The Road to Worlds: Regionals Wrap-Up, Second Edition (and Dilemma Popularity)

by Lucas Thompson, Ambassador

8th July 2016

The Sample

I used the top 3 dilemma piles of every standard constructed regional with 8 or more people, the top 2 of every regional with 6-7 people, and the winning dilemma pile of every regional that had 4-5 attendees, for a total of 51 dilemma piles reviewed. I tallied both the total number of appearances of each dilemma in those piles, as well as the number of decks each dilemma appeared in.

The Data

The following charts express the percentage of those 51 piles that included each listed dilemma at least once. That way, having three All-Consuming Evils in every consume pile won't make it look like such piles are more common than they really are.

The next charts compare this year's data to the data from the last five years. I only used the top 40 duals, and the top 20 planet and space dilemmas here for brevity.

Analysis

This is the first time in the history of this project that we've had a #1 that isn't Hard Time or An Issue of Trust (even if it is tied with Hard Time). We've had some other second place contenders (Pitching In, Secret Identity), but Moral Choice has never even been one of those. It has certainly been climbing steadily due to popular Relativity and TOS builds, but I would definitely classify its performance this year as a spike. That 5 Space Voyager has been dominant in an environment where winners are using 2-3 Moral Choices in ~80% of their dilemma piles is troublesome. It has been dominant through a 341% increase in Distress Call - a dilemma that is mediocre to terrible outside of Unfair Comparison piles against every other deck - when there was only one Unfair Comparison pile in the sample.

Chula Piles have died down a bit - I wouldn't say it is because they are any worse against the top decks, I suspect this change is largely due to the novelty of that dilemma pile wearing off. With the fading of those piles many of the other Chula dilemmas have seen a decline, but interestingly not The Chandra. I'm not sure why that is, since it is not great against the New Starfleet builds, and not any better than Intimidation against 5 Space Voyager. Perhaps people just remembered how useful it was when they were playing all those Chula piles last year, or maybe they just wanted an excuse to use their 2015 Regional promo foils. They do look pretty sweet.

I am surprised not to see an increase in Unfair Comparison, Kill, or Legacy piles to compensate for the drop in Chula usage. My hypothesis last year is the reason for the drop in usage of those other niche piles is that certain types of players prefer to use atypical piles, and that those players had all flocked to Chula. It could just be that niche piles just aren't doing that well, though I personally have experienced some minor success with Unfair Comparison recently so I would count myself as biased against that explanation.

The pro-interrupt suite from Lower Decks has made a good showing, especially considering how interrupt-heavy several of the new competitive decks (New Dominion, 5 Space Voyager) can be. I'd say the brightest rising star to watch Becalmed - people are trying it out to about the same degree that they're testing Dead Weight, though from my personal experienced Becalmed is way outperforming expectations. I would be very surprised if it were not in the top 10 next year.

Infinite Diversity Awards

Finally, I've once again tracked the dilemmas that only one person used in the whole sample. Here are our IDIC winners:

Discuss this article in this thread.