ProQuest: Metagame Recap

For the ProQuest Season, we invited guest writers to contribute to fabtcg.com over the course of the series. Davis Kingsley previously covered the Skirmish seasons and National Championships with metagame breakdowns and analysis; we're pleased to bring you his final article analysing the state of the ProQuest metagame! We'd like to thank him for his work creating this article series over the course of the season.

Welcome back, Flesh and Blood players! This last of the ProQuest analysis articles will focus on an overview of the season as a whole, how things progressed, and what this might mean for the future of Flesh and Blood.

Before we get started, though, I want to issue a correction – I had miscalculated some of the figures in my previous article when providing the overall data table. I believe the actual numbers were correct but some of the percentages were being calculated based on old values, summing to more than 100%. My sincere apologies for the error! The correct figures should be as follows:

Key Decks

So, this ProQuest season was the community’s first real opportunity to see Everfest in action in competitive play. Prior to the season, it wasn’t entirely clear how things would wind up looking – as things progressed though, Bravo, Star of the Show showed that he was the star of the show indeed, picking up more than 40% of wins despite being only a bit more than 20% of the overall meta.

Further, this success extends past the Pro Quest season – Michael Hamilton piloted a Bravo, Star of the Show deck to a win at The Calling Indianapolis and Yongji Yang won the Battle Hardened event in Indianapolis as well!

There are multiple different ways to play Bravo, Star of the Show. Early on in the Everfest meta, there was some hype around builds like Matt W’s “Captain Planet” deck I covered in a video earlier, which focused on running almost entirely Elemental cards to ensure very high consistency for Bravo’s ability. However, since then I think we’ve seen a bit of a shift in the meta – while most of the decks that I’ve seen these days do feature mostly “Element” cards (Ice, Earth, and Lightning) with which to activate the core hero ability, there are more powerful Guardian cards like Spinal Crush making their way into the builds as well.

While these builds may have less consistent hero ability activations, they can make up for it by providing more consistently disruptive effects with which to threaten the opponent via dangerous Crush effects, making it harder for opponents to put together a game plan to counter.

Further, it’s possible to play the Star of the Show both aggressively and defensively. Michael Hamilton’s Calling-winning list is a good example of this, able to run strong defense reactions

like Turn Timber (red) or Staunch Response (red) in order to stave off an aggressive opponent. A savvy player who goes for the “long game” can set up an endgame with reliable hero ability triggers via pitch stacking, creating a potent endgame setup.

The next-most successful hero in the ProQuest environment was Prism, Sculptor of Arc Light. Unlike Bravo, Star of the Show, Prism has been around for a while, but Prism decks look quite different thanks to new cards from Everfest! In particular, there’s an archetype that I call “27-Aura Prism” that has become quite interesting. This style of deck uses the new blue auras from Everfest to try and overwhelm an opponent with aura cards. Since “normal circumstances” for most builds only allow you to break one aura in a turn, the auras can quickly get out of control if left unchecked!

This style of gameplay is especially interesting since it can involve more building of a “board state” than most other Flesh and Blood decks do (perhaps with the exception of Dash, Inventor Extraordinaire and her items) – if the opponent gets too focused on life totals and not on keeping the auras in check, they might find themselves overwhelmed!

For instance, here’s Tee Thebeau’s ProQuest winning Prism from The Blue Post’s ProQuest event, featuring those 27 auras! Note that this build still features Heralds as well, so it’s not just aura-based gameplay.

The third most successful hero from the ProQuest season was Viserai, Rune Blood. Viserai has become a very flexible hero, able to easily come up with a build that can configure itself either for an aggressive game plan or for a defensive/combo-oriented one sometimes known as OTK (One Turn Kill). When playing more aggressively, Viserai can use Mauvrion Skies to give big Runeblade attacks go again while also enabling his hero ability, allowing for multiple attacks in a turn as well as building Runechants for bonus arcane damage. However, Viserai can also reconfigure into a build that focuses on building a large quantity of Runechants and then using Bloodsheath Skeleta to fuel a huge Sonata Arcanix turn, potentially drawing enough attacks to defeat an opponent in one go. Further, an opponent might not know which way you’ve configured your build, potentially leading to errors in their own composition – for instance, defense reactions can be helpful against aggressive Viserai play but are much weaker against the “OTK” playstyle!

Last but not least, I want to give a shoutout to Chane, Bound by Shadow, my pick for “most underrated” hero of the meta at present. Chane didn’t have the same sort of win counts as Bravo, Prism, or Viserai, but what he did have was quite a good win conversion rate relative to other heroes – better in fact than that of Viserai! In other words, if the current statistics held Chane would actually have more wins than Viserai if he had had the same number of players choosing him – Viserai converted appearances to wins less frequently, but made up for it by having more players.

