Nod Air took off this Summer – Top 50 Deck Analysis July 2019

Welcome to the monthly Rivals meta analysis: What units and commanders do the top 50 players in the ladder play? This time, I released GDI and Nod data at the same time, you can find the GDI version here.

• Please find the raw data here, incl. a full list of the decks including nicknames, if you want to find a player who plays a certain unit or deck.
• Average deck level went up from 13.4 to 13.6, and there's 6 full-L15 decks in the top 50
• 2.0 infantry (-0.1), 1.8 vehicles (=), 1.6 air (+0.3) and 0.5 (-0.1) tech units make up the average deck (changes to last month in brackets)

Now to the main data, the unit frequency. How to read the table below:

• "Frequency" is the share of Decks that run this unit or commander. First, the frequency in % over last 4 months is shown. Then, a bar chart visualizes the June frequency. Third, there is a small line chart that shows the trend over the last 4 months.
• "Δ vs average winrate" is how the winrate decks utilizing this unit/commander deviates from the average (e.g. Inferno decks had a 10 percentage points higher winrate than the average winrate)
• "Δ vs average levels" is how the levels of decks utilizing this unit/commander deviate from average (e.g. the Avatar users used had a 0.9 higher deck level than the average level)

Observations:

• Winners
• Scavengers made a strong entry now after people levelled them up. 36% of all dekcs use them. And this is despite the recent nerf
• Militant usage is at an all-time high, coinciding with the decline of wheels and increase of air usage
• Laser Drones, after their hefty buff, unsurprisingly went up a ton from 4% to 32%
• Venom the same, from 15% to 40% after being buffed. 
• Phantom also jumped from 11% to 30% and is popular in Artillery decks, Inferno-decks and and in 3-air decks
• Artillery, despite it's nerfs, grew in popularity -- usually as the single tech unit (aka "Tech splash")
• Jade became more popular with a jump to 22% of decks. 9 of the 11 Jade decks utilize the Laser Drone. This could help explain the growth of Jade: First, Jade is an expensive commander so benefits from a cheap efficient unit from a different building that the opponent has to counter. Second, they can relatively easily get to opponent's base to add some chipping damange and get vision for the Jade missile
• Losers
• Lasers dropped from 83% to 56%. Because who would have both lasers and Scavengers in their deck?
• Wheels fell from 66% to 32%, mirroring the raise in venom and the general replacement of Vehicles with Air in many Nod decks
• Scorpion tanks continued their decline from 88% in March to now 42%. This is mostly due to the current air meta, e.g. Laser drones are a strong counter to them
• Marauders declined from 21% to 8% and Chem Buggies from 21% to 14%, as the "Marauder Chuggy" combo fell a bit out of the meta

Unit Type Distribution

This chart shows how many decks contain how many units from which building. 

• Nearly all decks contain some infantry, most of them 2
• Vehicles are the most common building type to have 3 units in a deck
• Air play sees most diversity from 0 to 3
• There's about a third of unit with at least one tech unit

Click here to switch to the GDI analysis