I agree. I didn't get the sense before the expansion, though, that SP was considered a top 2 or top 3 faction. Do you think it was, and people are noticing, or do you feel anything has changed about the faction or the meta-game to cause a real shift up in position?
Back in March, SP IS and KF were fasho the top 3 factions. I haven't been playing enough to see what the top factions are.
Still updating this. I think SP Junk is a DTB. It -- and to be honest, most SP decks I'm seeing -- have a straight forward game-plan: turn into a better version of ST. The goal is to field stats. That the faction has utility and space-control tricks helps out (as does the copious healing). Worms is still on there, of course. They got some nerfs, but also got Chattering Maw. Spirits is in there as well for now, for similar reasons to SP: they both provide hard numbers checks, of a sort, and if you can't find some solution to that, it's a problem. Spirits (in their current, Surge-happy form) have decidedly less nuance, but they do have FW's spell set. Rest of the t1 decks are up in the air, but I think the junks make it as usual.
Anyone have any more input on tiers? I know things take time to shake out. Current assessment is Worms/SP/Spirits as DTB, all junks as t1, along with Voil, Salaman, ST beasts, dwarves, and minos.
I have been playing and winning a lot with meta SP. I was getting beat by people I usually beat using meta SP so I thought I will try it out. I added a few more slags for my personal favor. Reasons I think SP a so good: good teleport champs that can create threats outside of main battle, the refund is silly (I usually have 45 nora in the bank after my turn), Font bonus is like two split faction bonus of SL and IS for 5 turns (you can retreat back into the font any time and the counter will reset), summon spams, relic counters, knock back damage. They just have answers for everything, but lag.
those soul gem elemental bg's are really nasty. I know they crutch on howler but if you do not have spot removal for howler you are in trouble.
Did everyone forget how strong IS is? Dwarves/Drunk seems crazy strong in particular. I think Skeletons might be top tier, their HP stacking is really good.
Both of these were added to t1 last night, after I realized there were a couple things left out. (Witches also got a spot.)
See the "Where's deck [x]?" section i.e. they are sitting at t1.5 right now. They have some really good stuff -- Reinforce and Rumblers and all that -- but don't have either the the low-resource muscle or the higher-resource synergy to compete against the other stuff out there, I feel. At least, I haven't seen it demonstrated yet.
I feel like Witches are getting carried by Golden Lamia currently but they do have other strong champs.
I think the semi-consistent -1 SPD to enemies combined with things like Hourglass's spot damage and Witching Hour's spot healing do more than any particular champion (except maybe Inkblight, which is absolutely core, besides being strong).
Micro buffs here and there just gradually made them stronger. Recently the Bone Mine change and change to Bulwark helped them a lot.