How the MCC meta has changed: from the league’s inception to the present day

This fall, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is celebrating its 10th anniversary since its release. Such a milestone is a great opportunity to look back on the game’s esports history and highlight its most memorable moments and changes in the meta. 

We’ve compiled statistics from all seasons of the MCC regional league, starting with the first season in the spring of 2023 and ending with the current season, based on the results of the first five weeks of the regular season. The numbers will show how the play of our top teams has evolved over the past few years and what it looks like today. 

Let’s start with the overall hero pool—and the statistics are immediately surprising. Even before the end of the regular season, MCC Season 8 participants had used more heroes in drafts than ever before—86 in total—and 82 of them appeared in the pick phase at least once. 

Even in Seasons 5 and 6, when the league used the Brave Draft system (where the same hero couldn’t be picked twice in a single series), the pool was narrower. This can be partly explained by the fact that three years ago, MLBB didn’t have that many heroes overall. However, the 2024 Spring Season leads in terms of the number of different picks, when viewers saw 84 different heroes in action.

The nature of the game has hardly changed since the launch of MCC: we used the average number of kills as a baseline, and in every league season, the figure has been close to 1.5 kills per minute. The same applies to deaths—it can’t be said that teams have become more aggressive or more cautious over the past 3.5 years.

However, the pace of the game is getting faster and faster. The average match duration has been decreasing every year, showing only a slight increase in the sixth and seventh seasons. While teams needed 18 minutes per map in the inaugural MCC season, they now finish in about 15.5 minutes—which suggests that esports matches in our region have become much more dynamic than before.

Globally, the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang meta has been constantly changing, but some characters have remained more overpowered than others over the long term or simply appear more frequently than others at the top of the meta rankings. The three top characters in the MCC are Harit, Valentina, and Zhuxin, each of whom has been picked in more than 50% of all drafts in the league’s history.

Valentina leads in the number of picks (419), Zhu Xin was banned most often (also 419), and Harit leads in the total number of appearances in drafts (673). In addition to them, Fovius, Baksiy, and Joy remain among the leaders. Rounding out the top 10 is Kalea, who has already racked up 449 bans and picks, even though she was released just a year and a half ago.

In certain MCC seasons, the meta was dominated by heroes such as Wangwang, Minotaur, Fanny, Edith, Kadita, Angela, and Chichi. Moreover, twice in the tournament’s history, a hero has been selected in every draft—Chip achieved this feat in Season 4, and in the previous MCC Season 7, not a single map went by without Zhuxin. In the current season, Atlas has a 100% ban/pick rate, but the league is not over yet.

It’s telling that there are always many new characters in the top lists for individual seasons and in the overall rankings. Chip, Zhuxin, and Chichi weren’t even in the game during MCC S1 and S2, and Kalea wasn’t released until March 2025. Since his release this spring, Marcel has already racked up 263 drafts and is close to the top 30—while Hirara currently ranks only 79th, but will surely climb higher and higher.

Also, every MCC season features niche heroes with off-the-charts effectiveness. Usually, meta leaders end up getting banned—and if they do survive until their peak, they’re replaced by extremely effective combinations. That’s why the highest win rates are often posted by situational heroes who perform well only in rare cases. In the first season, Barts and X were among them.Borg, followed by the now-forgotten Diggy, Alpha, Zasq, Lunox, and Chip. And Lolita in MCC Season 3 even won 100% of her matches—a total of 7—which is a league record. 

That said, there are exceptions when win-rate leaders appeared more frequently for various reasons. Terizla was picked 78 times in the fall of 2024, even though he won two out of every three matches. Four seasons later, he returned with roughly the same level of effectiveness. And if we look at all seasons combined, players underestimated Harley the most—he racked up a 70% win rate in 80 MCC games.

When it comes to the absolute leaders, there are two (or rather, three): Leila, Popol, and Kupa all boast a 100% win rate in the main league. However, each of these heroes was picked only once. VSG defeated Team Quant1x with Leila in April 2024, and a year later, the Comrades secured victory for FORZE in the decisive map against SIBE. These heroes have never appeared in the MCC since.

Over just under 8 seasons, players in the EECA region’s top league have played 1,047 maps. Hundreds of players, constant meta shifts, major patches—yet even so, there were several characters who never appeared in team drafts at the MCC.

There are seven of them in total: the official statistics contain no records of picks or bans for Aemon, Aldos, Argus, Johnson, Karina, Veil, and San. The latter may soon change that—the new Golden Tower card modifier is here to help. Silvana also never appeared in matches, but for some reason she was banned once during the league’s first season.

Among the outsiders in terms of win rate, Florin, Leomord, and Akai stand out with very impressive but disappointing statistics. Next up is Fanny—she was picked over 100 times, but she only managed to perform well in one out of every three maps. 

The overall anti-rating for heroes who have been picked at least 10 times across all MCC seasons looks like this:

The five characters with the absolute worst performance were those who appeared in MCC matches but had a 0% win rate. Yin got his only chance in 2023, and Alucard was picked by Virtus.pro against Team Spirit a year ago—zaur egoist failed to pull it off at the time. Cyclops had two attempts, the last of which was this season, but Aurevia’s challenge turned into a fiasco.

Balmond has the best chance of improving his win rate: he’s been picked four times, including twice during MCC Season 8 by two different teams (Rune Eaters and Omnix). He hasn’t won yet, but that could still change, and the meta favors him. As for Natalia, she was last mentioned last year: she has only 6 picks, but no one has managed to win with this hero yet.

Perhaps if our regional league’s history had started earlier, we might have seen a different landscape: more heroes, different pick leaders, and fewer underperformers. Unlike the iconic MPL, the MCC still has a long way to go—so for main players like Florin, Karina, and Johnson, all they can do for now is wait for better times.