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How the Guilty Gear -Strive- Meta Evolved at EVO
See how the -Strive- meta developed at the year's premier fighting game tournament.
The Evolution Championship Series, the biggest event on the fighting game calendar, returned to its offline roots last month, and with it came the largest offline bracket ever hosted for Guilty Gear -Strive-. Coming just about two months into the game’s second season, Evo was a perfect opportunity to see how this new meta was truly developing.
See how the GGST Meta Unfolded at COMBO BREAKER and CEO
Would Zato-1 continue to dominate, as we saw at COMBO BREAKER and CEO? Would the assumed overlords of Season 2, Ramlethal Valentine and Nagoriyuki, take their spots at the top? Would the nerfed Happy Chaos continue to be the kind of demon that was able to take two of the top 3 spots at Season 1’s final major, COMBO BREAKER? And would a dark horse emerge from the rest of -Strive-’s cast?
To answer those questions and more, let’s dive into the data:
With 2,158 competitors, the Evo 2022 bracket more than doubled the size of the previous largest offline -Strive- tournament, the de facto Season 1 finale at COMBO BREAKER 2022, which fielded a bracket of 1,056 players, and nearly quadrupled the field at the next largest major of Season 2, June’s CEO 2022. Our analyses of the previous events stopped at Top 64; this time, with a larger event, we’ll go another round deeper into losers bracket and take a look at the character selections from the Top 96 players:
Character Prevalence at EVO 2022 - Guilty Gear -Strive-
© PG Stats
Six characters stood out above the rest at CEO 2022: Nagoriyuki, Ramlethal, Zato-1, Leo, Ky, and Faust. Of those, the first five continued to perform well at Evo, all placing at least six representatives in Top 96, with Leo leading the pack at 10.
Character Prevalence in Guilty Gear -Strive- Season 2 Majors
© PG Stats
Faust, mostly powered by ApologyMan, who was the top placing Faust at CEO in 5th, could not replicate that performance at Evo. ApologyMan was the top placing Faust once again, this time placing 33rd after falling to eventual champion UMISHO in Winners Top 48, and only one other Faust player, ElvenShadow, even reached Top 96.
Axl players rushed to fill the gap left by the Fausts: 7 made Top 96, and while none made top 8, three were able to crash Top 16: MysticSmash finished ninth thanks in large part to a huge upset over top Leo player Razzo, and Remi Celeste and Stealthy each took 13th, with the latter pulling one of the upsets of the tournament over top South Korean Nagoriyuki player DarkNecro.
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But, if your Evo experience was just Top 8, you might be thinking: Hey, wait a minute, this doesn’t really match up with what I watched on the stream at all. And that’s fair. UMISHO won with Happy Chaos, a character right in the middle of the pack, and her opponent in Grand Finals, Slash, was one of just two players to reach Top 96 with May. And then there were the character specialists like Bean and Daru who made Chipp and I-No respectively look like top tiers.
So let’s take another look at this data, but put some weights on the placings each character attained. Here’s a look at a concept called “Character Win Shares,” where each character receives proportional credit based on their placing. 1st place gets a full share, 2nd gets a half share, 3rd gets a one-third share, and so on:
Guilty Gear -Strive- Character Win Shares at EVO 2022
© PG Stats
Here we see UMISHO’s win get its full credit. So does the domination from the Zato players: he was the only character to get two representatives in Top 8 in Leffen and PepperySplash, and it easily could have been three, as those two were responsible for Latif’s exit at ninth. May rises to account for Slash’s 2nd place, as do Chipp and I-no thanks to their specialists.
So who drops in this analysis? The biggest loser is Ramlethal, who was the fourth-most common character in top 96 but ranked just 10th in win shares. The top 4 finishers with Ram – Supernoon, RedDitto, Armix and Solstice – all bowed out at 33rd. Leo also drops from 1st to 5th, as Razzo was Leo’s top representative in 13th. The pattern we saw with Sol in Season 1 where his performance drops off significantly in top cuts continued here as well, as he dropped from tied for sixth in total Top 96 representatives to 13th in this analysis.
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Guilty Gear -Strive-’s offline scene is thriving, and Evo shook things up, with plenty of players and characters alike shocking the world at the game’s biggest event. After it looked like things were starting to get solved in Season 2, with Ramlethal and Nagoriyuki poised to dominate, the rest of the cast made sure that wouldn’t be the case at Evo 2022.
But Season 2 is just getting started, and with plenty of -Strive- left to be played between now and next March’s Arc World Tour finale, you know this won’t be the final shakeup in the meta.
