Masters & Tiberium Map pools in the December season

I recently recommended the devs to change and expand the Masters map pool. I still think that an expansion would be good, as 5 maps is not much considering that many players spend 90%+ of each season in Masters League.

Yet, there still has been a big improvement thanks to the gods of random. Every month, the maps in Tiberium and Masters league are set afresh by random. And I think that especially the Masters map pool improved a lot. Let's have a look!

Masters Map Pool

This season's masters map pool is much more balanced. And 3 of the 5 are actually maps I had recommended myself.

• Open Water and Rorschach are the two most popular map choices in tournaments, and are good choices from the "connected 3-pad" map options
• Hot Zone is the single 2-pad map. 28% of the total map pool are 2-pad, so having 1 of 5 is much better than last season, where it was 3 of 5.
• Open Praerie is a very good disconnected 3-pad map in my view. It has an interesting Tiberium layout, and a "circular" pathing. It's pretty good for air units due to the 2 rocks in the middle.
• Peaks and Valleys is probably not the most loved map, but it's a good 5th map that is qite different from the others.

Tiberium Map Pool

Personally, I also like the Tiberium Map pool this month, but it feels a little less balanced. Of the 8 maps, there's just a single 2-pad map, and no fully connected 3-pad map.

• Three Lanes and Slashed Fields are representants of the "classic" type of 3-pad map that you also see in a number of events. 
• Stonewall, which is good for mobile decks, Peaks and Valleys and Frozen Road bring the number of disconnected 3-pad maps to 5 of 8.
• Peaks and Valleys and Hot Zone are shared with the Masters Map Pool
• The Needle and Twin Pillars are two semi-connected 3-pad maps. The Needle feels very balanced, and I heard a number of people complain about Twin Pillars in the past.

Traditionally, the disconnected 3-pad maps would have been seen as good for Nod aggro. Yet, quite some maps are also decent for dual harvester Tech, and the Razorback threatens to make life hard for Nod aggro. So it remains to be seen what the impact of the maps on the meta game will be. My gut feeling is that the map pool is diverse enough that no particular type of play is grossly advantaged.