This is my thinking, that any single over-used troop, or an over-used 2 or 3 teams is “broken”. In my opinion there should be a minimum of 25-30 “meta defensive troops”, that’s less than 10% of the catalog. As for a table, I’m sure @Sirrian would have something more expansive, but I actually just finished doing a review of the PvP top 100 defenses, so I’ll share my findings.
33 players had single troop defenses and 24 had event defenses (meaning at least 3 cards that have event bonus, fourth card could be anything, including “meta” troops). Of the 43 remaining defenses, there were basically 4 groups:
- 8 Famine-based (4 with DM, 3 with Psion, 1 with both)
- 9 Kerberos-based (4 with DM/FG/GS, 4 with 2xKerb/FG/GS, and a unique Maw/DM/Kerb/GS)
- 4 were EK/Valk/Mab (3 with Mercy, 1 with Psion)
- 22 other (but of those, 1 team used 3 “meta” troops, 7 teams used 2, 6 used 1, 8 used 0)
So 29 of the 43 “real” defenses or 67% contained 2 or more “meta” troops from a group of just 9 (Famine, Psion, EK, Valk, Mab, Kerb, FG, GS, and the DM class).
Something else the data points out that might be less obvious is that a third of the players opt for a one-troop defense in order to avoid these meta teams. Obviously some do it for easier battles, but there have been many posts from players who do it simply to avoid the monotony of the “Big 3”, so it would be interesting to know the proportion.
NOTE: I realize DM is not a “troop”, but rather a class and then you actually select a hero weapon. For completeness, all cases but one used either Black Manacles or Crypt Keeper. That means only 1 of the 13 classes and 2 of the 157 weapons. So while technically inaccurate, I think my generalization of DM as a troop adds a significant amount of simplicity while not dramatically changing the results.