Fair enough. I’ve been out of town all weekend and just got back. I will try to dig into this later this week. Thanks for the heads up on it!
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Got it–was able to download and parse. I’ve added the games to the database–exactly what I was looking for. Do you want me to put up a post on it?
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Would be interesting to see, since it was a pretty strong crowd and good mix of lists.
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A quick-n-dirty breakdown
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Cheers - some interesting info.
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If you’re a 3d printer, I had some time this weekend to design a quick status effect set and custom carrying case. If there’s interest, I can try to design something similar for magic items.
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The general feeling is that army selection is being heavily pushed by three factors this year:
- The scenario mix is more favorable to slower, tougher armies not afraid to carry tokens around or stand in one to three places.
- Abyssal Berserkers and Dwarfs are both overtuned and have not been corrected by the RC, so why not lean into them.
- Interest in army expansion and list exploration is way, way down this late in the edition and people are either chasing a cohering meta or taking what they already have.
I personally find it pretty uninspiring and think we need some relief from 4E or some of us are going to start looking elsewhere until it does drop. I know I’m turning my hobby powers towards other (round-based) projects and just coasting on what I have for Kings. Frankly, I’m not even playing KOW these days (mostly losing at Warmachine 4E), despite going to Masters next week 
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Good insight. It’ll be interesting to see when 4E drops–and what the result is. The longer it drags on, the more it feels like it sucks the life out of the game. No one wants to start new projects or paint up new models when they could be potentially invalidated here shortly. I’m feeling it, too.
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One more article as we gear up for US Masters:
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One final US Masters preview:
Item Hoarders vs. Hammer Herd: Regional Meta Showdown at the 2025 US Masters - Kings of War Data Analytics | Data & Dice Blog
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Well, you inadvertently click-baited me. I saw Herd in the title and got excited. 
Though the one Herd player’s opening game would definitely be one to watch for this clash of styles. (Table 6, about 45 mins into the Counter-Charge livestream discussion) Herd is piloted by a former Master and has great speed, but is more alpha-strikey, with 12 drops 19 US and ~150 pts in magic items, vs Varangur with a half dozen square, scoring heroes, 16 drops 27 US, and just 30 pts of items.
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Interesting breakdowns! Looking at the Northeast from inside of it, I can see a general desire to tune up elite units to be even more elite, out of what I’ve assumed is the age old wargaming desire to smooth out the effect of dice.* I often face Me 2+ hammers that cost ~300 points or are loaded with rerolls, and our experience against the nearby Midatlantic (a very alpha heavy environment for the last couple years) has resulted in either despondency (i.e. not playing much), investing in beta strike (my rocks, my buddy’s rats), or trying to meet its elites with more elites. I’m only bringing 70 points in artifacts with me to Masters, which feels nice and light, but I also have no unlocks to mess with … tho you are making me wonder if I should have wedged in a third Mastiff pack instead of investing in extra CS (to which I say, naaaaaaw, I have a lot of Dwarf cans to open) 
One of the regional trends I find interesting is Texas falling from the dojo killers they used to be, with the Mountain region rising (I wonder if some Southern players moved there? Or the region was reorganized?). The Midatlantic is also cooling down after an influx of tryhard Warmachine players entered post-Warmachine 3E and really heated things up, but they’ve since gone back to Warmachine 4E now that that’s taken off for real.
** A desire that will always bother me. I play a dice game for a reason! (Which I have to keep reminding myself when I have really, really brutal turns from the dice )
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Still watching the live results roll in and will have analysis when the dust settles, but in the meantime, there was a Facebook post complaining that missing 3 factions demonstrated that the game was unbalanced. Some quick math on the subject:
The tl, dr: the meta is perfectly fine. Humans spot patterns in things all the time and draw erroneous conclusions.
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Thanks for the insight!
I haven’t thought about it that way before.
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Cheers.
Yeah, didn’t initially see any issue with 3 missing factions (although was slightly more surprised by the identify of two of them - green lady & SK)
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For a lot of evolutionary reasons (E.g. Seeing a predator hiding in the grass), we’re primed to see patterns in everything and err on the side of false positives. That leads to an intuitive sense of what randomness looks like that doesn’t align at all with true randomness. I fall into the same thinking as well and constantly catch myself and have to reorient.
The spread of factions showing up at tournaments suggests the RC has done a fantastic job balancing them.
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Yes. That’s why we need the scientific method.
As a scientist this is very frustrating; see responses (or lack thereof) to climate change, vaccines, nuclear power, etc.
Also, all conspiracy theories. 
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Definitely this.
Obviously metas vary across different countries/regions - so some show up more than others - while some players seem to switch armies by season, some by event(!) and others stick to what they have/know.
RFO doesn’t seem to be played much in UK over last couple of years - after an initial take up when the rules came out. Since it has a pretty full mantic range, wonder if the inclusion of RFO units in the default list and some buffs they got might explain things? Don’t know about their popularity elsewhere, although obviously one of the three (statistically likely 
) no-shows at the US Masters.?
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I quickly pulled together a recap of the major storylines:
More to come as I get a chance to dig into the underlying data a bit more. In the meantime, let me know if you have any statistical questions about the US Masters you’d like me to explore in a follow-up post.
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