u/ReiJeremias

I'd like to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the difference between going first and going second in current Hearthstone by sharing a visualization comparing Standard and Wild.

All data was collected from HSGuru using the default meta settings (Diamond to Legend). I focused on the percentage-point difference between a deck’s win rate when going first and when going second. In this context, a positive value means the deck performs better going first, while a negative value means it performs better going second.

The average difference is 10.4 percentage points in Standard, compared to just 1.9 percentage points in Wild. This suggests that the advantage of going first is significantly more impactful in Standard than in Wild. The first image shows a box plot comparing both datasets. The second image is a table with average, maximum and minimum values observed.

Another interesting observation is that there are no decks in Standard that perform better going second. In contrast, 10 out of 33 Wild decks (about 30%) actually favor going second.

This seems to suggest that the Coin is generally effective at balancing first and second turns in the broader Wild environment. As a result, the issue observed in Standard may be more related to the current card pool than to an inherent problem with the Coin itself.

The raw data I used can be reviewed here: Google Sheets dataset.
The spreadsheet is somewhat unorganized, but all values used in the analysis are available there.