Top50 Nod Decks in May – a more diverse meta, but little air presence

[Edit: Find the GDI version here]

A month has passed since my last analysis of the Nod Top 50. Here's finally the new one: What did the Top 50 Nod players in Rivals play so far in the May 2019 season? For info on the methodology used, please check the link above. For the full list of the Top 50 decks, click here.

How to read the table:

• "Frequency All Decks" is the share of Decks that run this unit/commander
• "ppt Δ vs Apr 19" is the change in frequency to the last analysis
• "Δ vs average winrate" is how the winrate decks utilizing this unit/commander deviates from the average (e.g. Artillery decks have a 11 ppt higher winrate)
• "Δ vs average levels" is how the levels of decks utilizing this unit/commander deviate from average (e.g. the 5 Inferno decks on average are just L12.3, 0.7 below the L13.0 total average)

• Top 50 decks on average were L13, up from L12.6 a month ago
• Six players in the Top 50 have decks below L12. All of them run Wheels and Lasers, 4 run Seth and 2 Oxanna
• VictorBansemer with a Stealth Tank / Inferno deck with Seth (interesting, as often Oxanna seems to be an auto-pick for Inferno users)
• Lopatka with a Seth – Laser – Wheel, Chuggy, Tank, Stealth Tank – Banshee deck
• Cheshire with the standard 2-3-1 Aggro deck with Militant and Seth
• r3bb with one of the four remaining Avatar decks, showing that the Avatar might not be completely useless even after the series of hefty nerfs
• marckill with a variation of the 2-3-1 Aggro deck that replaces Scorpion Tank with Stealth Tank
• HayprO with a Giga deck!
• The 11 of the highest-levelled decks (L14+)represent 33% of the sample size in this analysis, indicating that you will meet the higher-level decks a bit more often than the others when you play against Top 50 players. Reasons for this might include:
• It's more fun to play with higher-level decks
• If you really love Rivals, you both are likely to play more and are likely to invest more money into it

Units more used compared to April:

• Bikes +18 ppt – after various decks had replaced it with the Stealth Tank, Bikes are back to be the 2nd most used unit. A key driver for this is the popularity of drones, to which it's the only cheap hard counter. Dealing with only Stealth Tanks and Banshees against Drones is very expensive, and Lasers are pretty slow.  Also, I feel more players learned to micro bikes well e.g. vs the Pitbull.
• Flame Troopers +16 ppt – possibly a reaction to Mutant Marauders, who have such high health that whilst Militants still hard-counter them, they take a lot of time to die. 
• Artillery +10 ppt – no surprise after the recent huge buffs. And even the win rates look very strong, 
• Seth +10 ppt – to me, it seems like a mix of two reasons: Less prevalence of "Oxanna is awesome" decks like Avatar, and the realization of more players that Seth seems a bit stronger in the 2-3-1- Nod Aggro deck, at least in most situations that the current meta brings up.
• Stealth Tank +8 ppt – this all-rounder stays popular. It's a great counter for air units and some specialist vehicles (e.g. Giga, Artillery), and can even work in more conventional situations, taking out Pitbulls, Bikes, damaged Tanks, helping to take down APCs etc.
• Mutant Marauders + 8 ppt – got a huge buff, and more players figuring out the usefulness especially in combination with Chem buggy, also thanks to 13lade's videos

Units less used than in May:

• Militant -22 ppt – both the twin of the increase in Flame Trooper usage, and the result of fewer tech decks (e.g. Avatar) that make the cheap Militant especially attractive to save money for the Tech switch
• Oxanna -14 ppt – see Seth and Avatar; but it's still the most used commander, as it is favored by Tech players, and still works with Aggro and Inferno decks
• Scorpion Tank -12 ppt – more decks don't have space for it (Stealth tank or Giga) or the Mutant Marauders taking it's role
• Avatar -10 ppt – a result from the series of Nerfs
• Banshee -10 ppt – this is a result of a wider range of viable decks at top tier, so can be seen as a positive thing. The Banshee is still strong, but Nod players see more options without it, e.g. through Mutant Marauders

The following table shows the # of decks that have a certain # of units in the deck. For example, 38 decks have excatly 2 infantry units, and 21 decks have 0 air units. If we look a bit deeper, we find that 24 decks have exactly 2 inantry, 2 vehicles and 1 air unit. You could argue that whilst there are a number of viable meta decks in a number of variants, the structural diversity of Nod play is relatively low. 

Especially the lack of decks that utilize at least 2 air units is extreme. Inferno decks are not using Phantom anymore, and Laser Drones and Venom don't seem viable enough. So usually, it's no air or the Banshee.

Comparison with the "Unit Tiers" from Excoundrel, 13lade and StrikerVX

Just today, Excoundrel released a great video, discussing all units and commanders of both factions together with top player 13lade (also check out my recent interview with 13lade), and sorting them into "Tiers", with "S" being the top tier, and then A-D tiering the units from better to worse. I highly recommend to watch this video, so why not just embed it here:

Below, you can find a table where I combined this tiering info with the data from the Top 50 Nod decks. I removed the "unit type" info, as I re-sorted the units by the tier from the video above.

What's interesting is that just from the numbers, you could argue that Artillery and Inferno were under--estimated by 13lade in his tiering. But there's two important thoughts I have on this:

1. The numbers can "lie". E.g. the Inferno and Artillery players in the Top 50 could just be more talented than the average, driving up the winrates of these units without them needing to be particularly strong.
2. 13lade argues from the perspective of a top-tier player. It might well be that he struggles less with certain units like Artillery and Inferno, which can be tricky to deal with if you have a bit less skill and/or experience.

Hope you enjoyed this read. If yes, please upvote this Reddit thread so other players also see it. Stay tuned for the GDI version of this, which will arrive shortly!