Chane is an interesting hero in that he can be very fast and aggressive, but also “mills” himself by banishing cards from the top of his deck. This pace can be difficult for some opponents to deal with, but if the opposing hero can hold out for long enough the Chane player will run out of cards remaining and become easy prey. However, a sophisticated Chane player can carefully pitch and take Soul Shackles into account in order to set up an endgame that can break through the enemy defenses, potentially via the powerful Eclipse.

Further, Chane has access to one of the best pieces of armor in the game, the mighty Carrion Husk. This card has the most defense of any equipment out there, allowing you to potentially tank an attack that could otherwise be very threatening – even if Bravo, Star of the Show threatens you with a buffed Spinal Crush or Oaken Old, the Carrion Husk can combine with other equipment or defensive options to prevent that Crush or on-hit effect from landing. This can be crucial in an “aggro race” situation!

That said, while these four heroes are perhaps worthy of special attention given their performance this season, I don’t think they are the only options available by any means. Indeed, every adult in Flesh and Blood other than Azalea and Levia managed to pick up at least one win in the ProQuest season, and I think there may be some Levia ideas floating around that could prove better than one might expect! With close to two months between now and the first Pro Tour event, this could be an opportunity for players to get in the lab and start brewing up some decks that can catch the current meta off guard!

Meta Over Time

One thing I think is interesting is to take a look at how the meta shifted and evolved over time. Let’s compare the event winner graphs from each week of the Pro Quest season and see how they evolved:

Interestingly, these graphs paint a picture of a meta where Bravo, Star of the Show started off very strongly, but slowly lost ground over time, while Viserai, Prism, and Chane grew relative to their initial positions and some of the less successful heroes faded from the limelight. To me, this seems to indicate a meta where Bravo was the “primary threat” but decks that had strong options against him started rising up more as well. What would things look like if this season had continued for another week or two? Hard to say!

Regional Data

Looking at data based on region, it still seems the case that we actually have quite a few different metas going on. Here’s a quick comparison of Bravo, Star of the Show’s win rate across different regions:

• Asia/Pacific (other than Australia/New Zealand): 31.82%
• Australia: 23.53%
• Continental Europe: 50%
• North America: 43.45%
• New Zealand: 66%
• United Kingdom: 26.67%

As we can see, these are very different results for different regions! In the UK, Prism was actually far ahead of Starvo with 46.67% of wins, while in Australia Prism, Starvo, and Chane were all tied for number of wins! Perhaps those looking to fight against the Star of the Show should consult Australia and Britain for their methods – and perhaps those looking to play as him would benefit from seeking out guidance from Europe or New Zealand?

The Future

With this ProQuest season in the bag, it’s interesting to look to the future of competitive play for Flesh and Blood. This season was designed to build up to the first Pro Tour event for Flesh and Blood – Pro Tour New Jersey, to be held in mid-May. Will the meta look similar at that event? Time will tell! There’s a scheduled Banned and Restricted announcement on April 5, 2022 which might shake things up some, but absent major changes I think it’ll be interesting to see whether we end up with a meta consisting largely of Bravo, Prism, and Viserai or whether players will develop new and special tactics to target the current leaders! Chane in particular looks ripe for testing, and there may be an opportunity to come up with new builds for other heroes as well and try to catch the metagame off guard.

I find it especially interesting to consider that after the main Nationals season towards the end of Tales of Aria, Briar had been doing incredibly well, winning more than half of the Nationals events – but when Australian and New Zealand Nationals came around a few months after the rest of the season, having been delayed by virus precautions, players had prepared accordingly and Briar was unable to prevail. Could we see a similar situation here with players developing strong answers to Bravo, Star of the Show? Time will tell!

One other note is that Bravo, Star of the Show has been so successful in the Everfest meta thus far that he’s actually approaching Living Legend status! With 814 Living Legend points accumulated thus far, a win at the Pro Tour would be enough points to make Bravo, Star of the Show the first Living Legend in the game’s history (assuming we don’t see a Young Hero reach Living Legend status in the upcoming Skirmish season) – and he could conceivably even attain enough points before that if he does well enough at the upcoming Calling and Battle Hardened events!

All things considered, I think this is an exciting environment for Flesh and Blood – while we have a frontrunner and some other strong candidates in the present meta, there are still a range of options available to the competitive player, no one “must play” build, and a bit less than two months until the Pro Tour for those who might want to get to testing! I’ll be excited to see how things develop and what ends up happening as we move to the next set of events this game has to offer!

Lastly, I want to give a shoutout to Legend Story Studios for giving me access to their data and a chance to write these articles for their site – it’s been an honor to be able to bring you these statistics straight from the source and provide some analysis for the Flesh and Blood community!

Davis Kingsley 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.