Ever since we first launched HSReplay.net, we’ve been really excited with all of the amazing members of the Hearthstone community who have reached out to us to collaborate on doing analysis on Hearthstone replays.

This week, we’ve partnered up with our friends at Windrush.io who are masters at doing data visualization on the web. In honor of having their great data visualization skills available to us, we decided it was time for us to take a crack at visualizing the standard ranked ladder. We were curious to see if we could visualize how the metagame on ranked ladder changes over time.

HSReplay.net gets several hundred thousand replays uploaded to it every day. Since we have that much data, we decided to identify the highest win rate decks for each day during the period from October 11th through October 25th, plot them by % win rate on the Y-Axis and popularity (number of matches played) on the X-Axis, and then animate how each deck changes over time.

We specifically looked at the standard ranked ladder from rank 15 through Legend and only display decks on the days when they had at least 100 wins. This helps us to filter out unusual decks which might have an artificially high win-rate due to only being played a handful of times that day.

The lines that divide the grid represent the 50% line for both win rate and popularity. They split the grid clockwise into four quadrants:

• Dark Horse Decks (Quadrant I) - These are high performing but relatively unknown deck lists.
• Staple Decks (Quadrant II) - These are the high performing popular decks that everyone is used to encountering on the ladder.
• Lemming Decks (Quadrant II) - These are decks that are popular but lose more often then they win. If you’re playing one of these, you’re not going to do very well unless you are a substantially above average player.
• Underperforming Decks (Quadrant IV) - These decks don’t perform well and are not commonly played.

Dark Horse Decks	Staple Decks
Underperforming Decks	Lemming Decks

Finally, we also added an option to see the same data but visualized by class. We hope that you enjoy the visualization, and let us know if you’d like to see more like this by tweeting at @HSReplayNet and joining us on the /r/hsreplay subreddit!

See if you can find the Violet Illusionist “Mill Variant” Control Warrior. Also, where the heck is that unicorn priest that Ben Brode promised us?!

We’ll see you after BlizzCon for more stats!

Andrew