ASH Season Week 2: The Ashes Are Heating Up

Ok, we’re back at it with a second week of ASH PQ data to add to what we’ve had so far and while some trends are accelerating in directions we’d expect, the data doesn’t quite bear out all of the hyperbolic claims we sometimes make. We’re up to 28 winners and the ball is just getting rolling before Sectors start hitting.

Starting with the note again: we’re working with data from SWUMetaStats.net, which watches a slightly different slate of tournaments than other trackers, so numbers you hear elsewhere won’t always be exact matches. Win rates here and on the Meta Dashboard are per-game, not match win rates, so factor that in too. APR figures also stay cumulative rather than resetting each week, trading a little responsiveness for not overreacting to single-week noise. The trendlines are particularly worth a look this week, now that there’s enough history for them to mean something.

The Elephant (Rancor?) In the Room

Let’s look at a variety of Cad Bane specific figures to examine the health of the meta currently.

Cad/Blue30’s field share has gone from 8.1% (LCQ) to 8.3% (Galactic Open) to 10.2% (Galactic Championship) to 11.0% (Week 1) to 12.4% now, a real climb, but a gradual one. Top 8 share tells a sharper story: 15.2% to 16.7% to 19.4% to 24.4% to 26.1%, nearly doubling across five tracked periods, climbing considerably faster than his field share has. He’s not just showing up more. He’s turning appearances into Top 8 at a rate that’s outpaced his own popularity all season — though as it turns out, that’s not quite the same question as whether he’s converting efficiently, which is where this gets more interesting below.

It’s worthing noting that Cad hasn’t actually had the top field share presence all the way across the board. Darth Vader / Yellow30 held the top field share spot at the LCQ. Boba Fett / Lake Country held it at the Galactic Open. Cad Bane has only owned the number one spot in both field and Top 8 share since the actual Galactic Championship, which is a genuine rise, of course, proving out in numbers the impression that various competitive players have been feeling for a while now. Part of that rise looks like real development work too. A couple of his rougher matchups right after Galactics have quietly gotten fixed over the following weeks, which we’ll get into below. His Top 8 share now carries a Strong badge on the dashboard’s leader readout too, one tier up from last week — a separate reading from the HHI above, tracking just the leading archetype’s own share, but telling the same story from a different angle. (But that’s part of an update to the Meta Dashboard itself, which I swear we’ll get to soon too.)

APR Sharpens Some Distinctions

I know I harp on this, but here’s a place where we can take a look at Adjusted Performance Rate (APR) and illustrate how it’s useful. Field share and Top 8 share are both just percentages of a growing population, but APR asks the question: is this archetype outperforming what its own share at each stage would predict? That can move in a completely different direction from the raw shares even while the raw shares look great, and for Cad Bane, this week, it has.

The closing number matters most here. Top 8 to Win APR has fallen almost every period since the LCQ, and Week 2’s +27.8% is by far the lowest of the season. That’s not a contradiction of his raw win total climbing (1, 1, 2, 5, 10 across those five periods) or his win rate ticking up too. It’s the properly normalized version of the exact question everyone’s been asking about Cad. His win total is growing, but not as fast as his Top 8 presence, and that gap’s been widening for weeks.

That said, the entry side complicates the “still accelerating” framing above too. Field to Top 8 APR hit its season high in Week 1 at +92.6%, then cooled to +82.8% this week — still strong relative to where the season started, but a real step down, and in the same direction as the closing number rather than the opposite.

When looking at these numbers, do take the LCQ to Galactic Open to Galactic Championship progression with a grain of salt as I mentioned before. We’re treating these as progressive events for sanity of tracking, but but it didn’t quite work that way in real life and of course the selected player pool of the GC does swing a certain direction as well. So, I’d personally place the greatest interest in the GC, Wk1, Wk2 arc and see how those trends are moving. In this case, we’re seeing a real drop in T8 to Win and a bit of fluctuation in Field to T8. The deck is certainly doing better than most in the Field, but other decks seem to be catching up once they hit the Top 8. 

I know I’m kicking the can down the road here, but I’m not quite ready to make the Suspension call yet. Give me at least one Sector weekend to add to this to see if that continues to bear out. Ok, really, it needs to be two since they’re back to back this time around. It’s hard to argue with that that big of an influx of data at that point and I think most of us can agree that with the amount of prep and planning that goes into attending events of that size that it’s probably for the best not to completely upend everyone’s deck choices right before them. And that’s not even counting the knock on monetary effects.

What the Trendlines Are Actually Showing

Ok, this is the part I’m most excited about, because these are stats we’ve been calculating for a while now, but haven’t done much with. LIke I mentioned before, Avg Matchup Win Rate is just the flat average you’d expect if you sat down against a truly random opponent. On the other hand, Field Weighted Matchup Equity weights those win rates by what percentage of the field those decks are, so if Cad is the most populous deck in the meta and you have a great win rate against Cad, your FWME goes up since you’re more likely to see it, right? These two help give you some insight into your likely tournament execution. And now we finally have enough snapshots for the Avg Matchup WR and FWME to form actual trendlines, which helps us see how the meta is adapting as decks rise and fall. A couple of things jumped out immediately.

