FAB Data Update: Briar Rules the Prerelease World

So, I was originally going to wait longer for results to come in on my Tales of Aria Prerelease tracking form before posting up some analysis, but games came in quicker than I thought they would (thanks to everyone who submitted data!) and the trends are… somewhat obvious. Briar has been incredibly successful at Tales of Aria prereleases. It’s not remotely close. In fact, Briar is doing so well that even if you combine the results from the other two heroes, they still don’t get a third of the wins! Here’s what the current data looks like:

Data current as of this writing (9/20/2021). Note that this table and chart will not update automatically after the article is published, so if more results come in they won’t be reflected here (though they will show up in the spreadsheet).

Note also that I manually removed some obvious duplicates, but there might be a few that I missed.

Note that Briar is probably somewhat less crazy than it looks here, as I don’t have base rate data for these events but quite suspect Briar was also the most played hero at these events. That said, I suspect she’s still quite overperforming. Briar’s arcane damage being mostly unblockable in Limited is a big asset, and even though Lexi and Oldhim can both get powerful attacks with Dominate in order to break through defenses, it looks like that wasn’t enough to unseat Briar from her throne.

Another interesting note is that Lexi took second place rather than Oldhim. The margins are relatively close there, but my personal thought going into the events (after a bit of testing, but nothing incredibly intense) had been that Briar > Oldhim > Lexi “by default”. Briar being the top of that list certainly seems to have been vindicated, but Oldhim didn’t do as well as Lexi.

So, does this mean that Tales of Aria Limited is a broken format? Not necessarily — what it means is that Briar was by far the strongest performer “at first glance”. It’s possible that if people play more Tales Sealed and better understand the format, they’ll catch on to some strong options that weren’t immediately apparent for prerelease weekend. Further, Draft and Sealed are very different formats, and Draft balance has a “self-correction” factor in that there may be more competition for options that are perceived as better.

Imagine a scenario where no matter how much thought people put in to Sealed, Briar continues to have a ridiculously favorable win rate. Even if that’s the case, Draft might still be quite interesting — after all, if your draft pod is full of people trying to get the “overpowered” Briar and you’re the only Oldhim or Lexi player, you might wind up with a much stronger deck that will be able to defeat the players who have been fighting over Runeblade cards.

All things considered, we don’t really know what the Tales of Aria Limited format will look like in the future — but what we do know is that Briar looks to have been a really, really strong pick out of the gate. I’ll be interested to see how things evolve (or don’t!) from here!