Nexus Blitz Numbers: Double Jungle, Win Rates, and More!

tl;dr: We have stats from the Nexus Blitz alpha! Check out the best jungle duos, champion win rates across modes, and see how the game mode performed in terms of player engagement!

With the introduction of a double jungle meta in Nexus Blitz, we were curious to know—who are the best jungler pairs? We ran the numbers on each of the 1,434,861 games played in North America for the Nexus Blitz alpha. Amazingly, of the 9870 possible jungle pairs you can select from 141 champions, only 3 of them were not played!*

Looking for Nunu’s best jungle partner? Try Kog’Maw, Karthus or Kayle, but stay away from Corki and Akali. Is the mega-CC combo of Nautilus and Alistar viable? With a win rate of 68%, you bet it is. See what OP combos you can find and try them out with your duo partner when Nexus Blitz returns!

*A huge thank you to guest analyst Nami Sumida for her work on these data visualizations. Check out some of her other projects here!

We also took a look at the daily number of Nexus Blitz, ARAM, and Ranked games played during the month of the Nexus Blitz alpha. In order to make it easier to see long-term trends, we smoothed the plots using a rolling average of 7 days.

Smoothed play counts in three game modes. The smoothed value for a day is calculated by taking the mean daily play count for the week leading up to the day.

These are some interesting numbers—on one hand, despite a staggering 100,000 games of Nexus Blitz played on the first day, the Ranked and ARAM play counts did not drop. This suggests that Nexus Blitz brought in people who do not play regularly and caused others to play more, which means if Riot’s goal was to increase player engagement, they were likely happy to see these numbers. On the other hand, Nexus Blitz play rates dropped consistently over time: we were surprised to see fewer people playing Nexus Blitz than ARAM after only 10 days of the new mode. Thankfully this didn’t deter Riot from releasing a new version for us to enjoy.