Cad Bane’s average matchup win rate was extremely strong through all three Galactic Championship Weekend events, sitting flat at 68.1% across LCQ, the Open, and the Championship itself. Then there’s a dip in Week 1 down to 63.8%, and now it’s pulling back upward in Week 2 to 65.5%. A strong open, a slight stumble, and a solid recovery. But even with the stumble, he remains very favored in almost any matchup.

Vader’s trendline is the one that actually surprised me. His overall Avg Matchup WR has been climbing all season, 50.2% through GC Weekend up to 52.5% now. His FWME, the field-weighted number, tells the opposite story on the other hand — it fell between the Championship (52.6%) and Week 1 (49.0%) and stayed down. Put plainly: the decks we’re seeing most of right now appear to be actively teching against Vader and space in general, and it’s paying off, since his field-weighted number is the one suffering even while his raw matchup quality climbs. My read is that’s the flip side of a lot of “random” rogue decks teching hard against other things (re: Cad)  and losing some capability against Vader along the way.

In a similar vein, Krennic is a good example of why FWME matters as a gut check on a raw win rate. He had an 85% win rate into Ahsoka Tano this week which is a very strong number, but is still in the red against Cad Bane specifically. An average win rate can look great while being carried by a couple of free matchups rather than real strength against the field it has to beat.

The Coinflip That Wasn’t Quite Even

Sure, last week’s most interesting number was Lando’s 61.7% into Cad Bane, but it was on a thin sample, so it’s worth revisiting now that the sample has more than tripled. Lando sits at 54.9% into Cad Bane this week. Still positive and still the best real number on the board against him, but it regressed the way small samples usually do once more data shows up. That’s not a knock on the read, it’s exactly the kind of thing the “small sample” flag was there for. 

Boba Fett / Lake Country is still parked almost exactly on a coinflip, 49.7% into Cad Bane on a much deeper sample now. Everyone else remains solidly unfavored: Ahsoka at 46.5%, Luke Skywalker / Data Vault at 46.2%, Krennic at 41.9%, and Vader as the roughest of the bunch at 42.1%.

That last one’s worth a second look, because Vader actually broke through this week with two new event wins after posting zero in Week 1. So did Luke Skywalker / Data Vault, with three. Both were decks I flagged last week as having a quietly decent matchup spread despite an empty wins column, and both cashed that in this week. I think that’s a good sign the FWME read was onto something real rather than noise.

The Rest of the Board

The Mandalorian, this season’s little workhorse, picked up his second win, a surprising event given his matchup spread is still below breakeven per FWME. He’s picked up two wins across two weeks now, which still looks more like bracket-luck than proven answer. Krennic picked up his first win too, on the back of a field-wide matchup profile that’s been solid all along even while his Cad Bane matchup stayed rough.

Ahsoka Tano lost almost a full point of field share, the steepest drop in the top ten, though she picked up her first win to offset it a little. Boba Fett / Lake Country bled about half a point too, and Vader lost a third of a point on top of a rough week by win rate, a slide now two weeks running. The field is fragmenting in a bunch of directions at once, not just losing ground to Cad Bane..

Here’s a smaller storyline heading into Sectors, though. Piett picked up wins on both Red and Blue builds, part of a broader push toward capital-ship-heavy strategies as a credible way to play over Cad Bane rather than under him. Lets keep an eye on this one moving forward.

There you have it. Two weeks in, and the story’s gotten more complicated in the right way. Cad Bane’s raw volume and matchup quality both keep climbing, and he took the top spot from two different decks along the way rather than simply always holding it. But the properly normalized numbers say his edge per Top 8 trip has been cooling for weeks. Whether Week 3 shows the raw numbers catching down, or vice versa, is the actual open question now. Berlin and Indianapolis are next, neither likely to feature a suspension before it starts. 

Dashboard Updates

A few notes on what’s new behind the numbers, for anyone poking around the Meta Dashboard directly. The biggest additions are a Cut Efficiency Leaders bar chart and a Top 8 Distribution donut, both new to that row. The Direct Matchup panel now shows the game count behind every head-to-head number, so you can tell at a glance whether a matchup’s backed by 500 games or 15. The Spotlight section picked up a third trend chart too, tracking Avg Matchup WR and FWME over time, exactly what made the section above possible.These new trendlines are something I’m pretty excited about, and I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to map it out that way before.

When we first stated showing HHI as a possible measure for meta health, I mentioned that the bands we were working with were kind of a gut feeling cutoff and might be recalibrated in the future and I think it’s time they got recalibrated. The old thresholds were borrowed loosely from antitrust convention and basically never left “Open” no matter what the metagame was doing. The new bands are tighter, grounded in an effective-number-of-archetypes framing instead, and we’ve also split Field level HHI and Top HHI, much like APR, in order to give clearer perspective. Top 8 HHI now reads “Moderate” rather than “Open,” which lines up a lot better with what the eye test’s been saying for a couple weeks.