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Duel Deck Search

December 30, 2022 · 6 min read

Get your 4 decks for Clan Wars 2 composed of the best performing decks in the meta!

new feature site clan wars 2

Duel Deck Search

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.

Duel Deck Search

Table of Contents

Duel Deck 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.

Duel Deck Search

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.

Duel Deck Search

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.

Duel Deck Search

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.

Duel Deck Search

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.

Duel Deck Search

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.

Duel Deck Search

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.

Duel Deck Search

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.

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.

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:

Duel Deck Search

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!

AQ EBarbs Bandit Bridge Spam
Battle Ram Archer Queen Elite Barbarians Magic Archer Royal Ghost Bandit The Log Heal Spirit
LumberLoon Double Dragon Bowler Freeze
Balloon Lumberjack Inferno Dragon Bowler Electro Dragon Tornado Freeze Barbarian Barrel
LH Miner Phoenix SD
Lava Hound Miner Phoenix Flying Machine Barbarians Skeleton Dragons Arrows Tombstone
RG MK Bats Log Bait
Royal Giant Goblin Barrel Mega Knight Prince Skeleton Army Princess Dart Goblin Bats

Check out the public Deck List if you’d like to tweak further in the deck builder.

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Author: SML
SML (See-ming Lee) is the Founder of RoyaleAPI. He made this site because he loves Clash Royale. Read about the History of RoyaleAPI
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