The top meta for Axie Infinity: Origins Season 4 Rare Era is filled with one main archetype - Topaz, which has been dominant since its buff in Season 3. Despite the nerf of Topaz in Season 4, it is not enough to knock Topaz teams down. Having said that, there are other archetypes that can compete with the Topaz teams during the Rare Era of Season 4. The main ones are Aggro (mainly with beasts) and Jinx teams.

Aggro can quickly knockout 1 Axie by Round 3, and if Aggro goes first, they will have a good chance to deny Topaz and other cards for the front Axie of Topaz teams.

Jinx is good against Topaz as long as the Neo, Parasite, and Garish Worm cards do their thing and discard Topaz, while putting in Jinx cards into the opponent’s discard pile. Since Topaz teams reply heavily on a few high damage cards (namely Topaz and Square Teeth), being able to deny these cards from being played is the best way of mitigating damage.

Figure 1 shows the distribution of teams played by the Top 100 player (19 May 2023) with more than half of the Top 100 teams (60%) being Topaz teams. Aggro, Jinx, Sustain, and Poison make up the remaining 40%. Poison is particularly interesting as it uses a lot of Sleep to stall out the game with Tiny Turtle and Potato Leaf.

There are only 5 archetypes represented in the Top 100. If we look at the Top 200 (Figure 2), we start to see AoE, Leafy, and Triple Owl. (I am very happy to be the Leafy team represented at Challenger at the time of writing :)) However, Topaz is still very dominant at 56%. It is only when we look at Top 500 and Top 1000 where we see more of other teams. Note that the “Others” and “Multiple” categories represent teams not matching to the 8 defined archetypes and matching to multiple of the defined archetypes respectively, where it is most likely that those belongs to Aggro or Sustain as these 2 archetypes are harder to define.

Based on the data, it seems that many top players opt to play the most dominant strategy, Topaz, which some choosing to play teams that can fight with Topaz such as Aggro and Jinx. Only when we go down the leaderboard do we see players trying other strategies but unfortuately the power level of those strategies are not able to compete with Topaz.

Obviously this data is very biased as it only includes players at the top. I personally am the kind of player who sticks to playing the strategies that I enjoy playing. In a way, the game is probably more fun at the lower level as there are more diversity in team compositions which makes the game more interesting. Wherever you are on the leaderboard, I hope you enjoy playing your team with your favourite strategies and favourite Axies without worrying too much about climbing!