Matchup Analysis and Metagame Predictions for 2019 Knoxville Regionals

✎ Tate Whitesell / @twhitesell42

A bit last-minute, but PokéStats would like to share some analysis of the expected metagame at the 2019 Richmond Regional Championships this weekend, and offer some predictions for the tournament.

Richmond is the first major Expanded event of the 2019-20 season, and the first major Expanded event to feature both Unbroken Bonds and Unified Minds as legal sets. Due to the large number of cards in those sets that have not yet seen play at major Expanded events, it is difficult to predict the Richmond metagame based on past data alone (and Expanded League Cup data is sparse enough that it also does not serve as a satisfactory prediction tool). However, our own Luke Morsa has developed a different method to predict this weekend's top-performing decks:
  1. Aggregate the top-tier decks as suggested by top player predictions, meta forecasts, article sites, and Cup results.
  2. Assign a percentage value to each of those decks' matchups against each other (based on personal testing and the input of top players).
  3. Average the matchup percentages to calculate Unweighted Matchup Scores (UMS).
  4. Weight UMS according to the expected metagame (matches expected to be played more often are given greater priority) to calculate the Weighted Matchup Scores (WMS).

For these scores, Luke selected eleven decks, which we believe will be the most-played decks at Richmond based on general community consensus. The table below shows the WMS of these decks, ranked from highest to lowest. Effectively, these are PokéStats's "deck power rankings" for this event--the decks we predict to see the most play ranked by how likely we believe they are to win the tournament. 

You can view the entire data spreadsheet, containing the UMS and individual matchup win percentages, here.

WMS will be displayed when any of the above decks appear in our Live Match Data Graphics on our liveblog this weekend.