2019 Collection: Stats & Role Cards

3 min readMar 26, 2019

Hello Collectors!

It’s been a few days since we posted our 2019 collection preview. Thanks for the positive feedback — we’re pretty excited for the new season and glad to see that many of you feel the same way. In our last blog post, we promised more posts breaking down the new card formats, layouts and other details and today we’re making good on part of that promise.

Today’s blog post digs into the new collection format and the cards themselves. We received a ton of questions about the preview cards we showed. Many speculations were made. Let us put some of these in context, lay some to rest and possibly frustrate you some more with some teasers 😜Here’s a breakdown of the new card layouts for ‘19…

Stats

Player stats are getting an overhaul for 2019 to prep for our first mini-game (this will be covered in detail in a future post). Each player will be assigned a role from the following list:

Sniper (like our friend s1mple here)
Rifler
Entry Fragger
Support

Each role will focus on four specific stats that are most valuable to that role. The player’s overall rating will be highly weighted towards these stats and this will allow for more direct comparisons between players who play the same position. We won’t be sharing the specifics of the algorithm we use to generate the overall stats or individual stats but they are based on real data pulled from matches and provided by our friends at HLTV. All the player's stats are derived from the same algorithm with no special treatment so that relative comparisons are as fair as possible.

Terrorist and Counter-Terrorist Parallels

Each player role card will have a T and CT parallel. Both types will count towards completion of your set but each will provide a slight advantage in the game depending on whether your team is on attack or defense in the round. This means it’s best to get both versions if you want to maximize your team’s performance vs. your opponents. Each parallel has a slightly different design with the T’s being more… T-ish.

Player Tiers

The new collection will be split into tiers with the best players being reserved for the highest tiers. Here’s the tier breakdown:

Commons (all players)
Tier 1 Role
Tier 2 Mastery Role
Tier 3 Legendaries

Each card tier will not only provide higher caliber players for your team but will also feature richer artwork/animations and stats buffs for the mini-game.

We’ve determined the players who will be slotted into each tier by stats. We’re sure this will ignite some spirited debates about the relative strengths of players and this is to be expected. Everything we do is based on a statistical approach, so rest assured that no favorites were picked and all players get an equal shot to prove they belong in the higher tiers.