Hearthstone World Championship Group Stage Analysis (Deck Win Rates, Ban & Class Stats, and Biggest Surprises)

Stonekeep takes an in-depth look at the Hearthstone World Championship Group Stage with player and deck win rates, ban and class statistics, and looks at the biggest surprises coming out of the tournament!

Introduction

The Hearthstone World Championship’s group stage is over. Between 26^th and 30^th of October, we’ve seen 16 players battling for the spot in the Hearthstone World Championship Finals that will be happening during this year’s BlizzCon (4-5^th of November). It was definitely an exciting event, with over 100 games played and quite a lot of surprises.

At the same time, however, 5 days of Hearthstone action is definitely too much for more casual Hearthstone fans to follow. But don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. In this article, I will summarize the event with a number of stats I’ve gathered after going through the hours of footage. So if you want to find out which classes were targeted by the bans, which decks were the most successful or what were the biggest surprises of the event, look no further and just keep reading!

Summary

16 players have participated in the group stage, while only half of them got through. Here is the quick summary of how the groups ended like:

Finalists region breakdown:

• Americas: Cydonia, Amnesiasc, HotMEOWTH
• Europe: DrHippi, Pavel
• China: JasonZhou, Hamster
• Asia-Pacific: Che0nsu

Hearthstone World Championship Finals bracket:

Event Information

All times are PDT.

• Quarterfinals:November 4th, 2016: 12pm – 2:45pm, 5:00pm – 7:45pm
• Semifinals: November 5th, 2016: 10:30am – 1:30pm
• Finals: November 5th, 2016: 1:30pm – 3:45pm
• Stream: Official Hearthstone Twitch Channel
• Learn More: Official Blizzard Heathstone Championship Tour Information
• Calling all of the action will be venerable host Dan ‘Frodan’ Chou, who will be joined by an alternating array of talented casting team duos: Simon ‘Sottle’ Welch with Alexander ‘Raven’ Baguley, TJ ‘Azumo’ Sanders with Brian Kibler, and Nathan ‘ThatsAdmirable’ Zamora with James ‘Firebat’ Kostesich.

If you missed the tournament check out the VODs:

• HCT Group Stage Day 1 VOD
• HCT Group Stage Day 2 VOD
• HCT Group Stage Day 2 Part 2 VOD
• HCT Group Stage Day 3 VOD
• HCT Group Stage Day 4 VOD
• HCT Group Stage Day 5 VOD

That was the most important information for the viewers who wanted to catch up. Now let’s proceed to the more interesting part – statistics and their analysis. I’ll try to bring you as much useful and interesting statistics as I can. I’ll post both the “best” and the “worst” statistics – worst ones aren’t meant to bash or criticize anyone, we all know that these are the best players in the world. That’s just how Hearthstone works sometimes and no one can help that. But still, a player’s or deck’s poor performance can also be thought-provoking and that’s why I’ve decided to list them. Let’s start.

Player Statistics

Best Player Performance

• #1 - Amnesiasc – 72% win rate (8-3)
• #2 - Cydonia – 69% win rate (11-5)
• #3 - HotMEOWTH and che0nsu – 66% win rate (8-4) each

Worst Player Performance

• #1 - DDaHyoNi – 11% win rate (1-8)
• #2 - Handsomeguy – 31% win rate (5-11)
• #3 - Bbgungun – 35% win rate (6-11)

Most games played: Omegazero and Yulsic – 19 games each

Least games played: DDaHyoNi – 9 games

Lowest win rate player who qualified to the Finals: DrHippi – 50% win rate (9-9)

Highest win rate player who didn’t qualify to the Finals: OmegaZero – 53% win rate (10-9)

Comeback – players who qualified from the loser’s bracket: Cydonia, Hamster, DrHippi, Pavel

Ban Statistics

• #1 - Shaman - 22 out of 40 - 55%
• #2 - Warrior/Hunter - 5 out of 40 - 12.5%
• #3 - Druid - 4 out of 40 - 10%
• #4 - Warlock/Mage - 2 out of 40 - 5%

It’s not really surprising that Shaman took the first spot when it comes to the number of bans. It’s undoubtedly the strongest and most consistent class in the game right now, so the most common tactic seemed to be “bring the lineup that’s strong against Shaman or just ban it”. It’s still astonishing that over half of the bans targeted a single class.

