Victory for the Light! (Calling: Las Vegas Analysis/Takeaways)
The Calling: Las Vegas is over, and it came with a surprising result! Meta favorite Chane was doing very well in the event, taking almost half of the Day Two cut (29/64 slots) and more than half of the top eight, with five Chane players going into the final cut. After the round of eight, two of the non-Chane players were defeated, so the top four was three Chanes and one Prism. However, Prism player Tyler Horspool managed to overcome his Chane opponents and win out, taking the Calling win and the prizes, renown, and Elo points that go with it!
This result likely took a lot of people in the community by surprise — including me! In fact, based on statistics from the Road to Nationals season this was a real underdog story — Tyler took one of the statistically worst-performing heroes and won out against the statistically best-performing hero, going 7-1 in his eight games against Chane during the event! (For more on the statistical performance of these heroes, see my earlier post re: base rates.)
Generally speaking, the conventional wisdom among many experienced players going into Vegas was that fatigue decks were obsolete against Chane following the Road to Nationals season. More experienced Chane players were able to use Chane’s banishes and access to Go Again to create giant turns that were very difficult for fatigue decks to deal with. In particular, Rift Bind allowed for very high damage when combined with many non-attack actions, and Chane players would at times let multiple copies of Rift Bind and Seeds of Agony sit in banish in order to “charge up” for a huge turn.
While Snag (warning to anyone looking it up: this card has really gross gory art) looked like it might be able to stop this plan at first — indeed, fatigue builds with Snag picked up multiple wins in the early weeks of the Road to Nationals season — Chane players were able to counter fatigue decks via a combination of experience and some previously-unpopular Go Again sources such as Seeping Shadows and Flock of the Feather Walkers. By the end of the Road to Nationals season, fatigue seemed like a poor plan against veteran Chane players, with defensive builds like Bravo or control Katsu putting up much worse results. (Control Katsu in particular seems like such a bad option at this phase in the meta that experienced player Dimos K recently wrote a brief article questioning why anyone was playing it at all!)
While most fatigue decks might be faltering in the broader meta, Tyler was able to stop his opponents using a build that had not just Snag but also Arc Light Sentinel to disrupt the big setup turns that Chane players have been putting together to try and break through against fatigue decks. It may be possible to play around Snag, but the combination of Snag and Arc Light Sentinel seemed to be a bridge too far, letting Prism shut down some of Chane’s big attack turns in the late game. In one game in the cut Tyler even went up against a Chane player who had a sideboarded Timesnap Potion to counter Arc Light Sentinel — only for Tyler to deploy a second Arc Light Sentinel on the key turn, destroying Chane’s momentum and wasting a bunch of non-attack actions that had been played to power up Rift Bind!
Arc Light Sentinel stares down those Rift Binds and says “bring it!” Did you know Prism is visible in the art of this card?
Flesh and Blood TCG is © Legend Story Studios.
Further, the fact that Tyler was going for a fatigue strategy out of Prism seemed to take opponents off guard — I saw multiple opponents using sideboard cards like Lunartide Plunderer or Ninth Blade of the Blood Oath against Tyler during streamed games — cards that are much better against Herald aggro and don’t much advance Chane’s game plan against fatigue.
Here are some of my other takeaways from the event in more detail:
Chane is strong, but not unbeatable. While Chane has put forth an excellent performance across the Road to Nationals season and many (I think rightfully) saw him as “the deck to beat”, it was still possible to defeat him with the right build and approach to the matchup.
…that said, Chane still did really well. No, he didn’t take the final, but Chane still did really well up until that point. Based on CFB’s unofficial meta breakdown, Chane was 22% of the field. However, he ended up with over 34.3% of the top 64 cut, over half of the top 8, and 75% of the top 4! This is a very strong performance and reflects that Chane is still a powerful deck.
Decks that have multiple strategies can get an advantage in sideboarding. In Flesh and Blood’s Classic Constructed format, matches are best of one but you get to sideboard based on seeing your opponent’s hero selection. However, some heroes can play multiple different strategies and the opponent may not know which one when they’re deciding their sideboard.
As I mentioned earlier, Tyler seemed to profit from opponents running anti-Herald cards that didn’t help much against fatigue — similarly, Katsu decks are hard to sideboard against if you don’t know whether the build is aggro/control/midrange, Boltyn can run either Raydn aggro or Cintari Sabers combo, and even Dorinthea (an extremely aggressive hero) won two Road to Nationals with a control build that equips the unpopular Hatchet of Body/Hatchet of Mind rather than her famous Dawnblade!Channel Fireball did better than I’d expected on social distancing. As some may remember, I ultimately decided not to go to this event thanks primarily to COVID risks — however, I was impressed by the pictures that I saw of the convention floor. While of course some risk is always going to exist, CFB’s table spacing and seating seemed to have achieved much less dense a layout than I’d feared and players looked to be doing a good job of wearing masks during the event.
Flesh and Blood has a lot of fans! It’s pretty impressive that such a young game was able to get over a thousand people in for its first really major event in the United States. Hopefully this will bring an end to some of the overblown claims with respect to “oh nobody actually plays Flesh and Blood, it’s all investors” and so on.
Lastly, I want to add that Tyler’s victory was really fitting and thematic from a lore perspective!
Yes, it looked like the Shadows were unstoppable and hero after hero fell before Chane’s attacks. However, just as some assumed the battle was lost, one hero of the Light was able to hold off Chane’s onslaught for long enough for his demonic pacts to come back and consume him.
In fact, even though an Eclipse fell over the battlefield as Chane summoned a deadly demon to try and defeat Prism in the final battle, the Light hero was able to keep up a desperate defense, ultimately fighting back to slay the demon with a mighty Herald before defeating Chane as well! One can hardly ask for a more cinematic finale to the event — I find myself reminded of the dramatic Monarch box art with angels and demons confronting one another in the skies. As we look towards Tales of Aria and the future of Flesh and Blood TCG, I hope that future finals matches can be as cool and exciting as that one!
