We have two separate sets of affiliation stats from Longshanks today (December 10th): first the total number of games in events played by every faction and then only from rated singles events from September 18th until today. Why that date? Because it includes the card rotation and last Banned and Restricted update. Everything before that is useless information for today's meta. Be sure to set those settings right if you research stats for yourself. Seeing that Wakanda and Guardians were super strong in January 24 with unnerfed CGR and Advanced RnD isn't giving you particularly useful information for todays game.
Total Games
Emma runs this game supreme but her play numbers dropped off a bit. She does win an incredible 60% of her games though. There's no way to play leaderless HFC so those are simply put in wrong in LS.
Who does top Emma? Asgard's best leader in Jane Foster. Since the new box dropped everyone, their mother, their dog and their mothers dog have picked up playing Asgard and they were quite successful overall with it. Loki reaching 59% with almost 1000 games alone means there might be a slight problem here. I think there should be a rule that you have to suffer through at least 20 games without the new box with Asgard before you are allowed to play with them like the rest of us long time Asgard players had to. 😁
And then we have Inhumans who are absolutely contestantly in the top 3 or at the very least top 5 but still everyone is surprised to see them there. They can only go up with their official new members coming soon and their, for me, honorary new members in Wrecking Crew and Abomination.
SHIELD takes #6 mostly on the back of Namor and the Invaders. IIM has fallen off on popularity immensely but even he stays above 50%.
Somehow Convocation makes the top 5 here. I think this is just a matter of good, experienced players staying with the faction after the heavy nerfs and the endless dry spell of no new releases. Because while the results are good the number of games is rather low.
Midnight Sons, who I piloted to a 2:1 in a local tournament I ran recently with this roster:
Make it to 6th place and will only get better with the next release which introduces a new leadership. They are also the coolest characters in Marvel which is a boon too 😉 Which does explain their high number of games.
Speaking of high number of games: Apocalypse is insanely popular with far over 1000 games played in the short amount of time he's been out. And 53% win rate is nothing to sneeze at either.
Web Warriors have taken a (relative) hit to they number of games with "only" 889. Miles still does well but his numbers have been higher in the past. The rotation of Mission Objective and the restriction of Fall Back might've hurt the Spiders a bit more than anticipated.
Malekith appears to be back with a vengeance. And Red Skull 3 puts out rock solid numbers too. Red Skull 1 and Sin tank the affiliation stats down overall. They'd be way higher without those to leaders on the stat block.
Rounding out the top 10 is the Criminal Syndicate which is back to Kingpin being the most used and most successful leader with MODOK being the most successful alternative. With Simon 'Vodkablitz' Jarry (who I had the absolute pleasure of meeting at WTC) firmly back on X-Men noone seems to really have been able to make Klaw work.
M'Baku is the clear cut best leader for Wakanda and the most used, too.
Legion of the Lost makes it's debut on one of these lists with a perfect 50/50.
Guardians fall (minimally) under the 50% mark (unimaginable in January after LVO). They'll get help soon when a personal favourite character of mine in Nova will release (along Yondu) you can count on me contributing to their number of games played quite a lot in 2025 (if that's good for their win rate is a different question 😁).
X-Men are popular as they always are and Xavier and especially Cyclops keep dragging the affiliation down in win rate that would be a top 3 contender if Storm was the only leader here.
Dormammu makes top 15 with just slightly under 50% which is very interesting. He has the least games played on the list so far however.
Red Skull 2 Hydra remains above 50% while Strucker is almost as popular but struggles to win a lot more. Angus of the excellent Rapid Fire podcast was nice enough to answer my question about why he sometimes runs the Zemo leadership even after the rotation and if I understood it correctly it's basically to bring the models he wants to bring at specific threat levels where he can't fit in Red Skull 2 so that he still has a leadership even if it isn't core to the game plan (which was shooting people from a bubble). His list was from WTC and he didn't have Zemo 1 available which also contributed to it.
