Nationals Classic Constructed Metagame: Week 3

We're pleased to welcome Yichin Liu as a guest writer for the 2022 National Championships season! Yichin is a Level 2 FAB judge, one-third of the OK&Y podcast, and is known for his community involvement as MalZenith, writing articles and creating guides for new players. This is the third article in his four-part series analyzing the developing Classic Constructed metagame at the 2022 National Championships!

Hello everyone, and welcome to the third of a four-part series where we’ll be bringing you some in-depth analysis of the results and takeaways of this year’s Nationals season. I have returned from my own country's nationals in the United States, where I watched two major events unfold over the course of three days. Joining the US's Nationals this week were 15 other Nationals events across the world: Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, and Flesh and Blood’s home country of New Zealand! With some of the biggest events this season, that means a lot more data than before! Let’s dig in.

The Data

As usual, we’ll begin with analyzing our main data points. One of the biggest trends this week is a general consolidation of the metagame to a more firmly-settled state. Compared to last week’s data, we see a general reduction in the number of players on less-played decks in the meta, with the player base gravitating towards Oldhim, Briar, Fai, and Iyslander. On the loser’s side, we have Dromai, Dorinthea, Dash, Lexi, and Viserai taking hits in popularity as players move away from heroes that have a poor Oldhim matchup. The Top 8 and Winners charts only further solidify this idea, with Oldhim and Briar picking up a disproportionate number of Top 8's and wins.

It’s taken a while, but a consolidation like this means that the meta has found its footing and finally “settled” into an equilibrium of sorts. Players can now be confident in all of the known entities in the format and plan sideboards accordingly. This doesn’t mean that innovation isn’t possible - as we’ll see later - but it does mean that most fringe heroes have had their fair shake at establishing themselves in the metagame and will probably not be making any big waves. Unless the meta consolidates even further towards the top two heroes due to a pronounced gap in power level, we should expect the current metagame to hold absent any major upcoming shifts due to bans or suspensions. We saw such a consolidation in the Tales of Aria metagame, where Briar’s dominance allowed Oldhim to go from secondary contender to major force. However, as we’ll see in our usual full data chart and a few other choice statistics, we’re still well away from any singular deck taking control of the metagame.

This week’s “Top 8 conversion rate to beat'' is about 10.6%; in other words, if a hero has a higher than 10.6% conversion rate, then that hero is performing above average. While we have four heroes that have a top 8 conversion rate above that rate, I wouldn’t put too much stock in Azalea and Kano’s performance - it’s very impressive that they’ve managed to put higher rates of their pilots in Top 8 than expected, but at such a low player count for both of them, the data gets a little fuzzy and shouldn’t be considered statistically significant. That leaves us with just two heroes at a high enough density with a conversion rate above average: Oldhim and Briar. Close to that 10.6% mark includes Dash, Iyslander, and Viserai (Levia is included as well, though the wisdom mentioned before applies). The battle at the top of the hill seems to be happening between Briar and Oldhim, though they’re far from the only challengers to the crown. One other measure we can use to gauge the health of the format is the average number of heroes represented in Top 8s among each event. When a format has solidified one to three “best decks”, how many heroes can find success outside of that?

According to our data, the Top 8 hero diversity in Nationals Events this season is 5.35, with Top 8 class diversity at 4.74. In other words, we see an average of between five and six heroes represented in every Top 8, with four to five classes among those heroes. A high top 8 diversity indicates a metagame that is completely wide open and almost impossible to prepare for, while low diversity indicates that the gap in power between top decks and the fringes is so great that individual player skill cannot make up for the difference. At a slightly above-average rate of 5.35, we can safely say that it is not uncommon for other heroes to find success in the current metagame.

Briar and Fai: A Tale of Two Aggro Heroes

One idea I usually like to note is the regional popularity and success of certain heroes, and it is exemplified in the regional popularity of our two top aggro decks this season: Briar and Fai. While Briar has remained popular throughout the season, Fai has slowly risen from second fiddle to true contender in terms of metagame share. Briar enthusiasts are largely concentrated in mainland Europe and certain parts of Asia, where her players come out in force in Nationals events like Poland and Hong Kong (where a whopping 39% of all players were playing Briar). She is the less popular choice in areas like the United States or the United Kingdom, where Fai takes the top spot. Explaining this discrepancy is difficult with the admittedly limited amount of data we have. Successful Fai builds are pretty evenly divided between Emberblade builds and Harmonized Kodachi builds, while Briar’s successes have their more aggressive and more defensive variants similarly represented.

