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RoyaleAPI
Duel Deck Search
Get your 4 decks for Clan Wars 2 composed of the best performing decks in the meta!
clan wars 2 new feature site
We’re excited to launch Duel Search today — a new feature that helps you find 4 high performance decks for Clan Wars 2 in Clash Royale.
In this post, we’ll go through how to use the feature efficiently, and at the end we’ll discuss some backgrounds and challenges we faced when we designed this feature.
Table of Contents
- Duel Search
- List View
- Decks View
- Details View
- Card Filters
- Include Cards
- Exclude Cards
- Include + Exclude Cards
- Background
- Making Duel Search
- Interactive Search
- New way of thinking
- Feedback
- Example Duel Deck Set
Duel Search
When you first get to the Duel Search page, you’ll be shown the absolute best deck sets — constructed using the best performing decks in the current meta. At launch, we have added some constraints to the decks that will show up here. They must be played for at least 5,000 times in Path of Legends or Grand Challenges in the last 7 days. We then mix and combine these decks together while making sure that none of the cards repeat.
List View
Use the Decks Toggle to show/hide the decks so you can preview the deck sets quickly. When you’re in List View, we show the duel sets as the 4 key cards of the decks. These are usually the win-conditions of the decks.
Decks View
When the Decks toggle is on, you can see the full decks. We have designed the screen in such a way that all four decks will fit nicely on the screen without scrolling even on smaller mobile devices.
Details View
We guarantee that all these decks have high win rates — but if you wish to see the detailed win rates and usage, you can use the Details toggle to expand these details. We don’t enable this by default because having both deck stats and win rates would make it hard to fit all four decks on smaller phones.
Card Filters
Like our powerful and comprehensive deck search, Duel Search allows you to include and exclude cards as you like.
Include Cards
Do you have favorite win conditions that you like to play? Include them in the card filters. Filters are not limited to win-conditions, of course. If you love to play Bomber, include it by all means.
Exclude Cards
Use the Exclude Cards option to filter out cards that you don’t want to play. Maybe you really don’t like Freeze, or maybe your Champion levels aren’t high enough for war. Apply card exclusion and get great results that fit your needs.
Include + Exclude Cards
Of course, you’re not limited to just include or exclude — you can combine both to find the best decks. At the time of this writing, Lava Hound is performing really well in the meta. But maybe you don’t know how to play it, so exclude them from the results after picking your preferred cards.
Background
When’s the last time you’ve changed the 4 decks for Clan Wars 2? For me, that’s when Monk was introduced — and then maybe 6 months before that.
Besides some in-game UI / UX issues with how the war decks are implemented, there are some fundamental difficulties with duel deck construction.
For the majority of players who don’t have the luxury to play any card they want, constructing war decks can be a headache. But even for players with maxed accounts, it’s not so easy to come up with 4 decks with unique cards that are meta.
Unless you’re a pro player who can adapt to any deck with ease, and unless you have a star-level analyst like Julesy or Jebuz, constructing four decks for war and then be able to play them well is not only daunting, it often feels impossible.
Making Duel Search
We have been coming up with ways to solve the war deck construction problem for quite a while. Our goal was simple: find 4 decks with unique cards.
But building this was not easy. For one, we couldn’t just perform a search against players’ decks. The decks a player used were not often played at the same time — they could often span several hours. It would require some very time-consuming process to locate and find every deck a player has played — such post-processing is not impossible, but would be very prohibitive for a real-time search engine.
Besides finding the exact four decks that a player used, there is a massive variability in decks. Having 32 unique cards mean that it is highly unlikely that players would share the same exact decks. What this means is that performing popularity analysis would not be possible at all.
Additionally, it wouldn’t be possible to reliably assign win rates to these duel decks — if a player used 3 decks and won a duel, then played his remaining 1 deck but lost to a 1v1 game, what do you assign the win rate to his 4-deck set? There are no natural ways to realistically group these.
Interactive Search
Given the above-mentioned difficulties, we have tried a different strategy — interactive search.
The interactive search would be simple to understand — first the player would pick a deck that they want to use from our regular search. Then sequentially, they will pick more decks by using card exclusion, until eventually they will have their four decks.
We have made some prototypes with this idea, but it always comes down to a clear issue — even if you’re able to construct 3 meta decks, the 4th deck is always a struggle.
In essence, selecting 3 meta decks can’t reliably guarantee that the remaining cards can form a solid deck.
After several months of creating different strategies to create interactive search, we came to the conclusion that this simply doesn’t work.
New way of thinking
It took several months of trial-and-error until we have arrived to our current solution — by intelligently combining meta decks based on performance.
Arriving to this point would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of the entire team — besides our core team, several data scientists were involved in brainstorming and coming up with suitable data models.
We think that our current solution is the best way forward, but we’ll continue to tweak parameters to balance the right mix of usage, performance and win rates.
This whole process has been long time in the making, and I hope that you’ll find the result to be useful.
Try it out:
Feedback
We hope that you would enjoy this feature and prove that our hard work would pay off. We already have some ideas on how to improve this experience, but please tell us in the comment below and tell us your ideas.
If you would like to help us improve this feature, consider joining our User Research / Beta Testing. Beta-testing is open to players at all experience levels, but you must be fluent in English. You’ll be notified on Discord if you’ve been accepted. More details in the form above.
Example Duel Deck Set
Before closing this post, I’ll leave the best duel set in the current meta for you here — remember that you can always use card filters to tweak these decks!
Check out the public Deck List if you’d like to tweak further in the deck builder.
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