We're pleased to welcome Lachlan Buchan as a guest writer for the Road to Nationals season. Lachlan is a competitive Flesh and Blood player who placed in the Top 4 of the Australian National Championship in 2021. He recently returned from the Pro Tour: New Jersey and has his sights set on the upcoming National Championship after his success at ProQuest events. Lachlan has competed at a high level in TCG's for a number of years, and wants to share his learnings with the broader community through strategy content that will take your game to the next level!
Hello everyone and welcome to my two-part series showcasing some evergreen tips on how to approach competitive Flesh and Blood events. The aim for these articles it to provide perspective from a competitive player with as much transparency around the process of preparing, what my thoughts and feelings are when competing and provide real life examples to help you improve all aspects of your game not just your technical play. You will hear from some fantastic players over this Road to Nationals’ season that will touch on the current limited Uprising format as well as their views around Constructed so hopefully with our collective wisdom we can lead you towards some impressive results. Let’s jump in!
It’s round 1 of the Pro Tour, I have traveled across the world almost 30 hours from Brisbane Australia to be in New Jersey for my shot at becoming the first Pro Tour Champion. I have worked with an excellent team where we have put in exceptional preparation, I am committed, and I have a deck that is well-positioned in the format. Round 1 begins and I start to feel the pressure of the event rising, it is a long way to travel to 0-3 drop!
I then begin to pull ahead in the game, I can feel my heart racing and begin thinking about how amazing it is going to feel with a round 1 win at the Pro Tour. I send a Phantasmaclasm at my Chane opponent who no longer has Carrion Husk and is on a dangerous life total, I select Command and Conquer from my opponent’s hand to put to the bottom of the deck, but my opponent draws another one and pops my Phantasmaclasm. In my haste of trying to close out the game, after getting my action point back with Phantasmal Footsteps I have played out my Fractal Replication from arsenal.
Given I have no combat chain now that my Phantasmaclasm has been popped with phantasm, the Fractal Replication that I had been saving for multiple turns in my arsenal is a valid attack for 0.
I realised my mistake almost instantly and my heart sank. My team and I had been waking up at 6:30am every morning and putting in 2+ hours before work in testing and perfecting our strategy and not once had I ever made this type of mistake, so why did it happen on the biggest stage of them all?
Phantasmal Footsteps
Phantasmaclasm
Fractal Replication
To understand my blunder, which I am hoping you can relate to, we need to accept when we choose to compete in anything in life that mistakes are going to happen. Flesh and Blood in general is a low-variance game that rewards good decisions. This leads to competitive players having a greater deal of control of the outcome of any given game when compared to other games. But what happens when we have something like the Pro Tour where all the players in the field have had to qualify to be at the event and demonstrate an above-average level of overall skill at the game? What becomes the point of difference? Normally, it is how one responds to the pressure of the event they are at and their mental state of mind. That is why some of the best sportspeople in the world rise to the occasion in finals season, and why some seem to go missing. It all comes down to The Winning Formula.
M(K+S+P) - The Winning Formula
The most frustrating part about my experience is that after a day or two of moping around in self-pity I realized what I had done wrong. I had forgotten the winning formula that was shown to me several years ago! This formula can be applied to almost all aspects of your life for anything that you are looking to find success in. Each letter represents a concept, and I will go through them below.
Knowledge
Probably the easiest section of the equation to guess is knowledge. If we contextualize this to Flesh and Blood, this is knowledge of the format you are going into. What decks are likely to see play and why? What are the key interactions? What are the key strategies your opponents will try and implement? All of these are critical to improving your knowledge which most of the time comes down to preparation for the event. We saw this extremely well executed when the Arsenal Pass team brought Kano to the Pro Tour based on their knowledge of the format and what they expected it to be, helping them get a big advantage over other competitors who were less familiar with Kano’s strategies.
One thing to always remember is to be open to learning new things and hearing new strategies and ideas. Starting from a blank canvas can sometimes be beneficial in improving your knowledge of the game.
Kano, Dracai of Aether
Blazing Aether
Aether Wildfire
Skillset
Next up is skillset, within the context of Flesh and Blood I am talking about your technical ability to play the game. Do you miss your Tunic triggers? Do you optimize your block values? Do you understand the concept of Tempo? Etc. All of these things contribute to your overall skill level as a player, and I have seen various people get stuck on this point. No one starts good at anything. Michael Jordan didn’t just wake up one day and be an amazing basketball player, sure he was lucky enough to have some natural athleticism but that can only take you so far.
It is the same in Flesh and Blood, you don’t start amazing, you must put in the time to build your skillset. I have seen various players in my local community improve immensely over the past 12 months just from practicing and putting in the time to improve their technical play. One way to accelerate this process is by being in a testing team and taking a methodical approach to your testing. I know spreadsheets are not for everyone, but I can tell you from personal experience that capturing data and having solid data points to refer to when trying to improve is invaluable.
One of the things my team did in the lead-up to the Pro Tour was record our games, and then get the other team members to review them to see if there were alternate lines that we could have taken. Give it a try for yourself as it made for some great discussion!
Process
This is the mechanics of the game, the rules as it were. Do you understand how chain link priority works? Do you understand the comprehensive rules? This one is self-explanatory, if you don’t know the rules and process well, then how can you expect to play the game well. Take the time to read release notes and any judge articles that get published, you never know when it will come in handy. One of the things on my to-do list is to complete the level 1 Judge test; whilst I don’t think I could ever give up the competitive rush of playing in a large-scale tournament, the ability to understand how rulings and judge calls work can be helpful in complicated board states!
Mindset
The last piece of the puzzle and ultimately where I failed at the Pro Tour. Mindset is the most important component in the winning formula and without the correct mindset success will be extremely hard to come by in competitive Flesh and Blood.
Let’s look at our Pro Tour Champion Pablo Pintor, he started his Pro Tour run 0-2, just like myself but instead of letting that get to him or “going on Tilt” Pablo proceeded to win out and ultimately take home the whole tournament. That is an incredible achievement and one that will go down in the history books for years to come.
There is an inherent cost for competing at the highest level for anything whether it be Chess, Basketball, or Flesh and Blood — and I am not talking about monetary costs. The time away from your family for practicing, the events you give up going to as it clashes with a ProQuest, all of this adds up and creates a unique sense of pressure at events.
How you deal with this feeling, this rush, is ultimately the difference between someone who is good at the game and someone who is great at the game. A way that you can maintain a positive Mindset is to focus on each individual component that you have to do rather than the end outcome. If you walk into the Pro Tour thinking “I need to Top 8 to make this trip worth it” you are focusing on the end goal rather than how you get there making it more likely you will make an error. This was my mistake; I was focused on the end outcome rather than each individual game component and it, unfortunately, cost me when it mattered most.
Fun Factor
Flesh and Blood can be a hyper competitive game but at its core the mission statement is to play great games in the Flesh and Blood and while I have touched on some intense competitive strategy today it is always important to have fun and be a great opponent. I still had a great time and met some amazing people in New Jersey, and it was an experience I will remember forever despite my disappointing results which goes to show that winning isn’t everything. Let’s hope my ELO recovers!
Until next time!
Lachlan Buchan is a competitive Flesh and Blood player and author of content relating to gameplay and strategy. The opinions expressed in the above article are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Legend Story Studios.