Trundle/Sol - is this normal?

I've been playing the game for just 3 months. I missed the launch of Bilgewater. So, the question is: is it normal for the meta to be this completely saturated by a single deck right after an expansion? I'm seeing Trundle/Sol like 3 games out of 5, and some other Sol deck most of the rest of the time.

Fortunately, I'm very comfortable with aggro decks, and I think I can manage a positive winrate against the deck, but still - there is an absolutely massive percentage of the player base on one single deck right now, and I find that fairly un-fun overall.

Edit - I will add that I've never seen the meta this completely saturated by a single deck, even after balance changes.

Edit #2 - it may have been a bit of a flash in the pan. A day later, I'm seeing it a lot less.

You should not be surprised that people play ramp into x <- any unstopable force. 

This deck concept is a popular and successful archetype.

It has always been a thing in many other cardgames like Magic the Gathering (where it also exists right now in the form of ugin ramp).

Ramp is a very easy to play deck and is a capable of scooring high winrates against everything that is not aggro.

I was argueing against the introduction of new ramp cards in freljord because it was obvious for any experienced tcg- player how that would end especially when enormous payoff cards like Aurelion Sol exist

If you want to balance this concept you have to nerf ramp, letting aurelion find a home in SI with thresh who can be played around.

For now you have to play eighter ramp, aggro, a very fast and proably unreliable combo deck or a Challenger deck to destroy their manastones before they do harm. 

You have options against ramp into X decks but they are hated in mtg for a reason...

This particular ramp deck can actually handle even aggro, due to the absurdly strong healing, as well as midrange blockers. But they do need a bit of a "nut draw" to be able to both ramp into Sol AND handle aggro at the same time.

Quote From sto650

This particular ramp deck can actually handle even aggro, due to the absurdly strong healing, as well as midrange blockers. But they do need a bit of a "nut draw" to be able to both ramp into Sol AND handle aggro at the same time.

Against my taric deck this deck has about 35-40% Winrate and given how strong my taric deck is... that % value is kinda still to high given the questionable decisions many players make.

If every ramp player would pilot his pile correctly we would talk about 45% win against a deck that swarms giant elusives onto the battlefield on turn 7 where they might play aurelion too but can't level him before they are already dead

If you are talking about how there is too much of Ramp, then this kind of reminds me of the beta when Ramp Freljord was just as ridiculously strong. You run it with Tryndamere and splash in either SI or Ionia. SI for Aggro match-ups and Ionia for Control match-ups. Everyone was practically running this until everyone rejoiced when almost all the cards that made it good got nerfed to the ground (Wyrding Stones, Catalyst of Aeons, Avalanche, Tryndamere, She Who Wanders).

So for the start of the meta, this happens from time to time but I certainly did not expect Ramp Freljord to come back.

For what it's worth, I think this was a problem at the release of the Rising Tides expansion, first with the Deep Sea Monster decks and then with the Nox/P&Z Championless Aggro decks. Perhaps those examples were less extreme than what you're seeing, but they weren't great in terms of deck diversity.

To the extent that this expansion is resulting in more extreme skew relative to Rising Tides, I expect it is because of the shift away from traditional expansions and towards what Riot is calling "sets." I suspect the shift to releasing expansions in sets was designed to produce exactly this kind of overemphasis on Targon archetypes. Just thinking about the numbers for a second, with Rising Tides (which released 122 new cards) ~50% of the content was Bilgewater and the other ~50% was new content for other regions. When the Call of the Mountain set is done, Targon will have picked up around 72 or 73 cards, which will only be ~42% of the new content in the set. (Assuming they continue a pattern of adding more 13+ cards to each region in each set, the new region will always end up with less than 50% of the new content.)

But, in this first expansion of the Call of the Mountain set, Targon actually makes up ~57% of the new content, and the other major content released (Freljord, Shadow Isles, and Ionia) is specifically designed to pair with that Targon content. That probably won't be the case for every region they release - there are only two more Targon champions, but four more old regions left to reveal. So, the majority of new content pushes players to pick up exactly these few Targon archetypes, and Ramp Aurelion Sol happens to be the early front runner in terms of power level, so it's getting all the attention.

I think he's referring to this list that's going to be pretty popular going forward. https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/bt37ehhh40qclfo1bdb0

While you fine folks might not care about meta shifts, the vast majority of players are just gonna see what streamers are playing and click copy deckcode and paste that bad boy right in, and cue into games.

To answer yes it's normal for there to be certain decks with higher play rates than others.

Ash Sej used to be absolutely dominate, it wasn't usual to hit 6 games in a row.

Quote From sto650

I've been playing the game for just 3 months. I missed the launch of Bilgewater. So, the question is: is it normal for the meta to be this completely saturated by a single deck right after an expansion? I'm seeing Trundle/Sol like 3 games out of 5, and some other Sol deck most of the rest of the time.

Fortunately, I'm very comfortable with aggro decks, and I think I can manage a positive winrate against the deck, but still - there is an absolutely massive percentage of the player base on one single deck right now, and I find that fairly un-fun overall.

Edit - I will add that I've never seen the meta this completely saturated by a single deck, even after balance changes.

New region, fun invoke mechanic, strong cards and since most of the other regions got nothing from this expansion makes sense to just see targon everywhere. 

I think it’s an issue with the new sets system that they are implementing. Initially I liked the idea of sets to spread out content more, but the fact that some regions won’t have a significant amount of new cards for up to 4 more months (or around 8 months if you count from when Rising Tides was released) makes me much less of a fan. I wish that they had distributed the release of cards a bit more evenly, even if that means giving champions a little less support in the expansion that releases them. I think a minimum of 4 new cards per each region per expansion would be good.

What used to be Tryndamere's stats?

It's just that his Leveled up form had Tough before. It made him kind of annoying to deal with but other than the nerf wasn't too impactful on how he was played. It just made him weaker in general and now he's one of the weakest Champions in the game.