Rest of the bans weren’t really that significant. The players that decided to bring decks that work okay against Shaman had to pick a class that their lineup is worst against. For example – Breath has brought Freeze Mage, which works really well against Shaman, but is terrible against Warrior. So when playing against DrHippi, he banned his Warrior, because that was the worst matchup.

The interesting thing is that because of the bans, Shaman was only the 5th most played class of the tournament. Two players didn’t even get to play a single game with their Shaman decks!

Class Statistics

For the results to be more reliable, I’ll be mostly ignoring Paladin and Priest in this section. Both of those classes were played only by a single player, with 3 and 5 games played on each class respectively. Because of that, I feel like the sample size is too low to include them.

Total games played: 119

Most popular class: Druid - 61 out of 238 (26%) decks played in total*

*Warrior and Hunter were the second most popular classes with 37 games (16%) each. It means that Druid was 65% more popular than the two second most popular classes of the tournament.

Least popular class: Rogue – 13 out of 238 (5%) decks played in total

Classes with a Positive Win Rate

• #1 - Rogue – 61.5% win rate (8-5)
• #2 - Warrior – 56.7% win rate (21-16)
• #3 - Mage – 55.5% win rate (20-16)
• #4 - Hunter – 51.3% win rate (19-18)

Classes with a Negative Win Rate

• #1 - Druid – 44.2% win rate (27-34)
• #2 - Shaman – 44.4% win rate (12-15)
• #3 - Warlock – 45% win rate (9-11)

These statistics surprised me a lot. Even though I expected Shaman not do that well, because I knew that it will either be banned or targeted, I didn’t expect the final win rate to be that bad. The strongest class on the ladder turned out to have one of the worst performances in this tournament – one could even say the worst, except for with the Druid, because the difference in win rate between those two is negligible.

Rogue turned out to have the best win rate of them all. However, I advise you to take it with a grain of salt – Rogue’s sample size is relatively small compared to the other classes on the list and the win rate was heavily influenced by the Pavel’s flawless performance with Malygos Rogue (3-0). Having that in mind, I’d say that across the board, Warrior was the MVP of the tournament. The class held a rather consistent, positive win rate across different lineups, even though it was the second most played class (tied with the Hunter).

The biggest disappointment was definitely the Druid. It was both the most played and the worst class of the tournament. It was brought by every player and, unlike Shaman, it wasn’t that heavily targeted by everyone’s lineups. While it’s just a speculation, the fact that a lot of players have still brought the nerfed Yogg-Saron, Hope's End in their Druid lists might have been a part of the problem. While there were a few great Yoggs this tournament, I’d say that more of them failed spectacularly by, for example, immediately Purify-ing or Pyroblast-ing itself or casting Astral Communion.

Deck Statistics

Most Popular Deck: Midrange Shaman, brought by 16 out of 16 players

Most Unique/Unexpected Decks

Most Consistent* Decks

• Cydonia’s Midrange Secret Hunter – 3-0
• Pavel’s Malygos Rogue – 3-0
• Hamster’s Token Druid – 3-1
• OmegaZero’s Dragon Warrior – 3-1
• Cydonia’s Tempo Mage – 3-1

*At least 75% win rate with 3+ games sample size.

Least Consistent* Decks

• Breath’s Secret Face Hunter – 0-4
• Naiman’s Tempo Mage – 1-5
• Bbgungun’s Discard Zoo Warlock – 1-5
• Pavel’s Tempo Mage – 1-4
• Handsomeguy’s Malygos Druid – 1-3
• OmegaZero’s Midrange Totem Shaman – 1-3

*25% or less win rate with 3+ games sample size.

