege, Priestess, and Knights. Lots of different archetypes, although some of them were quite oppressive in those metas before the nerfs.
4. Skellige (168, 43, 5)
Playing Skellige was quite boring this year, as the only two viable archetypes were Sigvald and Renfri Pirates, with a touch of Rain, Nekker Flurry, and a bit of Sove at the end of the year. But those decks packed quite a punch, as there was a time when the only tier1 deck was Renfri Pirates. Yes, that was the whole tier1. Maybe it was because Renfri was a bit overtuned, but she fit in very nicely to the Pirate archetype, and dominated the ladder for a time.
3. Scoia’tael (172, 52, 4)
Interestingly Scoia’tael hasn’t been at the top of the meta very much, only 2 times being in tier 1, and 7 times in tier 2, but still many players choose to take this faction to high ranks. The go-to decks were Elves, Harmony, PS Control, Dwarves, and even Handbuff got there at some point. ST had many different and enjoyable archetypes, and players experimented with them during the year, having excellent results.
2. Syndicate (216, 52, 9)
Syndicate was a powerhouse this year, reaching tier1 in most of the seasons with decks like Bounty, Tribute (these with the infamous KOB combo), various Nekker decks, Devotion SY, and even Collusion Cove in the last season. The newest faction in Gwent was able to stay on top of the meta for most of the year, and bullying opponents with the sheer power of brutal midrange options.
1. Nilfgaard (233, 51, 6)
Nilfgaard also took the top ranks hand in hand with Syndicate. Being in the top tiers for most of the year, with Assimilate (playing your cards better than you) in the first half, then changed to Renfri, with various leaders. With the wide variety of control tools, adaptable gameplan, and the huge pointslam of Renfri and other cards the deck took over the meta in a big chunk of the year, giving NG the top, and earning the title of the strongest faction of 2022.
Summary
This year was decent in terms of balance, as in most months there were multiple playable decks at the top of the ladder, and every faction had decks and tools to compete with the others. Obviously it’s not easy to perfectly balance 6 factions while keeping their faction identity, as you could see that Monsters couldn’t become a force even after some buff to certain archetypes, and NG and SY got several nerfs to their core cards, but they just downgraded one of two bronzes, and stayed OP.
There is also this nice table showing the average faction mmrs for the top5 scores in the seasons of Masters4.
It shows that there were seasons with a huge amount of mmr difference between factions, in those times the meta was a little unbalanced, thus players stuck to certain decks to compete.
If you remember such times, there is no need to bring them up, but if you need a reminder about old metas, you can check out the meta snapshots by Team Elder Blood: january february march april june july august september october november
Many thanks to lerio2 for collecting these cool stats.
If you are interested in other awesome statistics, check out Leriohub for more.
