Another Hearthstone Championship Tour event is in the books, and with such a large field of players, HCT Bangkok gave a great insight into the current tournament meta.
The meta continues to be a tale of two halves. Four classes are relatively level pegging, while another five lag behind.
The lineups themselves weren’t that difficult to work out. The winner, “ShangHigh,” brought Cube Warlock, Secret Mage, Murloc Paladin, and Spiteful Priest—the second most common lineup at the event. The most common simply swapped in Combo Priest, according to analyst Ville Kilkku.
The event was another good demonstration of the strength of the Asia-Pacific region. All but one of the players in the top eight, Simon “Crane” Raunholst, were from the region, despite the attendance of players like Aleksey “ShtanUdachi” Barsukov, David “JustSaiyan” Shan, and Jon “Orange” Westberg. The runner up, “Ryvius,” is the highest point scorer in the APAC region this season with 42 HCT points.
Of the 211 players, 203 brought Warlock and 200 brought Priest. Mage and Paladin were just behind on 126 and 120 respectively, with a big drop back to Hunter and Druid.
Rogue has dropped back from its place in challenging the top four, while Warrior enjoyed a minor resurgence with a slate of Fatigue Warriors in the tournament. Shaman meanwhile continues to be the forgotten class—just three players brought the class to Bangkok.
In terms of deck archetypes, Cube Warlock was the most popular overall followed by Control Warlock and Combo Priest. The strength of Cube Warlock and Combo Priest isn’t that surprising given current deckbuilding trends—most classes have great control tools, but the best decks also include solid damage output to close out a game.
Murloc Paladin was the most popular deck of that class, with Dude Paladin a little behind—and Dude Paladin underperformed.
Despite the clas being underrepresented, Spell Hunter was among the most popular archetypes. Unlike Warlock and Priest, that suggests Hunter’s best deck is pretty much universally agreed upon. Only four players that brought Hunter didn’t bring the spell variant.
With Bangkok over with, attention turns to Oslo for the next HCT tour stop this coming weekend.
Stats via kilkku.com
