Confabulation is a weekly Flesh and Blood newsletter. I lean towards the competitive side of the game, but the contents of this newsletter are meant for anyone to enjoy, no matter how you prefer to play Flesh and Blood.

This week, I write about my thoughts on the upcoming Classic Constructed meta, and give a rundown of how I think each hero will fare in the early weeks of the 2022 Road to Nationals season. But first, I'll share some links I think you should check out, followed by my thoughts on some vaguely spicy pre-release discourse on Twitter.

Red Hot Links

In this section, I’ll share links to other FaB media from the last week that I think is worth consuming.

• Tariq Patel made his debut writing for fabtcg.com with a brief but brilliantly thoughtful article about approaching the three new heroes in Classic Constructed. Tariq shows off his chops by sharing some heuristics of what to look for when building these heroes and identifying key cards and synergies the decks may rely upon.
• Yichin Liu's new article on fabtcg.com is an excellent introduction to both the Uprising limited format and draft itself, succinctly explaining each hero’s goals and what players mean when they say “sending signals” or “draft a deck, not a pile.”
• Arsenal Pass did an extensive, three hour long limited set review of Uprising. The Kings of competitive FaB content have good fun while sharing their intelligent (if somewhat Fai-biased) thoughts on every common and rare card in the set.
• Attack for 20 (top U.S. players Michael Feng and Yuanji Li) posted their debut episode sharing their thoughts on Uprising’s sealed format. They give great insight into why they feel Fai is the best hero in the format; I particularly appreciated their breakdown of different types of Fai cards and what to look out for.
• Finally, LSS devs posted three articles on fabtcg.com (Dromai, Fai, and Iyslander) giving a brief teaser of what to think about when starting to build each of the new heroes for Constructed. There aren’t many spoilers or secret leads here, but the articles do pose the right questions you should think about when sitting down at the deckbuilding table.

Run Through

In this section, I’ll give my quick and off-the-cuff reaction to a hot-button piece of FaB news or community conversation.

The most engaged-with FaB tweet I saw in the last week shared the following thoughts about how LSS should handle pre-release kits for stores. I won’t be sharing the original tweet here, because the conversation has run its course and I don’t want people to rush back to the thread.

Personally, I think pre-release kits are a great idea. Notably, pre-release season tends to be when we attract the most new players (the pre-release I attended was the first event for at least 20% of the players there). This makes for a great opportunity to impress new players with a well-designed packaging experience, extra copies of key tokens like Phoenix Flames or the double-sided Ash / Aether Ashwings, a quick reference card explaining any new mechanics introduced in the set, and possibly a convenient way to hold your newly pulled cards. It also just makes for a better player and product experience: ripping open six packs is great, but ripping open a specially-designed intro kit and then six packs is even better. Good packaging can go a long way.

What I really want to talk about, though, is the discourse that the tweet kicked off. Competitive-first players reacted by pointing out that, since pull rates are defined on a per-pack basis, it technically doesn’t decrease your odds of pulling a Legendary if the player sitting next to you did as well. I think this points to a general struggle we have, where the very logical minds behind the competitive side of the community speak the loudest and aren't willing to consider arguments or perspectives that are seen as "irrational." (This isn't a call-out of any specific person or type of player, just a meta-recognition of the fact that we're a community of differing minds and values.)

I find myself straddling the middle here. I agree that the pull rate portion of the argument is purely psychological—it just makes your pulls feel less bad, it doesn’t actually change the probability of pulling or not pulling a good card. Returning again to the point of player and product experience, though, I think that's something important to design for, especially for new players: if you can mitigate any negative experience they have at the event, you can maximize your chance at retaining them as consumers and community members. Marketing is basically psychology, after all.

Either way, I don't think this should be at the top of LSS's priority list. It's a detail that would make a lovely upgrade to how they handle pre-releases, but they have bigger fish to fry. Mostly, I found it interesting how the discussion under this post evolved in a way that so cleanly illustrated some of the major types of card gamers I've encountered since entering this space.

Main Topic: Looking Ahead at the Uprising Classic Constructed Meta

Deciding what deck to bring to a constructed event in a brand new meta is an exciting challenge, even if part of the answer involves it being a shot in the dark. With Uprising's release and the start of the Road to Nationals season just around the corner, Flesh and Blood players face down the familiar problem of new-set deck selection with a unique twist: two of the past year's most punishing heroes having hit Living Legend status. This week, I’ll take a crack at predicting how the metagame will take form at the start of this new format.

Looking Back

The first place I look to for information about what this upcoming meta may involve is the meta from which we’ve just emerged. Coinciding with Pro Tour: New Jersey and Pro Quest Season 2, it was defined by five major heroes: Starvo, Chane, Briar, Prism, and Lexi. Below is the overall metagame breakdown for ProQuest Season 2, taken from Drew Cordell’s metagame article on fabtcg.com.

Looking beyond the numbers, I see a pretty clear picture of how the meta took form. Though there are some complications and nuances, it generally broke down as follows:

• Starvo was considered the best deck, and had good play across the field, being able to control out aggressive decks while also having a powerful, proactive, and disruptive Plan A itself thanks to the hero’s ability. There isn’t much that needs to be said here: Starvo was good and has defined the meta since his release in Everfest.
• Chane and Briar were considered the premier aggro decks, having many good matchups simply due to being able to present more damage than their opponents. Both had decent play into Starvo when piloted right and when the decks played out favourably, with Chane being able to “damage stack” using many action points to get around Starvo’s fatigue plan and Briar being able to turn large Channel Mount Heroic turns into an early life lead that could often prevent the Starvo player from pivoting with one of their powerful fused Guardian cards. Being go-wide aggro decks, having a cheap and efficient weapon, and having access to punishing cards like Runic Reclamation, both were also considered favourable into Prism.
• Prism was often considered to have the best matchup into Starvo, whose high-cost attacks and lack of Go Again often prevented him from clearing auras efficiently. Receiving some of the best new cards in Everfest with Miraging Metamorph and the blue aura suite (especially Haze Bending and Shimmers of Silver), the prevailing Prism list was also just a powerful midrange deck in its own right. The hero could be played multiple ways, with some players leaning into heavily defensive lists that sought to block out aggro decks.
• Lexi, generally brought as the innovative low-Fuse combo Ice Lexi deck created by Yuki Lee Bender and her team for the Pro Tour, sought to prey on two corners of the “Big 3” triangle. With huge combo turns capable of 30+ damage and disruptive effects like Frostbites, Fatigue Shot, and Sleep Dart, the deck was often able to prevent Starvo from playing his own game and could kill him too quickly to let him play control or fatigue. Its punishing on-hits from cards like Blizzard Bolt, Chilling Icevein, and Ice Quake on ultra-wide Three of a Kind turns also meant that it could mitigate the Runeblades’ damage output and slow them down enough to win the damage race. Its worst matchup was Prism, but Ranger pilots accepted this unfavorability as part of playing the deck.

Though Starvo was not purely a control deck, its defensive capabilities and large, dominate-backed disruption effects mean we can somewhat treat it as a traditional Guardian within the meta triangle, at least in terms of how its matchups into the other major decks shook out. With this in mind, I feel comfortable summarizing the format as a triangle between Guardian (Starvo) being the best deck, which was responded to by a Counter (Prism), which was beaten by Aggro (Chane, Briar), which often (but not always) lost to Starvo. Other players had to find a way to tackle two or more corners of that triangle, which brought about the Combo decks (the aforementioned Ice Lexi and the Arsenal Pass Kano list).

Adapting the Model

It’s hard to find a direct analogue of last meta’s model when we’re not quite sure what the “best deck” in this format is yet, or if there even is one. Because of this, I’m looking to the other two corners of the triangle as possible starting points for this next meta:

• Prism could stick around, because she has a strong core set of cards, multiple well-explored ways to build her, and a good suite of punishing counterplay cards like Arc Light Sentinel. She also just received an upgrade in her previously-worst equipment slot thanks to Ghostly Touch. She’s famously a popular hero, with many players bringing her even in metas where she wasn’t tier 1, due to a mix of her aesthetics and interesting play patterns.
• Aggro could stick around because it’s, well, aggro. We’ve had some flavour of pure aggro be at or near the top of the meta since soon after the release of Monarch. With Chane and Starvo gone, the premiere go-face hero carrying over from the last meta looks to be Briar. Her strong armour, dynamic Runeblade cardpool, blow-out Channel Mount Heroic turns, and relatively easy access to Go Again all make her an excellent option to play week one.

To me, the new heroes don’t yet have grounds to stand on in terms of vying to be the best deck. Even the simplest of new heroes take time to tweak and settle on card ratios and an optimized list, which makes it hard for one of these heroes to be the best deck right out the gate. To be more specific, though, they all have some drawbacks.

Iyslander is a Wizard—a notoriously complex class—and looks to be poorly positioned into some of the existing top heroes. Both Lexi and Prism (the latter of which is already a tough matchup for Wizards) have instants to get rid of Frostbites on Iyslander’s turn if they have pitch floating after using Arcane Barrier. Briar decks run excess blues to enable Channel Mount Heroic, and often only need to use one of those three resources for their offense on any given turn. Finally, not having Blazing Aether or Lesson In Lava means that her maximum damage on a kill turn during her opponent’s action phase is limited, so Wizard players may have to look to unfamiliar play patterns to close out games.

Because her Dragons don’t come in cycles, Dromai has the widest cardpool, so I believe it’ll take longer than the other two decks to figure out how to build her optimally and sideboard for specific matchups. She seems to play best somewhere near the midrange style of play, which (outside of her class-mate Prism) hasn’t had much success compared to the polarized aggressive and defensive decks of the last few metas. Though I don’t think Phantasm poppers will be as much of a problem for her as people expect, they certainly make her less able to enact the Prism play pattern of keeping one card to get Go Again on a board full of difficult-to-block permanents. The early lists I’ve seen also don’t seem like they present enough offensive or defensive value to keep up with the top aggro decks of the day.

Fai seems to have the best shot at being good, especially early, but he doesn’t do much to shake up the picture of the meta as he likely just joins Briar in the Aggro corner. I’m not yet quite sure of whether his damage output can match Briar’s, but it does seem like he’s capable of playing both the regular aggro gameplan as well as taking big combo turns off the backs of Art of War and Stubby Hammerers, a key feature of an aggro deck that is looking to beat fatigue strategies. Briar has the better defensive play, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Fai tops a few Road to Nationals events early in the season.

The Triangle

If we go with the first model, and assume Prism sticks around at the top of the meta, then it’s likely that Briar brings the aggro corner to the top alongside it anyways, since it’s the natural counterpick. I’m not sure how the Fai-Prism matchup is, but being able to pop an aura at the end of your chain with a free Phoenix Flame certainly seems good, so he could join Briar there as well.

If we go with the second model, and assume Briar is the best deck in the format, then I can conceivably see Oldhim and Boomer Bravo returning to play the control plan and out-defend their aggro opponents. Both heroes were kept out of the last meta by a mix of a highly unfavourable Prism matchup and Starvo simply being able to do their thing except… better. They have access to an incredibly strong Guardian cardpool and are the premiere defensive decks, while still being able to play well on the front foot thanks to cards like Tear Asunder, Zealous Belting and Pummel. Oldhim has access to possibly the game’s best piece of equipment in Crown of Seeds, and, though it won’t be for 13, Bravo can still hit you with a dominated Crippling Crush to send you right back to May, 2022.

You can maybe see the same triangle I see forming out of this: Aggro beats Prism, Guardian beats Aggro, Prism beats Guardian. Look familiar? While it’s certainly different from last time (the Guardians aren’t Starvo and the Aggro can’t do as much damage stacking, action point stacking, or block-with-Husk-ing), the bones of the meta look the same to me.

