Attacking Your Local Meta

I strut up to my local Pro Quest, ready to steamroll the competition with Gravy Bones, Shipwrecked Looter, the strongest deck in the format. He tops every metagame chart, he’s got a great matchup spread, I am so locked in for this tournament. Round one: I explode on turn three to an Oscilio. Round two: Dash I/O runs me over in short order. Round three: Kassai goes on premium ally-clearing duty while chipping me down with Cintari Sellswords. What the hell? I thought Gravy Bones was the best deck in the format! I thought if I wanted to win a tournament, I was supposed to play the best deck! And yet here I am, 0-3 on the day with what feels like the biggest target on my back. How could this happen to me?! 

Metagame data is a powerful tool, but it must be used responsibly. This is even more true at the local level, your Pro Quest and Road to Nationals seasons, where things can really start to deviate from the norm. The metagame in your city, state, or even specific LGS can (and often will) look vastly different from what you might expect to see in a Calling Day 2 conversion table, or even a Fablazing winrate matrix. This can be due to a variety of factors; some folks don’t spend as much money or time on FaB, some prefer to specialize on their “pet” deck (yes, I mean you, Rod, with your Rainbow Pummel Jarl), and others may not necessarily have their finger on the pulse of the week-to-week metagame shifts at the highest level. None of this is meant to denigrate anybody. There are very skilled Flesh and Blood players who choose not to engage with Organized Play at the most competitive, spikeopathic level, but still manage to excel in their local scene. This could mean they don’t have any interest in playing Necromancer or Assassin, but have no problem taking you on a deliberately-paced trip to pound town with Decimator Great Axe Fang. It could be that your area just really likes Lightning for some reason (it’s me, I’m your area), and you can reliably count on three to four Oscilios at your local events, besides a few more players already hyping up the inevitable return of Aurora. Whatever the circumstances may be, there can be localized metagames that look pretty hostile towards the “best” decks in the format. If you can reliably expect, out of a 32-person Pro Quest, a handful of Runeblades and Cindras (plus a cheeky Huntsman), that tournament suddenly looks very difficult for an Arakni, Marionette to win. If your local metagame has a lot of aggro decks such as Dash and Oscilio or Warriors like Fang and Kassai, you’d have to make a substantial prayer to the GEM Gods in order to make it through those swiss rounds as a Gravy Bones player. 

In this article, we’re going to go over how to identify your local metagame, what angles you might be able to attack from, and what factors could be beneficial or hostile towards your preferred hero. I’ll present these ideas with a few metagame charts from actual local RTNs and explain what to look out for, what to prepare for, and ideally how to break it wide open. I’ll highlight the classes and strategies that I think would thrive in these environments, which ones I would try to avoid registering, and some tech cards that can give you a much-needed edge in some otherwise tough matchups.