ProQuest: Week Three Metagame

For the ProQuest Season, we've invited some 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 latest article analysing the state of the ProQuest metagame!

Welcome back, Flesh and Blood players! It’s time for the third week of ProQuest events, and once again, Legend Story Studios has kindly provided me with GEM results from this week’s events, which I have analyzed to bring you the latest metagame news – hopefully without introducing too many errors of my own!

This week’s data corresponds to eighty-four different events and 2,513 different players (though some players may have played in multiple events, so the “total number of individuals playing” is probably somewhat below this) – however, some stores provided incomplete information. As a result, there were 1,838 players with known heroes and 83 events with known winners, so the statistics are going to be a little approximate.

One other note on methodology – a few players were again registered as playing young heroes (for instance, “Boltyn” instead of “Ser Boltyn, Breaker of Dawn”. I assumed that these were registration errors and grouped them with the adult versions of those heroes – except for one player who signed up with Benji, the Piercing Wind! I did not include that in the statistics, so we’re at 1,838 known heroes as a whole for the week – sorry to the lone Benji player! Similarly, if I say something like “all heroes,” I’m referring to all adult heroes, as generally, players do not use young heroes in Classic Constructed. That said, if anyone can get a ProQuest event win with a young hero, I will add that hero to my overall statistics – thus far, we haven’t seen it, though.

With that said, let’s take a look at the overall meta for week three:

While Bravo, Star of the Show was still the most played hero at ~20.7% of the meta, it was by a slimmer margin than we’ve seen in previous weeks, with Prism continuing to grow and now representing ~18.0% of the meta! Viserai also increased his representation slightly. Once again, though, all heroes were represented in the weekend’s events.

Next, we’ll get into top eight placements:

Bravo, Star of the Show, Viserai, and Prism maintained their positions from last week as the “top three” heroes for top eight placements. All three of these somewhat overperformed their overall representation – relative to last week, though, Prism in particular had a notably bigger “piece of the pie,” taking close to 21% of top eights as opposed to last week’s 11.7%! Chane also continued to notably overperform his representation when it came to taking top eight placement, this time taking 8.39% of top eights with 6.42% of the overall field – a top eight conversion rate of 34.21%, better than that of Viserai and only a bit behind Prism and Bravo, Star of the Show!

Finally, we’ll look at wins:

Interestingly, while Bravo, Star of the Show has been losing ground on overall representation and top eights, he actually did better than last week when it came to wins, taking ~42.17% of events! Prism, Sculptor of Arc Light was in “second place” with ~24.20%, and Viserai took third place with ~12.05%. Viserai underperformed his overall representation and top 8 percentage, while Prism did worse than her top 8 percentage but better than her overall numbers indicate. I believe that with these results logged, Bravo, Star of the Show has now made it more than halfway to becoming the game’s first Living Legend, passing Chane, Prism, and Briar on his rise to center stage!

Aside from those “big three,” Chane, Bound by Shadow did disproportionately well himself, taking ~9.64% of events despite only having ~7.24% of the playerbase. In fact, Chane’s “conversion rate” statistics for both overall players to top eights and top eights to wins were higher than those of Viserai – perhaps the Shadow Runeblade is being underestimated at present, or players have grown more accustomed to Viserai’s playstyle but not yet honed their skills against Chane to the same degree?

Lexi, Livewire and Katsu, the Wanderer had their strongest showings yet of the ProQuest season this week, taking five wins and three wins, respectively. Neither were overperforming their representation in doing so, but these builds aren’t getting shut out either – I myself took a loss to Katsu during my ProQuest Saturday at the Channel Fireball Game Center, dying to a sneaky Lunging Press!

One other interesting note is that I’ve done some basic looks at win rates across different regions. While Bravo, Star of the Show has a very high 43% win rate in “overall” results, his performance appears to vary significantly across regions – in continental Europe and North America, the Star of the Show is picking up a much higher percentage of wins than in some of the other regions, actually winning above that 43% – I believe Bravo, Star of the Show won over 57% of Canadian events in particular! However, the same results haven’t been as impressive elsewhere in the world – in the APAC region (including Australia and New Zealand), the Star of the Show’s win rate is below 30%, and in the UK, Prism has won half the events and Bravo, Star of the Show only 25%!. These could indicate a different prevailing meta in some areas, though in some cases, there’s a relatively low sample size of events that makes it difficult to tell for sure.

Azalea, Kano, and Levia remain the only adult heroes who have yet to pick up at least one ProQuest win – all other heroes have won at least one event. Will this change as the season draws to its conclusion? Time will tell…

If you want to look at the data in more detail, here’s a picture of this week’s results:

And here are the overall results (combining this week’s data and that from previous weeks):

As before, the final two rows in these tables – T8Conv and WinConv – represent the “conversion percentage” from overall representation to top eight, and from overall representation to an event win. The last row, T8toWin, represents the “conversion percentage” from top eights to event wins. "Starvo” is an abbreviation for Bravo, Star of the Show.

Stay tuned for more meta updates here at fabtcg.com as the ProQuest season progresses and the Flesh and Blood community continues to explore the Everfest – personally, I’m hoping that we see wins from some of the heroes who haven’t done as well as the ProQuest season draws towards its close!

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.

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