Card Meta Analysis through Doomtown Deck Builder Analytics

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:

Factions

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:

Factions

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:

Top 12 cards

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:

Top 10 cards post FJ

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:

Bottom 5 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:

Bottom 10 post FJ

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.

 

5 Likes

Is there a way to see most ant least used actions?

1 Like

To me, this indicates simply that DR is the most flexible of the new homes. Each of the others have specific requirements of the deck they’re in to be useful in terms of required keywords or skills. DR doesn’t have this handicap.

This post implies that it includes data from unpublished decks, but doesn’t say so for sure. Is that so?

At any rate, it’s interesting data. Personally, I’d be far more interested in the raw data. Any chance that could be made available?

Some of the analysis choices here are interesting for trivia purposes, but don’t really tell us that much. Top 30 used cards, for example, is sprinkled with some popular actions and drifters, but is absolutely littered with deeds, simply because those are the cards with the fewest alternatives – the two 8 value deeds are top two, naturally. Conversely, it’s completely unsurprising that only one factioned dude (Allie, who has 0 influence) made the list.

To confirm, this data reflects which cards showed up in a deck as a simple yes/no, not quantities? It seems so from the write-up.

This also makes me wish there were a way to flag decks as competitive, casual, trick, etc; as well as to indicate if and how well they performed competitively in a way that would show up in the data. It’s impossible to tell why cards are seeing play, or which cards are showing up in decks that perform well and by the same token, which cards get played in decks that perform poorly. Of course, even if such tools were available, that doesn’t mean they’d actually get used by the person inputting the deck. :smile:

Great job! I will own up for trying auction.

1 Like

OMG DATA PORN!!
I love this! Thank you for making this available @Whizzwang :slight_smile:

So what happened to the other 3326 decks?

I was fascinated to see that Eustace True is the least used dude. He’s a base set card, why doesn’t he show up in the bottom 5 base cards?

2 Likes

Whenever a deck is created it is given a unique ID number so we can easily see how many decks have been created. The missing decks have been deleted by their creators.

I’m going to poke Platy for some more data once NTB has been out for a couple of weeks so we can look at any shifts. I should have a load of new data to share then.

2 Likes

Apparently I am in the minority of people that do not like running Jake Smiley.

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That’s probably because you’re playing Law Dogs only, and you need real influence to issue warrants :wink:

1 Like

That, and I tend to prefer real influence for board control. Jake is a “not lose” mechanism, which is rather boring from a play-by-play standpoint. He can’t run over and steal my opponent’s Circle M for instance :slight_smile:

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Well, he can, but only in Sundown :wink: