If I’m going to meet one of my goals for my 2nd year playing Flesh and Blood - to top 8 a Tier 2 (or higher) level tournament - I’m going to need some practice. When I started preparing for the upcoming ProQuest season I thought about how I should practice most effectively. In this post I’ll share some of my approach, including the positives and negatives I’ve encountered so far.

I’m a father with a demanding job, so I don’t have a lot of time to play. I can usually only play in one Armory a week, if that. Playing 3-4 games a week just isn’t going to cut it if I want to actually get any better. I don’t have friends that play more than casually or a testing group to play with so, for now at least, I’m on my own. This is tough because I’m no expert at competetive card games. I can’t rely on my own experience to get me caught up to the field of more seasoned players. Even if I were more experienced, I would still certainly benefit from outside perspectives and the wisdom of a larger group of individuals testing out a wider range of ideas. In lieu of a play group I’ll have to look for alternative means of getting outside my own head when testing.

With all of this in mind, my practice regimen for the past few weeks has revolved around playing and recording games on Talishar, while supplementing with content from the community and data from online games. I have a puppy that wakes us up pretty early, usually around 5 AM, which leaves me with an hour or two every morning that I’ve been able to designate as practice time. With Talishar I can at easily find people to play against whenever I have time to get in some games. But I know that just playing isn’t enough. I need to play with with purpose if I’m going to get better. I make sure to not have other stuff going on when I’m playing… no second screen or even music playing. I’ve found that playing on-line, especially in back-to-back games, it’s far too easy to kind of go on auto-pilot and you end up not getting anything out of the time spent “practicing”. Staying focused on the game, talking out play lines on mic in real-time, and knowing that I’m recording for later review helps me stay present and get more out of the games as I play.

Watching replays has been absolutely invaluable. I start out each practice session by reviewing at least one or two games. In my reviews I have been focusing on analyzing play lines as well as working out matchups. I pause as I go through games to take notes, mostly to help work out thoughts and reinforce lessons learned, not expecting to go back and review the notes themselves. I have found so many instances where having the extra time and separation from a game while watching a recording allows me to EASILY catch mistakes or suboptimal plays that I completely missed live. I can also kind of “data mine” my recordings to more efficiently answer questions I have. Is it better to run Mask of Momentum or Pouncing Lynx into a particular matchup as Fai? I can quickly scrub through a few recordings where I’ve played out one or both masks and analyze how things played out. Maybe some people can do this on the fly as they play, but I can’t. Honestly, I can’t recommend recording your games and rewatching them highly enough.

I am using OBS to do the actual screen recordings. It’s free, easy to use, and seems to work great. Recording a voice-over as I play is helpful to me in two regards. As I mentioned above, it helps me stay focused on the game rather than switching over to Twitter or whatever if I’m waiting for my opponent to take a turn. It also helps me understand my thought process when reviewing the game. I have definitely encountered situations where in the replay I clearly see a different, much better line than I played in the match, and having the voice over helps me understand what the hell I might have been thinking to make the play I actually made.

When playing on Talishar, I’ve been playing in the competetive CC queue. I find the level of play higher, the meta more realistic (although still skewed I think), and have encountered far fewer people dropping out of lobbies because the don’t like the matchup or their roll. At the end of each match I take a minute to look over the stats page and quickly recap in real-time. This process is helpful for analyzing my play or my opponents play, and it also buys me a bit of time so I’m not just queueing back into the same opponent, which I find happens if I jump straight into the next match.

Besides playing and reviewing my games online, another key practice tool has been searching out and consuming high quality content on-line. I listen to a variety of podcasts (Arsenal Pass and the M-n-R podcast are especially great resources for strategy), watch gameplay on YouTube for particular matchups, and read guides/deck techs when I can find them. This has been really helpful, of course, and is something I’ve been doing for a while now. But I find that I take so much more away from this content when combined with my own practice games and gameplay reviews. For instance, I’ve been testing a lot of Fai lately, particularly the deck that Daniel Rutkowski played in Worlds. Daniel and his teammate Yuanji posted a very helpful video explaining the deck on the Runaways YouTube channel. This video (and their earlier video covering the similar US Nationals deck) was critical for getting me started quickly when I first picked up the deck. But there is a lot of information in these videos. Some of it is subtle but really important, and wont sink in until I actually put in some time with the deck. For instance, the utility of Razor Reflex didn’t click for me until actually playing against Oldhim and his ice reacts.

The last key tool I’ve been leveraging for testing is Fabrary. Of course, Fabrary is great for building and manage decks. I especially love the matchup feature for making sideboard plans, especially since you can load in your sideboard on Talishar with the click of a button. But beyond deck management, Fabrary has been super helpful as an analytical tool. It tracks your games played on Talishar, so you can review stats from your own gameplay including win percentages into different heroes, as well as which cards you use and how you use them (pitch vs. block vs. play). I’ve also found the meta stats quite handy, although I take them with a grain of salt. I find some of the results don’t match my experience, and I always try to think through why. For instance, Fai currently has a 45% win rate into Dori. I don’t believe that matchup is Dori favored, though. I imagine the stats might be skewed because Dori really punishes newer players, so her win rate is likely higher than it would be in a competetive environment. Or maybe other Fai lists struggle into Dori more than the Runaways list I’m running. Either way, the meta stats on Talishar don’t match my specific experience in all cases, and I think are best used as another source of imperfect information. But imperfect as it is, it’s still useful. I particularly like the fact that they show win rate when going 1st or 2nd, and have found the choice with the higher win rate is typically in line with what I think the choice should be. At this point, I’m opting to go with what the stats say is right until I come up with a good reason to do otherwise.

To summarize my testing approach:

  • play games daily on Talishar
  • record games and review daily
  • supplement with wisdom from the community
  • leverage data available through Fabrary to guide strategy

There are some drawbacks to this approach, and things I want to tweak as I go forward.

First of all, I find it difficult to systematically test specific deck choices or gameplans when queueing into public queues on Talishar. You don’t really get to choose your opponent, and even if the hero you’re playing against is the same, the build and pilot likely changes, so there are a lot of variables at play. When making deck building or stratetic decisions, it would be ideal to change one or only a few things at a time to isolate the impact, and that’s pretty much impossible when playing in public queues. So far, I’ve had so much to learn and improve upon that it’s actually been beneficial to play a lot of games against a lot of different opponents. But I expect I’ll hit a point of diminishing returns and want to focus on more controlled testing sooner or later.

So far I’ve been very focused on my one hero, and trying to work out gameplans based on my playtesting experiences. I have not been doing as much as I should to understand the decks and gameplans of my key matchups. Ideally I would spend at least some testing time reviewing and even playing other heroes. This would give me a much clearer understanding of what my opponents are trying to do and what their weaknesses are so I could better optimize my gameplans.

Speaking of gameplans, while I have high level plans in my head for approaching various matchups, and I would like to do more to articulate, poke holes in, and improve my matchups. I might have a hard time truly refining my deck lists and plans without more controlled testing, but I expect there is a lot of room for improvement before I get to that point. I would like to start by writing down my matchups, including macro strategy, rationale behind sideboard choices, and specific play lines (on my side and my opponents side) to watch out for. I expect that when I do this I will uncover a lot of questions or issues, and I should take those specific questions into my review sessions and games to provide some clear objectives for my testing time.

A more deliberate, consistent testing approach has been extremely helpful. I can actually see the improvement in my gameplay over time and have significantly improved my general understanding of Flesh and Blood in the process. I’ll continue to look for ways to learn and improve as a player.