Expanded Data Dive Part 1: Dallas

Recently, I started playing around with RK9labs matchup data and deck lists. Turns out, the data has been available for quite some time and I just never realized it and never really saw others use it. So shoutout to Jared Grimes for pointing out that this information was out there. You can use said data to answer questions like: “How good is X card or deck against Y deck”. Personally, I think that’s pretty cool, so let’s talk about that.

North America gets two back to back Expanded Regionals in March: Toronto and Greensboro. Both, fortunately, supported by RK9Labs. So rather than release a single big article, on Expanded, I want to release two half size articles. This lets me get a review of Dallas out early enough for Toronto, and then a second article to review the matchups of Toronto in time for Greensboro.

So without further adieu, let’s figure out the play for Expanded!

Dallas Day Two Meta

With access to six rounds of day two matchups and the full deck lists, we have a lot of data to sift through. So let’s start from the top and review how each archetype performed in Day 2.

Archie’s Blastoise received a lot of hype going into the event from articles and social media and in turn represented a big chunk of day two decks. Although I would note that very few top players actually brought Archiestoise themselves. Regardless, Archiestoise seemingly warped the format around it. Not only taking up a quarter of the day two field, but dragging numerous Archiestoise counters along with it. Counters ranged from Grass type attackers like Vespiquen, Sceptile and Golisopod-GX to decks with Wobbuffet techs such as Primal Groudon-EX and Garbodor variants. It really goes to show you both the power creep introduced by the Team Up format and the influence of articles and social media these days.

Dallas Day Two Tier List

But how did these decks actually stack against one another? Looking at the Top 8 and meta spread only reveals so much information. I want to dig deeper, and to do that, I want to examine the exact Win/Loss/Tie rates of each deck. So I did that, and then I ranked them based on the average best-of-three points earned per archetype.

• 1.705 points – Zoroark / Garbodor – 46 wins, 30 losses, 12 ties
• 1.622 points – Zoroark / Control – 22 wins, 16 losses, 7 ties
• 1.607 points – Zoroark / Golisopod – 14 wins, 11 losses, 3 ties
• 1.556 points – Trevenant – 8 wins, 6 losses, 4 ties
• 1.5 points – Vespiquen – 11 wins, 10 losses, 3 ties
• 1.5 points – Zoroark / Exodia – 6 wins, 6 losses, 0 ties
• 1.5 points – Alolan Exeggutor – 3 wins, 3 losses, 0 ties
• 1.486 points – Fighting – 15 wins, 13 losses, 7 ties
• 1.417 points – Rayquaza – 5 wins, 5 losses, 2 ties
• 1.375 points – Cradily / Sceptile – 10 wins, 11 losses, 3 ties
• 1.344 points – Drampa / Garbodor – 13 wins, 15 losses, 4 ties
• 1.333 points – Night March – 2 wins, 2 losses, 2 ties
• 1.333 points – Shock Lock – 2 wins, 2 losses, 2 ties
• 1.304 points – Archiestoise – 43 wins, 51 losses, 21 ties
• 1.167 points – Primal Groudon – 6 wins, 9 losses, 3 ties
• 1 points – Counter Box – 2 wins, 4 losses, 0 ties
• 1 points – Wailord Stall – 3 wins, 6 losses, 2 ties
• 0.583 points – Unown Damage – 2 wins, 9 losses, 1 ties
• 0.5 points – Blacephalon – 1 wins, 5 losses, 0 ties

We can see Zoroark continuing to dominate the format, the only archetype capable of averaging significantly better than a 50% win rate in Day 2. Zoroark Garbodor in particular performed exceptionally well. Usually, when I look at these point rankings, popular decks tend to score worse. That happens because only so many players can make it far in Day 2 and thus large percentage of players for any popular archetype inevitably sink to the bottom. But here we see Zoroark Garbodor retaining the best average points rate in spite of its overwhelming popularity.

Zoroark Control only took the second highest placement, which I found strange. Zoroark Control made it all the way to finals, which should skew the average points in its favor. On top of that, Zoroark Control archetypes typically see a higher concentration of top name players at the helm. Despite all that, it still performed significantly worse than Zoroark Garbodor in terms of average win rate.

And then on the other hand we see Archiestoise performing abysmally, scoring the worst average points rate of any non-rogue archetype.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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