How time flies by. This time last year, we hadn't even launched yet. This time next year, we'll all be playing Shadowverse Worlds Beyond.
But the purpose of today's article is different. It's to take a quick look back at 2023 and highlight the most interesting facts relating to the JCGs.
Loot Sword's Dominance
To the surprise of no one, Loot Sword had the most JCG wins and top 16 appearances across 2023. It was a dominant deck upon the initial release of Barbaros, before being revived due to the power of Rogers.
In both of these separate iterations of Loot Sword, it was a mainstay deck that had few bad matchups and a wide toolbox to deal with the rest of the metagame.
Rune and Haven's time in the sun
Sword was not the only class to have a very favourable 2023. Both Rune and Haven had a multitude of different tier 1 archetypes over the course of the year, including Crystallize Haven and Sephie Rune.
Interestingly, Forest was the least popular class in 2023 by a significant margin, despite having multiple strong decks over the course of the year, such as Castelle, Magachiyo and Tempo Forest.
Archetypes with impressive streaks
Crystallize Haven managed to Top 16 in all 37 JCGs in HoR, during its era of peak power (prior to the rotation of Skullfane).
In addition, Elluvia Haven holds the current Top 16 streak, having made it to the playoff stage in the past 37 tournaments in a row. This is fairly interesting, as there were points in time where the archetype was very much a Tier 2 deck in terms of popularity (though its performance was generally quite strong regardless).
Final thoughts for 2023
Looking back at some of the stats for 2023, I couldn't help but feel somewhat nostalgic. The game was certainly not perfect over the course of 2023, but I still had a lot of fun.
It's been a pleasure serving the community over the past year and we look forward to another year of Shadowverse in 2024, whether it's Worlds Beyond or otherwise!
