Keeping Your Options Open: The Advantage of Never Standing Still

Before we get into the topic at hand, I'd like to give a bit of background on the journey that went into bringing this article to you.

I have wanted to write for the Rathe Times for quite some time now. I have always held written content in high regard, as I value how much work goes into it and recognize its scarcity for that. But due to my rough relationship with English, I assumed I wouldn't be cut out for this kind of content.

But, well, things have changed a lot during this last year and a half spent traveling and competing in Flesh and Blood. It's not part of the narrative, but while FAB is now available in many languages, it is still competitively played in English - and for me, that meant my competitive aspirations carried the additional pressure of forcing myself to speak in another language constantly.

Anyway, I think this community has already seen enough of me making a complete fool of myself (alongside my friends, the Sunflower Samurais). What's the risk of writing?

The next problem I had to face was conventional: what should I write about? A spicy new decklist? No, I'm a terrible deckbuilder. Maybe I'll harness my competitve experience to try to predict the future meta - oh wait, I was absolutely convinced Starvo was going to be a meme...

Damn, this is more difficult than I thought.

I was bouncing around ideas with the editor when he suggested, “Why don´t you write about your versatility with different heroes, and how you've managed to achieved good results with so many of them?” It was honestly something I had never thought about, never taken a moment to analyze it... but it was really an interesting topic once it was brought to my attention.

I love playing Flesh and Blood; and because of that, I've found myself driven to try everything the game has to offer. With every new set or big metagame shift, I spend time circling back to old decks, trying new things, and seeing if anything has changed. And when I'm testing for any tournament, I tend to play against people with varying investment in high-level play. That means I'm regularly playing against a wide variety of decks, both relevant and unconventional.

Due to geographical problems, I can't physically play as much as I want to, and a really important part of my relationship with this game is consuming online content. There's sadly not a lot of content in Spanish, but a result of this extensive community connection is gaining a variety of perspectives, specializing in a variety of heroes, which makes you want to try them all!

It ties really well with the fantastic video Cathardigan did recently comparing Flesh and Blood to different Fighting Games. It is true that a lot of the best FAB players have their signature heroes, which they have played in a lot of tournaments across several metagames - but that is not my case. When I win a tournament with a hero, they tend to hit Living Legend. ;)

Jokes aside, what am I doing differently, and managing to find a place at the top tables?

In the timeless “The Art of War”, Sun Tzu wrote,

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."

Which serves us really well to demonstrate one of the most obvious advantages of having a wide array of heroes at our disposal: you have played all the decks, you know their secrets, you understand their inner workings, and you know their weak points. This isn't simply the rules and interactions; I´m talking about knowing which specific scenarios are difficult for that deck to navigate, being able to predict a line of play by the cards that have been pitched or used to defend, and being able to pressure the fragile parts of its gameplan.

A great benefit to decks that aren't widely played is catching your opponent off-guard with powerful combinations they don't expect, or your enemy not knowing exactly how to play against you, leading to games that get out of hand quickly. Kano is a great example of this, where knowledge about how the game is going to unfold and being able to actually identify what is happening in the table is key to winning against him.

If you've played the decks before, the advantage of being an unknown disappears.

In my humble opinion, the best way to establish solid game foundations in Flesh and Blood - of truly dominating every small detail and play - is by playing a lot of games. There's no way around that. But you can accelerate that learning if you're playing other decks. In every matchup, you stand to learn about both decks involved; changing what you play means you're seeing more decks.

Knowing the basics of Flesh and Blood will help you play all of them, but each deck is built on different mechanics. By playing Bravo, you will be able to grasp the subtleties of how and when should you defend; with Iyslander, you will learn adaptability and trying to predict your opponent actions; with Chane you will discover the game-ending power of a good pitchstack... and the list goes on and on.

It's incredibly rewarding when you sit down with a new deck and see how many of the concepts you have learned from other decks can also be applied to the new one, even if their relative importance changes. You'll understand your new hero much more easily, and you will be able to focus on the new mechanics this deck has instead of spending your time catching up on core skills that you'd missed.

This is even more important in limited format, which is often built upon the most basic mechanics of the game (pitch stacking, threat management, etc.). After having seen lots of different cards from different classes, analyzing the cards from new sets will be much easier - which will help you greatly during the early days of each new expansion.

