Reposted from my Axie-specific blog (Diary of a Lunacian). Also in video formats on Youtube.

So far I have mostly been focussed on analysing the meta at the Top of the Leaderboard for multiple reasons: 1) We can learn the most from the Top players, 2) Teams are more optimised and easier to define into archetypes at the Top, and 3) Innovations often come from Top players (e.g. the new Metamorphosis archetype).

However, being a causal player myself, my vision of this blog is to provide information to a wider range of players who enjoy playing Axie Origins, not just for competitive players. By analysing the meta at the Top of the Leaderborad, I hope everyone can learn something from the information and make improvement in their gameplay.

In this post, I want to share more infomation on the Archetype distribution in Challenger sorted by ELO, because I am totally aware that the distributions can be quite different across the Leaderboard. For now I am only focussing on Challenger because it becomes increasingly difficult to define archetype at lower ranks (and also there is a lot more data to sort through).

Do note that the meta can shift very quickly and this is only a snapshot at a particular time on 16 June 2023. Top Players change the teams often, so do not take this as live information, especially at the very Top. Please do read to the end of the post where I discuss about the issue of gaining an advantage on the leaderboard / in online tournaments from gathering live match information.

Archetypes distribtuions by ELO at Challenger

First, apologies for the formatting of the Pie Charts. Beware that the colours for each Archetype may change between Charts as the Charts are sorted by popularity.

Archetypes Distributions at different ELOs in Challenger

2400+ ELO

2 Jinx, 1 Sustain, and 1 Topaz teams at the Top 4. Note that the data is a snapshot of the last played ranked-PVP team for the players, and players change between archetypes very often at the Top.

2300-2400 ELO

Topaz dominates the high ELO with 80% of the teams running Topaz. By now, Topaz teams are very optimised with high power level. It is not easy (and not cheap!) for many players to find another optimised team to have the same power level. Currently only Jinx, Sustain, and Topaz are above 2300 ELO.

2200-2300 ELO

Here, Topaz, Jinx, and Sustain are still the top 3, but we start to see some Poison, Leafy, Metamorphosis, and maybe even Heart of Ocean and Glorious Mane as well, but still you can expect 50% of the matchups are Topaz.

2100-2200 ELO

Popularity of Topaz decreases as we go down the ELO (mostly because Topaz is so strong that they tend to climb up to higher ELO), but still Topaz is at 41% at 2100-2200 ELO. You can expect to see more Jinx (29%) and Poison (12.2%). There are fewer Sustain here at 4.3%, so tech against Sustain is not as important at this ELO compared to fighting against Topaz, Jinx, and Poison.

2000-2100 ELO

This is where you may see slightly more Jinx (35%) than Topaz (32%). Jinx, Topaz, and Poison makes up 80% of the teams here, with Glorious Mane, Sustain, and Heart of Ocean making up another 10%.

1900-2000 ELO

Topaz, Jinx, and Poison still make up over 65% of the matchups but there is Glorious Mane, Sustain, and interestingly AoE as well. At this level, one can expect to face all sorts of different archetypes which is great for casual players from a fun level perspective.

1800-1900 ELO

At low challenger, we see Glorious Mane being the most popular strategy. Potential reasons are: 1) teams are relatively cheap, 2) it is relatively easy to pilot, 3) fun to deal massive damage, 4) fewer bad matchups at this ELO. As one would expect, this is the most diverse ELO within Challenger as players mostly use teams that fit their favourite playstyle and play for fun as opposed to trying to fight the meta. Here AoE is at 15% where it is more viable because of the lower power level as well as the high popularity of Glorious Mane, which is a good matchup for AoE.

Gaining competitive advantage from live match information

This is not a new topic in Axie. Given that information of all matches in publicly available (including Ranked Arena matches and on the Esports server), anyone can analyse the information and potentially gain an advantage in the Arena or in online tournaments. Having said that, the information is not accessible enough for an average causal player to easily obtain. This can result in an unfairness in information available for players, which could translate into differences in win rates.

Esports

I personally am not a competitive player, so everything here is purely my speculation. I think it is not too much of a problem for big events where all information is available to all players (I could be wrong here), but it can be a barrier to entry for relatively new players to enter the competitive scene through online tournaments as they may not have the tools available to obtain the information of their opponents, while competitive players (especially those in big guilds and teams) can gain an advantage by seeing the opponents’ match history. This is not a unique problem for Axie but I personally hope we get to have “open team sheets” where all team information is available for all players even for the smaller online tournament so that it is more friendly to new players.

Leaderboard

As all match data on the leaderboard is available, including the teams and timing of the matches, it is relatively easy to use this data to your advantage by looking at how many people are playing a particular archetype around your ELO at a particular time, and pick your team accordingly. As a causal player who is not in any guild, I can obtain the data relatively easily from API, so the information is certainly available for the Top Players in big teams and guilds to fight for the top spots on the Leaderboard.

I do not remember the full Terms and Conditions of Axie Origins so I cannot comment on whether it violates anything. As a casual player, I personally do not use this information when I play, but I see that it could be a problem at a certain ELO where it could create an information imbalance at a certain ELO where more serious players would use this information to gain an advantage while more casual players may not have access / may not bother to use the information / may not have the resources to make use of the information.

Things are a bit different at the top assuming that everyone at the top have access to the information, and so there is no unfairness. The live information becomes an extra layer of “competitive game play” that pro players need to handle during their grind on the leaderboard. Given that I am not a competitively player, I will not and can not comment on this, but I would assume some pro players might prefer to focus more on playing Origins and less on managing matchups and potentially timing their queue time.

Potential Solution

I do not know enough about the underlying tech to know if it is feasible but one potential solution could be to not make the live match information publicly available, e.g. keep match information inaccessable for 2 hours. In this case, players can still get an overall picture of the meta while not needing to take into account live match information when queueing into the Arena.

I did not intend to write so much but here it is. I hope you find this information useful! If you find this post informative and would like to see more, consider hitting the subscribe button, check out my Youtube channel, and use my lunacian code: maurice for a little support!

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