Flesh and Blood Meta Review Part Two: Skirmish + HK Regionals
Following up my previous review of Nationals results and the rise of Briar, I figured I’d write up what early Skirmish results have been looking like from this third season. For me, that first “online Skirmish” season was really the start of serious Flesh and Blood competitive play, so I have a bit of a soft spot for this series of events! (If you want a throwback to that, you can check out my Tall Dorinthea writeup and tournament report from back in the day!)
Before we get to the data I wanted to give a quick plug for the event results tracker where I’ve been recording these results, as well as to the Skirmish result submission form. If you have Skirmish results for the spreadsheet please feel free to send them in via the form (or by contacting me directly). My thanks to all those community members who have sent in results, decklists, and the like — especially to “Sizzla” who has been extremely helpful. This project would be much less than it is without their assistance!
Blitz Skirmishes
In Blitz, the “old top tier” consisted of Ira, Dorinthea, Chane, and Kano (as well as arguably Bravo). Let’s see how the results look from this season thus far (though this is almost certainly incomplete information):
(this image does not update automatically, if you are reading this significantly after this post’s publication check the live sheet for more up-to-date information)
These results are quite interesting and point to quite a diverse meta indeed. The “old top tier” looks to be mostly doing quite well — Ira, Dorinthea, and Kano are all putting up quite strong results, and they are joined by Briar and Oldhim! Chane isn’t doing as well (though I think there’s at least one event that I haven’t added yet where Chane won) — plus I suspect that there’s a “new hotness” effect where Chane (and perhaps Bravo) are underplayed relative to their strength thanks to Runeblade and Guardian players gravitating towards the new Tales of Aria characters for their classes, Briar and Oldhim.
The conversion rate metrics are also interesting here. (Note that due to event size some events are cutting to top four rather than top eight.) Disregarding the one Rhinar win thanks to low sample size, Dorinthea and especially Oldhim have significantly higher conversion rates than the other high-performing heroes. Oldhim in particular is turning top cut appearances into wins far more often than would be expected — he has just as many wins as Briar here despite less than half the top eights! Now, of course there aren’t all that many events tracked, just thirty-nine, but to me that looks like a sign that Oldhim might be worthy of further investigation.
Overall, a meta with at least five characters doing well competitively (and more if you count Chane and Bravo) is pretty diverse and interesting — certainly the results have been more encouraging than those from Nationals! One point that might account for this is that the Blitz decks have been more honed than those from Classic Constructed — prior to Road to Nationals., CC decks were still a bit “up in the air” since the previous meta had hinged around a Chane build that was devastated by nerfs. In Blitz Chane was merely one of many top tiers, so his nerfing didn’t really have the same impact.
Draft Skirmishes
Draft, on the other hand, isn’t looking as balanced. Let’s take a look at the situation…
Ouch.
With 45 Draft Skirmishes in the sheet, Briar is winning almost two-thirds of the events, with Oldhim at almost one-third and Lexi at an embarrassing one in fifteen win rate. I’m not entirely sure what’s causing this, but these are not good numbers. I do think that by default, Briar > Oldhim > Lexi in Tales of Aria Limited play. In principle though, draft should be “self-correcting” in that a stronger character has more demand, which in turn means that you might get higher card quality from a weaker character as players flock to the strong build. Indeed, we saw that come up at both The Calling: Cincinnati and the event at Dallas/Fort Worth — after lots of players drafted Briar in the finals, a non-Briar player was able to prevail with a very strong deck.
My suspicion is that the level of play at Skirmish events was generally a good deal lower than that at The Calling, and hence that players may have drafted more “evenly” — a situation that quite favors Briar in my view. That said it’s hard to say exactly what went on there.
In any case though I do think that this result casts some doubt on Tales of Aria’s strength as a Limited format, both for Sealed and Draft play. While the Draft play at Nationals and The Calling seemed interesting, these results don’t look especially balanced. Sealed similarly proved to be a very Briar-favored format (as I discussed in my prerelease review). Now, you can say “well it’s better at a high level of play”, and perhaps it is. But in my view Limited formats should be especially good for less experienced players, since they are the formats one can jump into without owning cards. These Briar win rates just don’t reflect a format that is balanced and appealing at that level — in either Sealed or Draft. Hopefully future sets can do better1
Hong Kong Regionals
There were two Nationals-level events that I didn’t factor in — Hong Kong Regionals and Italian Nationals! The Hong Kong event just came to its conclusion (I was watching the finals live while finishing up this post!) and Briar did not win (or indeed even make the finals) — the final was Chane vs. Oldhim. I strongly suggest that you watch this event yourself (as of this writing there isn’t a Twitch VoD or YouTube link up yet that I’m aware of or else I’d link it) and so I am not going to spoil the ending , but it was an incredible game. Both Chane and Oldhim have in my view solid counters to the zero-cost Briar build, and this win reinforces the idea that Briar’s “dominance” was the result of a “snapshot meta” rather than the result of Briar being incredibly overpowered… but we’ll see what happens in Australia and New Zealand when they run their own Nationals in early 2021, as well as the results from Italian Nationals (which I believe will be held later today, November 28th, 2021).
With all that said, thanks for reading, do submit those Skirmish results if you have them, and best of luck in your events! With holidays approaching I’m not sure how much more content I’ll produce during the next bit — I think there will likely be a Rathe Times article but not sure what else — so for American readers I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving and I wish everyone a merry Christmas. See you in 2022, God willing!
