BCS 2019: Top Weiss Schwarz Decks + Stats

When I made this kind of compilation for this year’s Spingfest, it was really well received, so here we go again: BCS 2019 has come to an end & here are all the decks that topped this season!

As usual, Bushiroad is months behind on officially posting the winners and their deck lists, so for the time being, most of the table below relies on community information – huge thanks to everyone who helped me fill out the blanks, I couldn’t be doing this without you guys!

As more lists are uploaded to the official site, I’ll keep updating the table with links and corrected information if necessary – once all info is released, I’ll add a note letting you know that the table is now final. But until then, if you spot a mistake somewhere, please let me know so I can correct it! Full update log can be found here.

Just like last time, there are some stats at the end, and my tournament report from our BCS in Rome is in a separate post here if you wish to check that out too 🙂

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BCS 2019 – All Weiss Schwarz Top Decks

Missing info is marked with with ???.

LOCATION	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th – 8th Place *
August 24 Chicago ILLINOIS, USA	SAO	BD	RZ	GGO	KS	KS	BNJ	CCS
September 1 Ciudad de México MEXICO	AOT	AOT	RZ	BD	RZ	RZ	BD	KC
September 14 Richmond CANADA	AOT	P5	APO	SAO	LSS	LSS	LSS	BD
September 21 Secaucus NEW JERSEY, USA	AOT	LSS	RZ	TLR	KS	RZ	SAO	LSS
September 28 Houston TEXAS, USA	RZ	AOT	BD	GGO	BNJ	LSS	BD	GL
September 29 Manila PHILIPPINES	BD	GL	RZ	BNJ	LSS	PD	GGO	BD
October 6 Cologne GERMANY	AOT	BD	RZ	KS	SAO	SAO	SAO	RZ
October 6 Lima PERU	PD	TLR	KC	SAO	APO	APO	SAO	CCS
October 13 San José COSTA RICA	SAO	GL	GL	TLR	???	???	???	???
October 19 Atlanta GEORGIA, USA	AOT	RZ	AOT	RZ	GGO	???	???	???
October 20 Rome ITALY	CCS	RZ	AOT	SAO	RZ	KC	AOT	SAO
October 20 Auckland NEW ZEALAND	AOT	SAO	AOT	BD	LSS	BD	BD	SAO
November 2 Toronto CANADA	KS	GGO	BD	LSS	KS	LSS	BD	RZ
November 3 Mouvaux FRANCE	BD	SAO	AOT	CCS	BD	BD	SAO	LSS
November 17 Lisbon PORTUGAL	SBY	BD	RZ	BD	SAO	SAO	SAO	RZ
November 23 London UNITED KINGDOM	SAO	SBY	AOT	KC	RZ	RZ	CCS	LSS
December 7 Anaheim CALIFORNIA, USA	LSS	LSS	SAO	SBY	LSS	RZ	KS	GGO
December 13 Melbourne AUSTRALIA	BD	SAO	KS	KS	RZ	BD	LSS	LSS

* 5th to 8th place decks are in no particular order

Statistics

Taking into the account the info I’m still missing, the following charts are currently based on data from 18 locations (out of 18 total), 72 players in TOP4 (out of 72 total) and all together 137 players in TOP8 (out of total 144) – a step up from last time’s data which only contained top 4 decks 🙂

In case side-by-side column breakdowns aren’t your thing, here’s the same info in some pretty pie charts:

And here’s the full table of the data I looked at (once again sorted by % of 1st places). Side note: if anyone wants the link to the full Google spreadsheet, shoot me a message 🙂

With the 1st update, I’m also adding the requested table of ratios for winning vs. getting into top cuts:

In regards to the 2nd update: we got some new data about regional top 8 representation at Worlds! It doesn’t perfectly match the data above (no surprise there), but since the only numbers we got were the totals for all regionals, I have no idea at which locations the discrepancies actually occur – so I’ll leave the table and charts above as is.

That being said, here’s the info they gave us:

I won’t go into detail discussing this since Connor (BoatsDon’tSink) already covered pretty much everything with his latest video. Go give him some likes for having prettier graphs than me.

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At first, I was surprised to see that almost a third of all 1st places went to AOT since I didn’t expect it to be as prevalent still. But the more I looked at the bigger picture (mostly the TOP 8 set distribution), I realized it’s actually not as prevalent as it seems to be. Don’t get me wrong – winning a third of all regionals is a damn impressive thing. However, it’s really easy to look at this data and come to the conclusion that we’re still in the bad old days of AOT being the only important thing in the Weiss Schwarz meta. I don’t want that to be the takeaway here, so excuse me as I once again address the Eren situation.

What AOT used to have going for it was that it used to be uncontestedly the best for a significant amount of time, long enough to be able to solidify its place in the meta for years to come, as we’re now seeing. The era of its free reign has since long been over, and yet – AOT is still very much something you have to plan for at every regionals. Is it because it’s still as scary as it used to be? I don’t think so, there are scarier decks out there. Nowadays, the problem with AOT isn’t that it’s everywhere; in fact, at the 6 locations for which Bushi released that data, AOT only made it into the top three most represented sets once – in Cologne, where it was 2nd (13.5% of all decks in that tournament). No, the current “problem” with AOT is simply that a lot of people still playing it are some of the overall best players who have been doing so for over two years. And when you put together a great player with a great deck and a great amount of experience, that’s when you top a third of all regionals in a season (same goes for SAO, to be fair). It’s not meta-breaking, it’s just simple math at this point – which makes me really happy.

Why? Because it means we get to talk more about other sets, and we totally should! Bang Dream is an absolute joy to play right now, with all the different options and whatnot. SAO, while being up there with AOT in the old boys club of meta decks, is still getting some new support within Alicl-brb googling this-Alicization in a few months (at least a Musashi clone if nothing else), so that will be interesting to see. Speaking of which, it’s sad that Bunny Girl released so late into the circuit season that we didn’t get to see more of it this time around, but I’m sure there will be time for that either at worlds or afterwards when Goblin Slayer releases. And last but not least, Re:Zero is super solid right now, but if we eventually get the new Memory Snow set in English too, that’ll be a whole new story in and of itself.

I’ll wrap this up for today before I accidentally turn it into an impromptu meta-talk post again 😀 Thank you guys for reading, hope you’ve enjoyed the post!

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Update Log

• December 25th: Added a few missing decks, updated charts, fixed the incorrectly calculated 5th-8th places column, added ratios of topping vs. being in top4/top8 as requested by one of you guys. (This was supposed to be Monday’s update but WordPress was being shitty and wasn’t publishing correctly.)
• January 24th: Added info from Worlds
• March 6th: Official deck lists were updated on the ws-tcg website, so I added those hyperlinks to the main table. Philippines and France lists are still missing :/ There were 2 minor discrepancies about the order of what topped, so I’ve also updated the percentages on the other graphs, with the exception of one which needs a design re-haul – I’ll fix that one tomorrow!
• March 7th: All graphics are now updated.