By: Yuki Lee Bender

Brewing for Competition Part 1: The Process

This article is part one of a two part series where I lay out the deck building process that I personally use in Flesh and Blood. In the next article, I will lead you through the steps that ultimately led me to register what would become the winning decklist for Canadian Nationals. One of the key ideas, most frequently talked about in decktech videos is the idea of a “core”, which is a set of cards that are key to the deck’s gameplan and do not change, regardless of the matchup. The rest of the cards are often described as “sideboard” cards, which can be brought in to target specific matchups. I use this idea myself in my Lexi decktech video, because it is very helpful for explaining to others how to sideboard and play the deck. However, I personally don’t believe this idea has much of a part at all in the early deck building process. When I build decks, the core is something that emerges naturally as a product of my process. Getting too fixated on identifying your core early on can actually limit your creativity and hamper your ability to build an effective deck and sideboard. In this article I will explain why deckbuilding is important and guide you through each of the steps I personally use when building a Classic Constructed deck in Flesh and Blood.

Why Does Deckbuilding Matter?

I personally believe access to good deckbuilding, through one’s own skills or through a teammate’s, is one of the most valuable assets a competitive Flesh and Blood player can have. Flesh and Blood is a young game with a relatively small amount of major competitive events and a limited flow of information being shared between players at any given time. All of this contributes to the metagame never being truly solved, for example look how open the metagame is right now even after the entirety of the Nationals season. This is very different from a game like Magic the Gathering, where the metagame is often solved within 2-3 weeks of format due to the sheer volume of games played online, leading all but the most dedicated players to be best served netdecking. In Flesh and Blood however, there is plenty of room for players to gain an edge through deckbuilding. Not to mention deck building can be very fun and rewarding.

The most recent example of deckbuilding to get an edge is Tariq Patel’s Lightning Briar list which took the Nationals season by storm. However, we have also seen this same trend in the past. There are too many pertinent examples to list them all, but here are a few relatively recent examples to consider. Team Arsenal Pass’ Chane deck from the Monarch metagame led Brendan Patrick to win multiple Road to Nationals events and fellow team member Dante Delfico to a top 4 finish in The Calling Las Vegas. Additionally, frequent innovator Matt Rogers took Midrange Viserai to a top 4 finish at The Calling Orlando. Finally, the example I am mostly personally in touch with, is brewing an Ice Lexi deck that effectively targeted the Lightning Briar deck was probably the largest factor that contributed to my win at Canadian Nationals.

The Deckbuilding Process

Deckbuilding is a non-linear process, where you frequently will go back to previous steps to make changes before testing your results again. Additionally, sometimes you may not be building a deck from the ground up, and instead just tweaking a deck. If this is the case, you do not necessarily always need to follow each and every one of these steps. That being said, this is my preferred deck building process, assuming I have enough time to see all of it through:

1. Start with an idea or goal in mind.
2. Build an optimized 60 card deck for each important matchup.
3. Identify key cards that work well in all of your important matchups.
4. Identify key cards in specific matchups.
5. Narrow down to 80 cards and test your matchups again with these setups.
6. Make changes to the 80 and go back to Step 5.

The best place to start building a deck is either with a central idea or goal in mind. A great example of a deck built around a specific strategy is Tariq Patel’s Lightning Briar deck. It is designed to efficiently use all of it’s cards without having to pitch, in order to pressure the opponent in ways that are difficult to block efficiently. The interview with Tariq on fabtcg.com is a fantastic read if you are curious about more of the history and inspiration for this deck. The second major inspiration for a deck, is if you have a specific goal in mind. For example, going into Canadian Nationals my goal was to find a deck that was favorable against both Briar and Bravo which ultimately led me to build my Ice Lexi list. Oldhim is another great example of a deck that mostly started to see play in response to the Briar dominated metagame.

