Meta update after 2 weeks of May.
Our meta tier-list was created at the end of the first week of the May season, which can be seen here. Now we are looking at what week 2 looked like, and how the meta is shaping out. There was of course the OTA update on Thursday, nerfing Enchantress and Rockslide while buffing Venom and Drax (also changing location show rates).
As of the writing of this post, there have not been a ton of games played with Venom...but the reality of the data available through the snapfan app is that his winrate in the 80-100 range has gone down since the OTA buff, from 46.6% to 45.1%. His playrate did go up, and people have not really had time to optimize a deck featuring him. In the infinite range, his winrate did go up, from 29.2% (No clue where this came from) to 51.1%. This is still not impressive. Again, this is early so given more time, who knows what will happen...I don't expect much in the current meta, however.
Looking at the meta as a whole, Zabu Darkhawk lists are still dominating. In the 80-100 range, this combination represents over 20% of the meta, while sporting a 56% winrate and solid cuberate as well. If we require Stature to be in the decklist, the winrate jumps to 58% . Stature represents 60% of the Darkhawk decks (which, when multiplied by the 20% of total meta, puts Stature/Darkhawk at 12% itself of the meta).
Ignoring Stature and just looking at Jeff the Baby Land Shark within this deck, we see a similar increase in winrate (slightly more actually). This comes in at a 58.1% winrate. Running both cards ends up at a 58.8% winrate.
This leads to a very hard to answer question - what cards are "required" in a deck? If you follow the tournament meta and read Torikun's article about the May Battle Arena tournament, you'd perhaps know that a version of this deck without Jeff took 2nd place...but as we can see, it just does worse. Is it a ladder vs tournament difference? Not really. The deck is "good" either way. To do well in a tournament however, you only need to have a relatively small sample hot streak. I truly believe that a deck winning a tournament with a card swap does not make it the better deck - it simply had the better run on that day.
Regardless, the meta did not shift from the OTA patch. Soon we will have our downrank (presumably of Silver Surfer, Darkhawk, Knull, and Sentry). This could impact the meta...but more people getting Darkhawk doesn't seem like a good thing for meta healthy.