It’s important to note that Prism doesn’t automatically fold to any old aggro deck, and that the Prism decks out there are incredibly mature and have had months of effort put into them to fix their weaker matchups. There’s something to be said of the fact that while players who’ve spent 2022 on pre-ban Viserai, Chane, and Starvo have to find a new deck to play, those who played Prism can keep on chugging and adjust their lists to the prevailing meta. The deck might not be able to run 27 auras anymore, but that just means it has more space for defense reactions (if going for the fatigue plan) or punishing Heralds (if choosing to out-value an opposing aggro deck that lacks poppers).

Whereas Starvo broke the rules because his hero ability was simply good enough to even out the matchup with Prism (depending on who you ask), the matchups in this version of the triangle seem even more one-sided, perhaps with the exception of the Aggro/Briar-Prism match. Because of this, I’m a little bit hesitant to call it a true triangle: if the Guardian decks can’t find a way to start evening out the scales of their Prism matchup, their stock probably falls a bit behind the other two major players. With Time Skippers, Timesnap Potions, and the right mix of disruptive cards, though, there could be a way out.

The Fallout

So, if the top of the meta looks like Briar, Prism, and Oldhim or Bravo, who else has play?

Lexi found herself just outside last meta’s triangle, and probably does so again. While I’d love for a more pure-Fuse Ice list to work, I just don’t think it’s the play while Prism and Oldhim are around, both of which have historically been Lexi’s worst matchups. Yuki’s list’s combo cards and her key discovery of switching up the hero's typical play patterns by putting key arrows into arsenal certainly make the Guardian matchup less bad than it was, but it’s still a struggle. If the meta shakes out as above, I think Lexi probably loses a bit of favour: Prism staying near the top and Oldhim being better at defending breakpoints than Starvo both make it difficult for her. Don’t count the Elemental Ranger out, though. It’s still a strong aggro deck capable of massive turns while dishing out the game’s most consistent disruption. Those are some of the best ingredients to make a killer Flesh and Blood deck.

We’ve already discussed that Fai could hang up at the top alongside Briar. I have a starting 80-card list that I’ll be using to test the deck, and I’m sure many others are well ahead of me on testing. While players work to tweak the key ratios of Rupture cards, resource cards, and chain starters, it’ll be important to look at whether the deck can keep up on value with Briar, stop Prism from getting her board established or kill her before that’s ever a concern, find big enough turns to beat Oldhim and control Bravo, and get around the disruption presented by Ice, Ranger, and Guardian.

If Fai and Lexi round out the rest of the top end of the meta, we can look to the remaining list of heroes to find who else could be a good pick. In this case, I’m looking for heroes that meet one or more of the following conditions:

• Were already good decks but were being gatekept by either Starvo or Chane;
• Have good play into two or more of Aggro (Briar/Fai), Prism, Guardian (Oldhim/Bravo), or Lexi;
• Have excellent play (80-20 matchup) into one of the above;
• Have good-to-great play into the new heroes, since some players will be bringing them out of excitement alone regardless of how they end up;
• Received good pieces in Uprising that could push them over the edge; or
• Have a fundamentally strong deck with a uniform, linear, and straightforward gameplan.

With Starvo and the best of the Runeblades gone, Rhinar could finally find his time to shine, especially if Prism shifts more towards Heralds. He tends to do well in unexplored metas, and has typically had favourable matchups into Prism and Guardians. Good matchup table, no longer gatekept: check.

Having received a considerable once-per-game upgrade with Crown of Providence replacing Arcanite Skullcap, Viserai could also return as a strong tempo deck, even without Bloodsheath Skeleta to round out his kit. He, too, plays well into Prism. A great matchup into Prism, received a new piece, and has a fundamentally strong linear gameplan: check.

Dash received some notable attention during the last meta, with Teklo Pounder finally enabling a valid Boost Dash deck in CC. Meanwhile, the traditional Pistol Control list or a hybrid list that can switch between the two modes remain strong and solid picks. Unfortunately, all versions of the list can struggle into Oldhim, and the Boost list leaves itself vulnerable to both fatigue and disruption in many of the same ways that Chane was. No longer gatekept and a strong aggressive deck with a linear gameplan: check (with the drawback of not playing great into the Guardians, Lexi, and some of the new heroes).