Once you’ve clearly identified your idea or goal, the next step is to build an initial 60 card deck that can execute on that goal or strategy. As you playtest you will naturally make changes and refine your list, but as you play against a variety of decks, you may also identify that the strategy is more effective in certain matchups than others. For example, maybe you are happy with your anti-Bravo 60 card deck, but it doesn’t function well into the Viserai matchup. An ideal approach here is to build a whole new 60 card deck, which has one purpose - to defeat Viserai, even if it is substantially different from your build for defeating Bravo. This is the most important part of the process and may be a major shift in mindset for some players. The reason I like using this approach is because, when you are sideboarding before a game of Flesh and Blood, you are not just picking the best cards for each matchup. You are presenting a specific 60 card deck that has a strategy designed for that matchup. For each and every matchup, you are presenting a different deck with a different strategy. Certain matchups will have very similar 60 card configurations and strategies, but it’s important to think of each of them as distinct, because every hero requires you to play a little bit differently. 

At this stage, don’t worry about the “core” of your deck or if you could feasibly fit all the cards for this deck and your original 60. The goal here is not to construct your ideal 80 card deck just yet, but to learn what cards work well in specific matchups, and what strategies are available to your class in that matchup. You can then repeat this process for the rest of the decks you expect to encounter in an event. Often in the early stages of deckbuilding, I may have as many as 90-100 cards that I’ve identified as being useful in various matchups. This is okay and an important part of the deckbuilding process.

Sometimes, this new 60 card deck may have a dramatically different core strategy than your original deck. A great example of this is hybrid Prism lists which play an aggro herald gameplan into most matchups, but play auras into decks with lots of 6 power attacks like Bravo. There are of course exceptions to this rule, for example if you are working on an Ice Lexi list, you aren’t going to be able to play a full lightning list with lightning arrows. However, in general the more open you make this process, the more you will learn about which cards are key in that matchup. Additionally, it may help you identify weak matchups and identify if they are even worth teching for at all. For example, Bravo struggles quite a bit into Dash, regardless of the configuration he chooses to play, so we can determine Dash is likely not a deck worth devoting a large number of sideboard cards to. Additionally, if you discover early that the hero can’t have as strong a matchup as you would like into a certain strategy you expect to be prevalent, you can more quickly identify that perhaps it’s time to explore a different hero instead.

Once you’ve completed your ideal 60 card lists for each individual matchup, it is time to start working towards a more refined 80 card list. The best way to do this is to first identify which cards are ones that appear in all or most of your 60 card decks. These are usually cards that are universally powerful like Three of a Kind, or cards that are flexible role players that you are happy enough to run in a variety of matchups like Frost Lock which can range from a resource card to a power card depending on the matchup. As you assemble this list, you are actually creating an early draft of the “core” of your deck. What is powerful about this process, is that it allows you to construct your core in an organic way that ensures it is flexible and robust across your matchups. 

Now that you have the core of your deck, you should have a much better idea of how many extra slots you have for tech cards. Usually you won’t be able to fit everything you would ideally want in your deck. So, you can start by prioritizing the most impactful cards in matchups you expect to face often, as well as cards that perform well against multiple decks. I would highly recommend writing out each card sideboard card, and listing which matchups it performs well in next to it. This helps you see visually how valuable that card might be as part of your sideboard. In particular, cards that are flexible and can be roleplayers in multiple key matchups are very powerful. You may also make concessions in certain matchups if you do not expect to play that matchup often, or you feel confident enough in that matchup that you are happy to play fewer tech cards for it. 

If you are having trouble getting down to exactly 80 you could just cut some extras and opt to do some additional testing before deciding on a final list. I often spend a lot of time with a pool of ~85 cards I would like to have, and then fine tune various matchups and determine which ones are most important to include in the deck. Remember, that it is important to double check the ratios for these new 60 card decks all check out. Also, if the deck differs from your ideal 60 that you tested previously, you will want to spend some more time testing that matchup and ensuring the new deck still performs. 

Deckbuilding is an iterative process and often you will have to revisit previous stages. If you have an already established deck but just want to work on one problem matchup, consider building an ideal 60 card deck for that matchup and then seeing how many of those cards are needed and can fit with your core. Additionally, while this deck building method is very robust, it is also very time consuming. Often, you may need to find places where you can take shortcuts to speed up the process. In the Part 2 of this article series, I will discuss how I applied this process to brew the Ice Lexi deck I won Canadian Nationals with, when I had only two weeks to prepare.