Decks That Were Never Played*

• Cydonia’s Midrange Shaman
• Che0nsu’s Midrange Secret Hunter
• Thijs’ Midrange Shaman

*Because they were banned every series.

Biggest Surprises

#1 - Thijs not qualifying

Thijs was definitely the crowd favorite. Cheered by a lot of the viewers, most commonly picked in the “Choose your Champion” event (according to the polls), the Spring European Champion had all the fan support he needed. Sadly, he got knocked out on day 4 after losing both of his series (against Jasonzhou and Handsomeguy). A simple “0-2” doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Both of his series were incredibly close, going to 3-3 with basically a Bo1 deciding the whole series. Sadly for his fans, he lost both final games and went 3-4 two times in a row.

Maybe he wasn’t lucky enough, maybe there were some small problems with his lineup, but in the end a lot of the players are going to lose their free TGT packs. Including me…

#2 - Most unorthodox lineup going through

Everyone was excited after initially seeing the decks brought by Hamster. There were two of the most underrepresented classes in the tournament – Priest and Paladin. Both played only by a single player. The same player. Hamster. This fact alone gives him an award for the weirdest lineup. But surprise, surprise – that’s not all. He brought Token Druid instead of the Malygos Druid, which was by far the less popular choice – there were 13 Malygos Druids and only 3 Token Druids. Next, he decided to go with the C’Thun Warrior, which also wasn’t the most popular version (4 C’Thun Warriors compared to 6 Control Warriors). The only really standard and common deck he picked was a Midrange Shaman. But we can’t blame him for that since everyone else brought it too.

And the best part is that we’re going to see Hamster again, in the Finals. Yes, Priest has a shot at taking the 2016 Hearthstone World Championship. Who would have thought?

#3 – Europe’s comeback

Europe’s performance was pretty poor throughout the whole tournament. While one can’t deny that both Thijs’ and Naiman’s series were very close (every series of those players ended up with a 3-4 score), both of them got quickly knocked out of the tournament after going 0-2. The other two European players weren’t doing very well themselves – both Pavel and DrHippi had dropped one series each and they were on the verge of elimination. Falling to the lower bracket, both of them still had a shot to qualify on Day 5. European fans were crossing their fingers, and it worked. DrHippi has won his series against Yulsic (4-2) and Pavel won his series against OmegaZero (4-3).

The last series of the whole tournament – Pavel vs OmegaZero – might be one of the biggest tournament highlights and comeback stories of Hearthstone. After losing the first 3 games, it looked like there would be only a single contender from Europe after all. But Pavel never gave up and managed to take down OmegaZero’s Token Druid four times in a row. Some of the games were very close and could go either way. For example, in Druid mirror, Pavel dropped Yogg-Saron, Hope's End against Ragnaros the Firelord and Arcane Giant – he was at 10 health and OmegaZero had 5 more damage from his hand (+his own Yogg), so if Pavel’s all-in Yogg plan didn’t work out, the series go to OmegaZero. Not only that, but OmegaZero had played his own Yogg the next turn and while it was mostly positive, it didn’t work out that well –after just a few spells, it Polymorph-ed itself.

All in all, we’re going to see 2 players from Europe in the Finals – but we should remember that both of those players had to fight an uphill battle to earn their spots.

Closing

That’s all, folks. I really hope that you found this both informative and interesting – I’ve tried my best to focus on both of those aspects. Some of the stats might be pretty useful for the competitive players, while others are just trivia.

Overall, I think that the group stage was pretty exciting. The meta still revolved around Shaman, but since over half of the bans targeted it, we could see some other matchups too. Even the most underrepresented classes – Priest and Paladin – had some air time and the fact that Hamster got through is really amazing.

I’ve watched most of the games from the group stage, so if you have any questions about the decks, matches etc. - you can ask in the comment section below and I’ll try to answer. If you like this one, I might do a similar stat compilation for the Finals too. And if you want to be up to date with my articles, you can follow me on Twitter.

Good luck on the ladder and until next time!