Just a quick update on the pre-season 5 meta and go through the 10 balance changes that were just revealed for Axie Infinity: Origins Season 5. The full list of changes since Season 4 can be found in the official spreadsheet.

My takes on the 10 balance changes

Overall there are pretty minor changes targetting the Spears (including Leafy, Spikes, and maybe Feather teams) and the Poison-Bleed archetypes which are two very popular archetypes in pre-season 5 tournaments.

Spears going back to 60 ATK is a fair change as they provide a lot of value already. The change in Sidebard tones down the power level of Poison a bit but not by much.

I like the change of Dual Blade, Scarab, and Iguana now applying 3 instead of 4 Doubt so it does not feel like Doubt is staying forever. This is a relatively big change because the effects of Doubt usually matter during the debuffed Axie’s turn, so effectively it will now only affect the debuffed Axie for 1 Round if Doubt is applied once. This will certainly lower the power level of Poison and Bleed teams.

I agree that Forest Wrath was too powerful and toning down the scaling makes it feel fairer now. The important point is that it still does Pure DMG which is crucial for certain matchups like against Sustain.

The other big change is Last Stand which now loses Taunt on activation. This will probably make some Mech Axies with Taunt a bit less useful now and players will have to think more about the positioning of the Last Stand Mech a bit more. I would say it is a fair and interesting change but Last Stand would still have the same effect if positioned correctly. Last Stand is still a very strong rune but now there are more ways to play around it which is a good change.

Hidden Razor is the last change which is pretty minor with a -10% Stat attached just to tone down the power level of Bleed in Mystic.

Quick look at the Pre-season 5 Meta

Not that many players are grinding up the leaderboard during the off-season, so this data could be a bit sketchy. Do note that it is more likely that players are playing the Axies they already have and that the Axies for some archetypes are yet to be breed.

Here I want to introduce a new resource that came out very recently called axieboo.com which has information on both the marketplace and the leaderboard. I highly recommend you check it out if you want to look at what archetypes are currently popular on the leaderboard.

Below you can see that archetypes in the Top 100 and Top 1000 on the leaderboard. It is quite a diverse meta with Poison, Jinx, Leafy, Topaz, Bubble significantly represented in the Top 100. It seems like a lot of players are trying out Poison as it finally saw a number of buff from the recent patches.

This is it for this quick update. If you find this post informative and would like to see more, consider hitting the subscribe button, check out my Youtube channel, and use my lunacian code: maurice for a little support!

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