Thralls are pretty popular out of the gate but haven't found their stride as well as some other new releases. I don't think the strength here lies in the actual leadership which doesn't strike me as suuuper great but basically the Hellfire effect of bringing everything you want to in your list with a very good 5 threat leader. Interestingly though he sits lowest on the ranking of the four affiliation that play like this.
New Mutants get in more games than I would've expected as they kind of feel like an unfinished affiliation at this point. The leadership is pretty cool but the list of characters is just very short at the moment.
Weapon X does OK overall where untypically Logan is by a large margin more successful than X-23.
Oh how do my beloved Spider-Foes have fallen from grace. They got a big boon out of their new 4 character box but it doesn't seem to have lasted. Goblin, while being played less then half the time does sit well above the 50% mark interestingly enough.
Avengers are super popular as to be expected and Sam shows top 3 numbers in win rate as usual but is dragged down by both Steve Rogers being well under 50% and Hulkbuster not making a particularly strong case to have Avengers as one of your options in Timeline 2025 (where he's the only available Avengers leader).
Defenders sitting here near the bottom with almost a thousand games played is very surprising. There's some players who enjoy a lot of success with them and the model quality in the affiliation is extremely high but the community at large doesn't appear to be able to make it work on a consistent basis.
Black Order is in a rough spot. It is dominated by a broken and also boring model and has exactly one plan. There's cool models in the affi but you just run out of points too quickly to bring them. I'd love to see a full Thanos rework that brings him more in line with the design space of Apocalypse where a lot of his power stems from the leadership.
The good news for Brotherhood is: help is on the way. Because it looks grim for one of the historically most played factions in the game. Player numbers dropped significantly and the win rate is pretty terrible too. Especially for Magneto.
X-Force somehow can't get out of the cellar despite having a strong roster. I don't really know what the problem is for them.
A-Force on the other hand have a very obvious problem in She-Hulk being made out of paper.
87 people had some reason to play unaffiliated but mostly got burnt for their decision. It's especially weird seeing as there's now four affiliations that can include anyone you want.
And finally Sentinels remain a none affiliation. The least number of games get by far the worst win rate, too. Nimrod safe us all!
Rated singles events only
Hellfire remains at the top which isn't too surprising as they aren't super popular for team events anyway.
Convocation climbing all the way to #2 is nothing I would've expected here.
Asgard remains very good though here Loki and Jane switch places.
SHIELD under Namor is doing great in singles still which nets #4 on the list even though Fury and Stark are below 50% here.
Dormammu makes a very unexpected top 5 appearance.
Inhumans are knocked out of the top 5 but just barely and keep on showing they need to be taken more seriously.
Sons were very successful in rated singles as well as in all games.
Web Warriors are also in the top 10 but not nearly as close to the top as they used to be.
Wakanda sneaks into the top 10 on the back of mostly M'Baku.
Surprisingly Apoc appears to have only about half of his games being in rated singles but he still did well in them.
Malektih is even better for Cabal in this column but Red Skull 3 gets in consistent wins for the faction, too.
Guardians find themselves on the right side of the 50% line in rated singles, as do New Mutants and Green Goblin Spider-Foes have top tier numbers. WTC had a lot of Foes games which mostly went bad so it's a big help for them to exclude that data.
LotL does a bit worse in rated while in Hydra Strucker does better and Red Skull 2 untypically worse.
Same picture as always with X-Men only that Storm doesn't have enough games to carry the other two here into a better overall position.
Unaffiliated beats out a lot of affiliation on this list which just blows my mind a bit.
Thralls does struggle a bit here, too. Once again being the worst of the 4 everyone is on affiliations.
Black Order is the same and Defenders as well.
The cellar looks pretty familiar even though they change places a bit here.
No switching places for Sentinels though.
That's it for today. Next up: end of the year character stats
Cheers from Germany 🍻
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