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Monday Meta Report - December 13th

Are you looking for the best decks in this week’s meta-game? Leer takes a deep dive into the data to show you what decks you should play and those you should prepare to face!
Meta Monday

Welcome to Monday Meta Report, a weekly series where we take a look at the most dominant decks in the past 7 days and why they are currently on top of the meta.

The Data

Meta Decks by Playrate -- data from @Balco21

Taking a look at Balco’s Meta Tier List, we can quickly identify two decks that stick out: Ezreal/Kennen and Rally Yordles. They are by far the most played decks this week with a 14% and 12% playrate.

Taric/Pantheon and Gangplank/Sejuani are the next most played decks with a 4% playrate, while Gangplank/Twisted Fate is the only deck with at 3%.

Meta Decks by Winrate -- data from @Balco21

When looking at winrates, we also see Kennen/Ezreal and Rally Yordles on top with a 54% winrate, though Poppy/Ziggs is even above them almost scratching 55% winrate. GP/Sej comes in fourth with a close to 54% winrate and GP/TF fifth with a 53% one.

The Reasons

Kennen Ezreal

Kennen/Ezreal has taken the meta in its grasp by day 1.

Its matchup table tells us why: It has incredible winrates against almost every deck that is currently played on ladder, the only exceptions being Rally Yordles (Poppy/Teemo) and GP/TF.

Poppy Teemo

This feeds directly into the reason why Rally Yordles are performing so well at the moment - they are beating the most played deck.

As you can see, they are also beating mostly everything else, except some PantheonPantheon decks and … wait a minute. I thought the worst deck in the history of LoR was banished from the game?! Let me rectify this error and erase it from existence. This way you will never be tricked into playing that agonizing deck … ever. I’m doing us both a favor, trust me.

Anyways, as you can see Rally Yordles has only Pantheon decks as their weakness and otherwise exclusively good matchups.

Pantheon Taric

Speaking of Pantheon decks, looking at Pantheon/Taric we can see quite a different picture from the first two decks. As mentioned above, the deck has a convincing winrate against Rally Yordles, but a terrible one against Ezreal/Kennen. 

Its mediocre matchups explain why Pantheon/Taric only has a 50% winrate at the moment, while its engaging playstyle explains why it’s being played this much nonetheless.

Lastly, spotting why Poppy/Ziggs is currently the most winning deck can be a little tricky.

Poppy Ziggs

Its matchup table looks similar to the one for Pantheon/Taric, right? … Not quite in fact. Its “bad” matchups, most notably Ezreal/Kennen and Rally Yordles, are actually not that bad, with only around a 47% winrate. 

On the other hand, the deck has quite high winrates in their good matchups, like 61% against Pantheon/Taric. Also, be reminded that the decks covered in this matchup table only make up around 50% of the total amount of decks being played on ladder. 

Poppy/Ziggs is quite an old deck that has been around since the early days of the Bandlewood region release. Thus, it has an extremely refined decklist that makes it very consistent against most of the “other” 50% of ladder which is not covered in these stat reports.

For more matchups, you can also visit our own Matchup Table.

Interpretation and Moving forward

Taking a look into the future, we can take an educated guess with the above data. When looking at popular decks, it is always important to compare play and win rates with each other to get a realistic image of their current power level.

Balco uses a system called Meta Score, where they evaluate a deck by weighting its matchups against the field, factoring in each archetype’s frequency.

"vS" Power Scores - data from @Balco21

It’s no surprise that Ezreal/Kennen and Rally Yordles stand on top, they are currently the meta-defining decks.

Ezreal/Kennen is still in its early stages and there is not one good decklist that most players agree upon. For example, a lot of decks still run 3 copies of Deep MeditationDeep Meditation, while many argue that the additional card draw is irrelevant in the deck. Still, it’s an incredibly powerful deck that can defeat almost every deck if it draws well.

Personally, I find the deck intriguing to play and all the more difficult. I can guarantee you that you are misplaying with this deck, all the time. If you are looking to learn this deck, you might want to study VODs of reigning world champion Alanzq.

Rally Yordles on the other hand does its best Rally Elusives impression and we know how that deck performed ‘till a week ago 🙂

Quite some power level lower in third place, GP/Sej still performs solidly with its well-rounded matchup table. If you are a little shy to learn new decks and just want to enjoy the game with a well-known deck, this can definitely be your preferred pick!

Despite its high winrate, Poppy/Ziggs only gets a Meta Score of 58, due to its (slightly) unfavored matchup into Ezreal/Kennen and Rally Yordles. This means that while Ziggs/Poppy is a great deck overall, in the current meta it’s more advisable to either play Ezreal/Kennen or Rally Yordles.

GP/TF comes in fifth with a Meta Score of 51 because of its favored matchup against Ezreal/Kennen (60%), but heavily unfavored one against Rally Yordles (31%). If you feel like flipping a coin to get a favorable matchup, this can absolutely be your deck!

Conclusion

If there is one take-away from this Meta Report it’s this: You either play Ezreal/Kennen and Rally Yordles, or you beat one of them. 

Personally, I prefer the first one since it is quite early in the meta. It’s a good time to learn how to pilot the go-to decks and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Give the meta a week or two to develop refined decks that can hopefully compete with them.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s Meta Report as much as I did writing it. We’re experiencing an exciting breath of fresh air to the meta and we will have to pay close attention as to how it will evolve over the coming weeks.

As always, thank you very much for reading, feel free to leave a comment and I will be happy to reply.

Also thanks to Balco for his comprehensive statistics and Legna for the insightful matchup tables. They are fulfilling an incredibly important role in the community; without them, reports like these wouldn’t be possible. So go check them out!

If you want to read more by me, you can read my How to math in LoR article here.