Originally published at: http://gomorragazette.com/2015/06/28/card-meta-analysis-through-doomtown-deck-builder-analytics/
by Dan Knight
DTDB.co (DoomtownDB) is a fan-managed resource maintained by Pierre “Platy Pus” Rivoire. Platy does a seriously impressive job keeping it up to date while also adding useful new features all the time. Recently, I hit him up for some card analytics hoping he would be able to give me (and now all of you) some insight into how the community approaches deck building.
At the time of writing this, some 9428 decks have been built using the DTDB builder. That’s pretty impressive for a game that’s been out less than a year. Of these almost 10,000 decks, 6102 of them are still stored in the database (although not all of them have been published) and 1216 of those were made since the release of Frontier Justice. With this huge stack of data available to look at deck building patterns, I thought it would be interesting to take a peek inside our global meta and see what everyone is up to.
Let’s start by looking at factions / outfits:
There are a couple of surprising results here. While the number of Sloane and MCC is pretty much even, there’s a lot of favouritism for the Law Dogs leaving 4th Ring flagging. If we look back at the earlier days of deck building, 4th ring were perceived to be a lot weaker which could account for this variance.
A closer look at the specific Outfits used shows us this:
Of the four new Faith and Fear outfits, Desolation Row is seeing the most love. If we take a look at the recent tournament results, this revelation comes as no surprise. Desolation Row is definitely one of the stronger outfits at the moment.
What is interesting about Desolation Row is that it dominates the other new outfits so much. Is this because there isn’t yet a power deck using the other new outfits comparable to Des Row? Or is it because players are inclined to emulate decks that do well, which means the other new outfits aren’t getting as much attention?
Next up, the top 12 cards used across all decks:
The top 2 spots are taken by the Jokers, although interestingly they don’t appear in ~33% of decks which is a lot more Jokerless decks than I was expecting to see. If we take a look at the remaining top 10 we see that 8 of those 10 cards are deeds, with Circle M Ranch appearing in 3464 decks (57%). The utility of Steven Wiles makes him a favourite for an astonishing 56% of all decks! I fully expected to see Travis in the top 10 and he has not disappointed. It is worth noting that this is the top 10 cards across ALL decks that are saved on the database so there is a heavier leaning towards core set cards as they have been around the longest.
If we take a look at the top 10 since the release of Frontier justice we get the following:
Not much change here. Jake Smiley makes an obvious appearance in 43% of all decks and Travis drops a few places. The lower Travis rank is probably due to the new in-faction Grifter options.
Expanding on the “most used” cards, the below table shows the top 30 cards appearing in all decks stored:
Joker (red) 4096
Joker (black) 4033
Circle M Ranch 3464
Steven Wiles 3423
Travis Moone 3156
Pat’s Perch 3084
Jackson’s Strike 2709
General Store 2374
Blake Ranch 2367
Carter’s Bounties 2266
Charlie’s Place 2180
Yan Li’s Tailoring 2141
Pistol Whip 2036
Sun In Yer Eyes 1972
Pearly’s Palace 1936
Unprepared 1885
Coachwhip 1860
Clementine Lepp 1817
B&B Attorneys 1721
Cattle Market 1694
Undertaker 1694
Allie Hensman 1694
Kidnappin’ 1689
Baird’s Build and Loan 1653
Jake Smiley 1651
The Pharmacy 1642
Shotgun 1633
Ramiro Mendoza 1613
Pony Express 1570
Law Dogs 1547
Baird’s and Jake Smiley only make a showing at the bottom of the top 30, but remember that this is across all decks made since the DB went live and they haven’t been available until later saddlebags, this is quite an impressive showing.
So that’s the popular side of things. However, where there’s a “top of” list, there’s also generally a “bottom of”. An all time list is populated by a lot of Frontier Justice cards that doesn’t really provide much insight, as the set has not been out for very long. Nonetheless, we can get a list of the 5 least used core set cards:
Poor Auction. However there are 56 people out there with a guilty little auction secret in their decks J. Good Stiff Drink a makes a surprising appearance at the bottom as does Tin Star. Both of these cards, in the right decks, offer some fantastic options. Could it be that those “right decks” are just too few in number?
And finally, the least used cards in the Frontier Justice environment:
There’s some really interesting data here. Good Stiff Drink, Secret Tunnel and Tin Star are seeing more play, and do not appear at all. More Dudes with abilities that you want to use again, more focus on mobility and cards that mesh well with bounties are all easy to see in the current environment and probably account for this shift. Plasma Drill drops into the bottom 5 probably due to the better gadget options we have available and less people trying to make it work.
All in all, LOTS of cool data to look through here. Feel free to join us on the forum and discuss anything you found to be under or over represented, anything that surprised you, or own up to being one of those Auction fans.
