Nationals are still in full swing - I'm watching the Canadian Nationals stream while I write this - but even if you aren't following the top tier competition unfolding across the globe, the impact of such high-profile gaming is being felt across the community in ways you may not even realize.
You may have noticed, for example, the lack of content being created for Flesh and Blood this past month. As players prepare for Nationals, the public-facing development we're used to seeing has retreated inward. Competitive teams are holding their cards close to their chest, preparing their answers to the meta in secret. This has, in turn, make Part the Mistveil an especially mysterious set release, as the playerbase has less comparison points to work with as it tries to develop lists.
And yet we have Nationals, the ultimate source of competitive decklists and high-quality gameplay to study and build upon. Nationals has seen Zen solved and iterated upon; it's given focus (though not consensus) to Nuu decks; it's updated Dash, Inventor Extraordinaire to perhaps her final variant for the push to Living Legend; and it's fueled the factioning of the Illusionist playerbase. As these finalist decklists go public, the champions responsible for them often add their own insights, giving the community priceless insights into the minds of FAB's finest.
What we end up with, then, is an incredible surge of high-quality development on the best - or most popular, anyway - decks in the format, while the B-Tier and below goes underground. And for a short time, you're likely to find your locals are mirroring the results of the top tables. If Zen is winning a lot of Nationals events, he's probably winning a lot of local events too, as players the world over emulate the decklists and play patterns on display in these highly-publicized events. And so the prophesy becomes self-fulfilling: Zen is the best deck at US Nationals, so people assume he's the best deck, so people play Zen - and a well-build, thoroughly vetted build of Zen, to boot - and that leads to more Zen wins into a less refined and unproven field, and on and on we go.
Nationals can also act as a harsh crucible for novel deck ideas. We all get excited when a unique build lands on the feature match table, but a defeat can shutter development or rule out the viability of a hero. Of course, in FAB there are no flawless heroes - especially as our meta keeps widening, with more heroes added faster than existing heroes can Living Legend. But watching a rogue deck take a loss certainly puts a damper on any excitement its appearance may have inspired. There's no reason Maxx can't win an Armory, but between under-representation in major events and a lack of Top 8 appearances, you'd have to be passionate about the deck to even consider him.
This is why the results of top tier events matter so much: they create the trends that we all follow, until they become truth. Zen is the top deck in the format not because he's the best deck in FAB, but because people have seen him succeed, have clear blueprints to follow, and generally enjoy the gameplay - and the success that comes with it. We've seen Zen lose more Nationals events than he wins, but he remains the figurehead and the shaper of the meta at large and countless local metas downstream.
After Nationals season concludes - and with it months of prep and locked-in lanes for the most notable names in the game - we should expect to see creativity and content production ramp up once again. With one final bow at Pro Tour: Amsterdam, the stakes drop off drastically for FAB competitive play. And while that one guy might keep running his copy of a Nationals-winning decklist, it will slowly age as other decks develop. We've grown much better at answering meta breakers, and LSS has gotten much better at designing what I like to call 'Challengers': those decks whose design push the very limits of a mechanic or game concept. The ideal meta for FAB - the natural state that it returns to when the game is in healthy balance - seems to be a constant churn of 'rise up and answer', where the top deck at any moment is whoever challenges the top deck that came before. We're just now seeing the emergence of a Nuu meta; without Nationals to guide us, how resilient will she prove to be? Without Nationals to guide us, that answer will be different in each and every local game store.