But which one is better overall? Well, if we go by what the statistics say, Briar is the better choice in this metagame. They have roughly the same number of pilots around the world, and Briar has a top 8 conversion rate of 18.68% for the Nationals season so far, compared to Fai’s 10.51% top 8 conversion rate. The signs are clear: Briar is the better deck this season. Up until now, the data has included events large and small. However, not all events are made equal. Assuming a roughly even skill distribution, it is much more difficult to make Top 8 of a larger event than a smaller one. To put another perspective in our data, let's divide the data a little differently. Rather than including all events in a single week on the same chart as we have used before, we will take a look at metagame share among larger events, and small to midsize events. The line as to what defines the size of the events here are a little arbitrary in terms of what defines a larger event versus a smaller one, but should help show a new perspective as to how we can think about Briar and Fai's respective performance.

While there's a lot I can speak about new insights gained when sorting data this way, we'll focus on our two most popular aggro decks. Briar is more popular in smaller and medium size events, while Fai is more popular in larger ones. Fai's conversion rate, therefore, is weighted against him; it is more difficult, even assuming player skill is similar, for Fai to win events where he has comparatively more players than Briar in. The difference is pronounced enough for me to suspect that Fai's place in the metagame might have more to it than data suggests. When weighting performance based on event size, Fai’s performance becomes even with Briar. While not concrete proof of Fai’s superiority, there’s enough of a discrepancy here that gives me pause. It may be that Fai is just as good, if not better, of a choice when heading into a large event.

Miscellaneous Successes

Moving on from the bigger heroes, let’s talk about the heroes that are a little less popular. Throughout the weekend, I was regaled with stories of offbeat builds finding success in the metagame. By now most have heard of Michael Hamilton's "muscle mage" Iyslander list, which runs cards like red Fyendal's Fighting Spirit and red Wounded Bull as efficient ways to gain an offensive edge over the less-damaging Ice Wizard spell. But Michael is far from the only innovator that found success this weekend, and many more players in Top 8s were able to find success via some unique takes on their heroes of choice. Jacob Baugh piloted his Dash deck to victory not using the typical Boost-centric Dashes we've seen emerge following the Calling Singapore, but on a control build that focuses on fatiguing and utilizing a slew of defense reactions and life gain cards from the generic pool to grind the opponent down with her pistols. Taiwan Nationals was won by Ming-Han Lee on Lexi, who deviated from the typical Ice/Fuseless build and dedicated themselves to just Ice, using cards like yellow Polar Blast and red Icy Encounter as ways to directly attack a metagame full of aggressive decks.

On the more humble end of things, Azalea found herself in the Top 8 of Polish Nationals courtesy of Pawel Leszuk, who ran what is largely an Azalea list that included a small combo package involving Tri-Shot, Rapid Fire, and Endless Arrow as an alternative way to end games after a bit of setup. Boltyn, another hero that has had minimal success so far this season, also found his way into Top 8 of Taiwanese Nationals by pilot Ho Chi Yun, utilizing Energy Potion as a way to prevent interruption from pesky ice heroes during his combo turn with Lumina Ascension.

While I’ve said in weeks past that remaining unpredictable is a large reason for these decks’ success, that’s not the only takeaway you should have from these individual data points. Each of these players not only found an innovative way to attack a weakness of the deck that was keeping others from finding success with it, but also was skilled enough at piloting the deck to continue to win once the “secret tech” became public. Rumors of a unique deck travel fast, and large events like Nationals events take place over the course of one, if not several, days. The true test for a deck comes when players have had the opportunity to formulate a strategy against it, so the best way to gain an edge when that happens is to have more practice in the matchup under your belt.

That’s all I have for this week! I’ve included the overall data for the last three weeks below; stay tuned for next week where I’ll be going into some additional interesting statistics from the overall metagame, localized area metagames, and a final few Nationals events in Singapore and Germany!

Full Season Data

Yichin Liu 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.