Riot has provided some deck stats from the 32 finalists from the Americas Empires of the Ascended seasonal tournament!
Quote From @PlayRunterra Here's what the top 32 Americas competitors brought to the Open Rounds! From our data, we're seeing a lot of Slay and TLC decks.
Wondering will be played during the Seasonal Tournament? Tune in Saturday, May 1 at 1 PM PDT to find out.
Indeed, it seems like almost everyone brought either a Thresh + Nasus Slay deck or a Trundle + Lissandra "TLC" deck, with most players choosing to bring both. We are cheering for the brave participants who opted not to bring either; however the previous two tournaments have not rewarded those who bring off-meta decks.
Other observations we made:
- In total, 33 of LoR's 58 champions are represented.
- All 9 regions are represented, although Ionia, Piltover & Zaun, and Bilgewater have significantly fewer decks than Shadow Isles and Targon
- Newcomer Shurima is actually the 3rd most popular region, albeit almost entirely due to Nasus Thresh.
- With 4 decks, 13% of finalists brought the underappreciated Shyvana
- She has 4x the representation of Scouts, TF Fizz, and Nocturne Nightfall, who all only have 1 deck
- It should be noted, however, that pairing Shyvana + Aurelion Sol frees up Zoe due to Riot's "champ-lock" format.
- Infamously low-playrate Katarina earned a spot thanks to Fogacinha's 1x in an Ashe + Marauders deck.
- Despite Raphterra's claims that Tahm Kench + Soraka is "the ultimate Nasus Thresh counter", only 1 other finalist brought it.
- Note that Raphterra actually also qualified using Tahm Kench + Soraka, albeit on the SEA shard so his deck is not represented here.
We have not seen any analysis from Riot for the other shards yet, but some unofficial data collected by content creator Kozmic implies these trends are representative of the other shards too.
What did you think of these results? Did anything surprise you? Share with us below!
Comments
I've been looking for a good Shyvana deck for a while. Are the lists available anywhere?
In general, the deck lists don't seem to be publicly available. I know Hexenwitch and TheBlackBoss were 2 of the Shyvana decks; I was able to find their lists (below) and they are nearly identical. I wasn't able to find the other 2 but I would be surprised if they were significantly different.
Good luck!
And to think that many people thought that Nasus was the weakest of the three ascendant champions.
Proves, yet again, that people are just plain bad at predicting the power level of new cards that none of them has played with. Myself included. I thought Zoe was flat awful and would never accomplish anything.
Other people (not me this time) thought LeBlanc was bad because Mystic Shot. Turns out she's one of the 10 best champs in the game presently. Predicting power level is just hard before playing with the cards.
However, all that being said - Soothsayer is going to be completely busted. Are we ready for Lee Sin to find a new home in Shurima? He's already seen some experimentation with Shurima as his second region - Soothsayer and Chronoshift might just be the extra protection he needed to find a comfy home among the sands. (And I say this with great trepidation ... please let me be wrong.)
He kinda proved it's the ultimate counter to Nasus Thresh by posting a 100% winrate of TK-Soraka into Nasus-Thresh during the tournament. Didn't drop a single game of that pairing.
I was actually thinking about writing an article framing TK 'Raka as a Nasus Thresh counter, however I personally haven't been having quite the same success as Raphterra. I'm mostly sure that's due to pilot errors (there are a lot of ways to mess up as the 'Raka player whereas the Nasus player has a pretty straight-forward gameplan), so I wanted to get a few more games under my belt before I wrote anything.