Every competitive player knows that adaptability is an extremely important skill. Being a master of Prism's complex mechanics is awesome, but once she has left Classic Constructed format, you will need to find a new deck. If an unexpected deck appears a week prior to a Pro Tour, being able to respond quickly is vital if you want do well at that Pro Tour. Is there any better way of adapting quickly than having a reasonable knowledge of every hero and deck beforehand?

Due to how competitive seasons are structured (with lots of events jammed together during only a few months), you usually have plenty of time to prepare for your first event of the season - but almost no time till the next one. As an example, the weekend after Pro Tour: New Jersey, I was already back to playing Pro Quests to qualify for the next Pro Tour. (And only a week after Pro Quests ended, I was playing the Team Blitz Calling in Madrid!)

This tournament pace makes it almost impossible to find time to test something new in between events; so if I had to drastically change my deck between Pro Tour: New Jersey and the Pro Quest season (maybe because I didn't read the meta correctly and lost the gamble), it would have been really difficult adapting if I hadn't worked at mastering all of the relevant decks beforehand. Needless to say, learning how to Kano in just one week for the Calling is almost impossible!

I offer, as an example, my most recent win at the Calling: Antwerp, where I played Oldhim.

I will start by saying that, no matter how much you prepare, how good you are at reading the meta, or how perfect your deck is, you will always need luck to win a tournament. A lot of it. Luck to dodge your bad matchups, luck during your games; but also not having any overwhelming bad luck moment (“4 Mauvrion Skies in hand? Guess I'll lose.”), or catching your opponents having horrible games. Once we have made this clear, we can talk about how all of this advantages we have talked about helped me during the tournament.

In both Pro Tour: Baltimore and the Calling: Antwerp, I was going to play Lexi. I was pretty sure about her being the best hero in the format - but both times I made a last minute change to Oldhim, trying to predict the meta. It didn't work as well as I would like during the Pro Tour, and that left me feeling like I had to play Lexi in Antwerp. But in the days before the tournament, I made some changes in my Oldhim deck and felt really confident in my matchup against the decks I thought I would play against.

So I ended up registering the old man.

I would never have done this if I didn't have a lot of confidence in playing Oldhim built up. The deck I was playing was essentially a Bravo deck with Crown of Seeds - and man, I have played Bravo quite a bit, so it was really easy to make that change.

My experience in playing both Viserai and Iyslander (both really good against Oldhim) was super important when I was paired into them. I could adapt to a more defensive posture when I saw that Viserai didn't have that many ways to create runechants, or changing my entire strategy to aggression against Iyslander when I saw some key cards were being used to defend. On the other hand, when I was paired into Uzuri during swiss, I made a mistake because I had limited testing of her and haven't tried running an Uzuri deck as aggressive as the one I was facing. During the finals, I tried another approach into the Uzuri I faced there, and it worked much better.

The jokes say that I push heroes into Living Legend, but there's one more very real consideration that we should talk about when it comes to the rapid pace of competitive seasons: when your hero of choice exits the scene, either by retirement or a change in the meta, you need to pick someone else up and continue on. For some, their competitive prospects take a hit when their main hero exits the format. But if you've spread your experience across many classes, you can maintain your competitive level without the peaks and valleys.

Playing a wide array of heroes has a lot of good points, but it's necessary to talk about a few negative points here. We've talked about how you will be able to adapt quickly, and how you'll develop skills across every deck and mechanic. But this will also take a lot more time to develop. If you feel like you don't have enough time to practice every deck, it may be better to just focus on a few of them (maybe even decks with overlapping strategies).

Another important point is making sure that you are playing these different decks correctly - not just getting a few games in to get a general idea of what they're doing, because you will miss some important bits of the deck. There are heroes that are really difficult to play in Flesh and Blood; really, there aren't any decks I would call “easy”, so be prepared to spend a lot of time on this wide-ranging skills development.

And then there's cost. It will take quite a bit of money to build out every deck in the game. There are ways to play and test lists without owning them, but at the end of the day, you can't take a list to a tournament if you don't own it. This expense is nothing to scoff at. I'm lucky enough to be in a playgroup where we share our pool; but to people who collect on their own and don't want to use that much money, it's perfectly reasonable to decide this isn't the way you want to improve your competitive prospects.

At the end of the day, there are a million different ways to enjoy this hobby. For some, that involves intense specialization, binding yourself to a hero or a class and its identity. For others, it's making use of everything in their collection. The good news is there's a path to competitive viability either way. Find what makes you happy and enjoy the ride!