The Skirmish Series got underway last weekend with twelve events taking place. Tournaments were held across the USA, Australia, Malaysia and Portugal with close to 300 players taking part over four days of events. Adding in the Armory Events that ran over the weekend, over 1,000 people had the chance to take part in organized play for the weekend! It was always our goal to give communities big and small a chance to take part in Skirmish, so it was great to see events ranging in size from over 60 players at the CompetEsport and Cloak and Blaster events, down to 5 person events at Elandrial Games in Australia and Lost World in Portugal.
In the lead up to the weekend, the hero to beat was without a doubt Ira, Crimson Haze. Having taken the top four spots at The Calling Auckland 2021, Ira decks are clearly a tier one choice in the current meta game. However, given that many of New Zealand's top players had chosen Ira for that tournament, the question remained whether a more diverse field would emerge as more countries joined the fray.
The Midian Guard in Melbourne, Australia hosted one of the first events of the weekend, and gave a pretty clear answer to the question, with a Top 4 featuring Dorinthea, Kano and two Rhinar decks, with Australia's number two ranked player Leigh Fletcher going down in the finals to Mitchell O'Dea and Rhinar. We were even lucky enough to get (soundless) video coverage of the event! Meanwhile down in Albany Australia, we had a Kassai deck taking out the Elandrial Games event. The following day Dan Solo Comics and Collectables in Tasmania played host to Skirmish and this time Leigh Fletcher managed to take the field down with Rhinar.
Moving on up to the US, CompetEsport hosted the biggest tournament of the weekend. After nine rounds of play, US #5 ranked player Davis Kingsley defeated Canada's #2 Dante Delfico with the meta-deck of the week, go-tall Dorinthea going the distance against Ira. Designed to undermine Ira's Flic-Flack based defense strategy by going straight over the top with big attack reactions like Overpower, Kingsley went the distance in a 64 player field. Then, on Monday night we saw a rematch with both players again making it through a 61 player field to the final of the Cloak and Blaster event. This time the result was reversed with Delfico taking out the tournament with his Ira build. Excellent tournament reports are available here at the Tower Number Nine blog, along with detailed analysis of the Tall Warrior strategy. In between these two events, US #3 Rob Cygul took out the DeckEdge event with Warrior. Rob also streamed his weekend of events on his Tolarian Dropouts You Tube channel.
Rob Cygul on his undefeated run through the DeckEdge Online Blitz Skirmish Event
The last event of the weekend was with Gamers Haven in Ohio. 32 players started the event with the final four playing Ira, Dorinthea ( piloted by Davis Kingsley), Kassai and Rhinar. The finals went down to Rhinar and Kassai with the warrior deck played by Nicholas Murphy giving Kassai a second win for the weekend.
Unplugged Games Skirmish Top 8 - Front Row L-R Fraser-Quick, Martin Watt, Wesley Lingard, Kaiya Takara. Back Row L-R Brayden Peck, Todd Robinson, Daniel Pederson, Luke Oliver
Now don't forget in this sea of Blitz events Unplugged Games in Lismore, Australia broke out the Welcome to Rathe Unlimited boosters for sealed deck action. 17 players cracked boosters on their way to top eight and after the top eight draft, Daniel Pederson with Dorinthea and Wesley Lingard with Bravo faced off with Wesley taking a hard fought victory.
It was a great weekend of events, and it was fantastic to see such a range of decks putting up top results. Two of the key design goals with Flesh and Blood have been to reduce variance, and to reward good decisions, not good luck. The strong performances that we saw over the weekend by so many of the world's top ranked players just highlights how much of a game of skill Flesh and Blood is, and that the best players frequently find a way to win through challenging metagames and tough individual matchups.
For those players who participated in online events, we will be direct fulfilling prizes over three waves through the course of the series, so expect to see prizes start showing up in a couple of weeks' time. Please make sure that your address details are up to date in the system in order to be eligible to win!
Discussion Points
A couple of key discussion points came up over the course of the weekend, one with regard to round timings and one with regard to points allocated for draws.
In terms of round timings, a number of players have commented that their games ended up in draws because the round went to time, either because they were paired with new players who were playing a bit more slowly, or because technology was slowing things down a bit. While Blitz and Sealed are 30 minute round length formats, at casual level events like Skirmish stores do have the discretion to set different round lengths if they want to. We'll be reaching out to organisers to remind them of this, but please remember that stores do need to balance allowing more time for games to finish against running tournaments in a timely fashion, and we're supportive of TOs making their own decisions based on what they think is the right thing for their own tournament.
A second point of discussion was why draws don't lead to players getting any win points. This is a great question, and it's actually such an important one that we'll be addressing it in a separate article. For the moment though, we'll say that this was a very deliberate decision that a lot of thought went into, and there are a variety of different reasons that we've adopted this approach.
The Week Ahead
Week 2 of the Skirmish Series is going to feature event more events than Week 1, including the first of the Canadian events and the entry of a lot more of our European stores;
North America:
- Treasure Chest Games and Collectibles: Vancouver, Canada
- Gods' Arena: Quebec, Canada
- Taps Games: Calgary, Canada
- A&H Games: LA, USA
- Gamers' Guild: NC, USA
- Comic Book World: KY, USA
Europe / UK:
- Side Quest: Gdańsk, Poland
- Living Realms: Castleford, UK
- Azkaban Juegos: Madrid, Spain
Asia / Pacific:
- Nexus Games: Nelson, New Zealand
- Hobbymaster: Auckland, New Zealand
- Cardtastic: Melbourne, Australia
For those of you looking for some deck tech for the upcoming week, we have some of the winning deck lists available for you;
Also, don't forget to check out;
- The Calling Auckland 2021 Top 8 decklists here
- Jason Chung's Viserai build here
- James White's Data Doll build here (note - your results may differ from James'!)
And finally, there are lots of other Armory and On-Demand events happening around the world, both in person and online. Check out here on out Event Finder for more details.
Good luck out there, and stay safe!