Finally, Dorinthea is still a great hero, with some people seeing recent success on the Everfest-upgraded Axes list, as well as the traditional Dawnblade list still being a strong deck and a punishing one to play against. She received new pieces in the Classic Battles box, with Glistening Steelblade being another key threat in the deck and Run Through being one more source of Go Again. Blade Flash, while woefully inefficient, also makes a decent utility blue that is able to give her sword Go Again. Plus, Crown of Providence is a big boost to the deck, which doesn’t have a natural headpiece and can sometimes get stuck with an awkward arsenal. Shin Inoue recently took Top 4 at the Battle Hardened Las Vegas with his take on the Dawnblade list. On the flip side, Prism is a tough matchup for her, and while playing into the Guardians is definitely accomplishable, it requires intentional setup and tight play. Great play into aggro (especially when they don’t have Husk), received new pieces in Classic Battles and Uprising, and a fundamentally strong deck for a variety of reasons: check.

That leaves Dromai, Iyslander, Boltyn, Levia, Azalea, Kano, and Katsu leftover. I’ve already discussed why I don’t think Iyslander and Dromai will be a huge threat in this meta (at least not early), and many of those other heroes haven’t seen much change since the last meta. Sabers Boltyn hasn’t had a large showing since Monarch, and Raydn Boltyn is highly susceptible to Ice’s disruption; Levia recently got herself on the Living Legend leaderboards twice with an impressive Club Control list, but the deck was tweaked specifically for last meta and will need some reinvention to carry her forward; and Azalea still has her same old problems: she’s just not good enough in any one dimension of the game nor across the board to really justify playing her.

Kano could pop up as a meta call just as he did at the Pro Tour, especially if you know people aren’t bringing enough counterplay in Arcane Barrier equipment. Unfortunately, Oldhim usually has enough blues and AB—plus Crown of Seeds—to get around Kano’s large arcane damage turns, Prism has always been a tough matchup, and Briar has access to Spellvoid 2 (Aether Wildfire’s Worst Enemy!) in Shock Charmers. The new Wizard pieces from Uprising are more sidegrade than anything else, giving Kano more pieces to deal with allies and the Wizard mirror. He could show up, but I wouldn’t expect him to be a top threat throughout the season. Finally, I don’t think Katsu actually received enough to propel him to victory. His new cards seem to hint at a list either using the Hundred Winds line or the CRU/EVR lines that build off of Soulbead Strike and Torrent of Tempo, but having tested the latter in the last meta, I just don’t think it’s there yet.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I don’t think this new meta will be that fundamentally different from the one from which we just emerged. With Starvo and Chane gone, the overall offensive power level of the available hero pool is a bit weaker. This should let some older heroes back into the fold and should also open up decklists that no longer need to run red Unmovables as a three-of. I could be proven wrong, most likely by either Dromai or Iyslander surprising me, Prism proving to struggle into the rest of the field, Oldhim being more beatable than I expect, or some combination therein (some of these things are tightly connected).

Don’t get me wrong: with three new heroes released while over 30% of players from the last meta find themselves in search of a new deck, this is an exciting and dynamic moment in the game’s history. It’ll certainly make events more enjoyable to be able to sit down across from your opponent without the dread of playing into a juggernaut like Starvo and Chane. I do think the next real meta shakeup will come when Prism leaves—her play patterns and cardpool currently have the most warping effect on what’s playable and what’s not—followed closely by when Oldhim leaves, as his ability to run pure fatigue is simply unmatched.

If you’re showing up to a Classic Constructed Road to Nationals on July 2nd or 3rd and are unsure of what to run, I’d pick up one of the heroes I discussed earlier in this article. Personally, I’m looking at Briar, Dorinthea, Fai, or Lexi. Even still, a part of me wants to just bring Dromai because I find her a joy to play and I love the challenge of breaking an underdog deck wide open. I could always just try to qualify at the Draft events, y’know?

Enjoyed the newsletter and want to share your thoughts? Hated it and want to berate me? I can’t enable comments yet because the pricing plans that would let me do that are simply too expensive, but I encourage you to reach me on Twitter @ghsher. As always, these posts are my entry into the communal discussion, and I look forward to hearing what others have to say!