Shamless brag post but the grind was long and I want to boast and vent a bit! After playing for like three days (and no ranked games at all) a couple years ago, I reinstalled Shadowverse during the free tenfolds in late December. I spent the first couple weeks mostly doing story without planning to ladder at all; the earliest screenshot I have is achieving D2 on January 5th. And now this morning, I finally got all the way to Master!

Using story rupies to make decks, I started out with evo shadow, which was nerfed like three days later, then pivoted to dragon, which took me the rest of the way with 428 total ranked wins.

Pre-mini expansion I used a control buff dragon deck with Tiamat and a Ghandagoza finisher and less storm than most were using. After playing around with Gamieux I ended up with this fast buff dragon deck for most of my grind through A and beyond.

Stats! I didn't start keeping track til around low A, but from when I did til master, my record was 148 wins to 68 losses for a 69.5% overall win rate. Up until AA3, the win rate was more like 78%. I had a rough AA3 overall; I'm guessing more people in Master (who this late in Shadowverse are going to be way more experienced) and competing decks getting more refined was the main cause, because a ton of those losses were on my opponent's 7 mana turn, whereas most of the grind before I wasn't worried until their turn 8.

Matchup stats:

• Ceres/Evo Shadow - 80.0% (16W-4L) - they almost never got to assemble their combo. I saw too much overlap between traditional evo lists and Ceres OTK lists to distinguish them very well, so the exact count might be off, but the vast majority definitely played at least one Ceres
• All Runecraft - 80.0% (8W-2L) - The rarest class by far, I saw 3 earth rite, 2 spellboost, and 5 whims, with both losses being to whims.
• Ward Haven - 77.3% (17W-5L) - I got way better at playing against these over time, depriving them of evolves as much as possible to limit Saber turns
• Swordcraft - 76.2% (16W-5L) - Pretty much all running Octrice rally/evo decks, not sure if there's a differentiator I could spot
• Wrath Blood - 67.8% (21W-10L) - the most popular single deck. In AA3 I went 6W-6L which was frustrating. I had a lot of bricked hands though so probably part fluke on top of better players/lists
• Buff Dragon - 66.7% (22W-11L) - I never liked playing the mirror. Lots of variance in lists, but these are all the ones who played buff stuff
• All Forest - 65% (13W-7L) - Difficult to tell which are only Sekka, only Ladica, or both, but they play the same anyway. Actually one of my favorite opponents to fight against, I found the matchups fun
• Puppet Portal - 63.6% (7W-4L) - notably every loss was in AA3, suggesting better deck lists and players than earlier games
• Heal Haven - 61.5% (8W-5L) - Frustrating every time. I could probably play better against them than I did, I usually ran out of steam by the time they were hitting my face with relic goddess

Every other archetype I saw 6 or fewer total games of after I started logging, though notably I faced 7 Jerry decks (3 dragon, 3 sword, 1 shadow) and lost to 5 of them, with 4 of those 5 losses being Jerry turn 6 into Thunder God on turn 7 for at least 16 nearly-unavoidable face damage. Portal had the most noticeable refinement in deck list; for a few days after Lishenna came out the decks were awful, but by AA3 they were giving me a hard time.

I'm not sure yet if I'm gonna try for GM this season, but for now I need to rest. Thanks for letting me boast! Shadowverse is pretty fun.