After the Ashes (of my vacation)

Hey all, we’re back this week a bit later than usual. I was out of the country for vacation for a bit, and as many of you know, catching up on work post vacation always seems to be a real beast. The dashboard has been updated for the new meta and you may notice now that the pre and post suspension eras of the ASH meta have their own pages. We’re in a brave new world, so to speak, and it made sense to split the tracking for the post Cad era. This article is also a bit more brief than usual due to aforementioned vacation and work catchup.

Meta Health

T8 concentration dropped from Moderate (11.09) to Healthy (5.91) in the first weekend without Cad. That seems like a pretty good indication that the meta is much healthier without him and that we might be on to something with the current HHI bands. I’ll keep an eye on this and we can keep tuning. 

Krennic Didn’t Just Inherit the Top Spot, He Ran Away With It

Only five archetypes clear the sample floor this week since we just don’t have many results yet in this era of the meta, which means Field appearances of 50 or more and 3 or more Top 8s. That’s expected for a first week under a brand new baseline. Here’s Week 6, in order by Bounty Rating:

Krennic hits a perfect 100 on both Power and Frequency. Beyond the composite score, he holds the single highest win rate and the single highest field share among the five qualifiers outright. He picked up 11.7% of the week’s field and turned that into 21.7% of all its event wins, 5 of 23. Our earlier hypothetical projections seemed to indicate that Krennic might be the top deck afterward, though the most recent said maybe Dedra, but we can see now which way that shook out. 

He’s Not Untouchable, Though

Krennic is missing out on being the top dog on two of the four lenses, however, so let’s take a look at where he’s showing some weakness. Ahsoka Tano’s raw Field to Top 8 APR is +22.1%, actually the best of the five qualifiers, edging out Krennic’s own +20.3%. And Luke Skywalker (JTL)’s Top 8 to Win APR is +53.0%, also the best of the five, well clear of Krennic’s +28.4%. Krennic’s S1-APR and S2-APR scores of 96.0 and 76.8 on the Bounty Rating table come from sitting close to those two peaks, but not holding either one outright. Granted, he wins on the composite because he’s strong everywhere, but currently not as strong as Cad had been.

That lines up with the matchup data too. Ahsoka, the archetype with the best raw entry number, also sits at 53% into Krennic on a real 132-game sample, a genuine if modest edge, the only one of the four qualifiers with anything positive there. Two different numbers, entry-stage APR and head-to-head win rate, landing on the same answer for who’s actually closest to him. She’s the early answer, for whatever an early answer is worth after one week.

Luke Skywalker (JTL) is worth a second look too, for a different reason. His S1 is negative, -14.0%, while his S2 sits at +53.0%, the best closing number of anyone this week. That’s a real split: his field presence isn’t converting into Top 8s as efficiently as people who do make Top 8 are converting into wins. And Darth Maul’s raw win rate, 49.5%, is technically underwater despite solid S1 and S2 numbers. That said, the same old small sample caveats apply everywhere this week.

The Deck That Was Supposed to Be Here

Here’s the twist. Sure, Dedra Meero / Colossus spent Weeks 4 and 5 as the clearest challenger on the board, cracking the real Bounty Rating top two and topping the no-Cad-Bane hypothetical outright the week before the suspension landed. This week, with Cad Bane actually gone and a level field to prove it on, she’s sitting at 33 field entries and 3 Top 8s. She’s not currently clearing our sample floor to get in the real picture yet, so we’ll see what another week of data does to her performance. 

Worth Watching

There’s a few other archetypes current below the sample floor worth flagging before they potentially matter, and their two-stage APR numbers are more specific than raw Top 8 counts would suggest. The Mandalorian posts a strong +52.8% S1 on just 27 field entries, a particularly elite number for that stage even if the sample’s tiny, but his S2 sits negative at -11.4%, showing up but not closing. Mother Talzin’s profile looks similar in shape: +18.3% S1 against a rough -39.5% S2. Boba Fett / Lake Country is flat rather than strong on entry, +1.5% S1, and considerably worse on the close, -41.8% S2, continuing the same pattern that has been dogging him for some time now. Lando Calrissian runs the opposite split, a weak -19.3% S1 paired with a big +79.6% S2, the same show-up-light-but-close-well split he’s been on in the ASH era. 

There you have it. One week without Cad, and I’m eager to see where we go from here.