It’s a brand new year! We want to wish everyone a happy New Year and hope 2023 is the best it can be for all of our friends out there! The holiday period might be behind us, but Flesh and Blood is the gift that keeps on giving. There’s lots to talk about; The next set release, the upcoming ProQuest season, new Armory promos and more. Let’s get into it!
January Armories:
Despite our best efforts, promotional material for January will be slightly delayed. On the plus side, the store is now fully restocked with its booster pack options, so you can choose from any set your heart desires to try your luck or select as prizes after events.
The event schedule is visible in our dedicated calendar here. As you can see, all of our Armories in the first three events of the month are scheduled to be Classic Constructed. This is so we can all get our practice on for the upcoming ProQuest event on the 21st. The WtR Draft special event is also taking place on the 14th. Please contact us to reserve a spot as we have limited availability for this event. Finally, as you can see in the last week of the month we are running a special Clash event. This is the first time we are running an event with this format, so make sure you familiarize yourself with its rules here. This is a community created format that seems promising, so we wanted to give it a shot in-store. It is a lot more budget friendly and allows for some innovation in deckbuilding.
Regardless of all of the above, we will be recording outcomes of the events, and any promotional material you are being owed will be given out as soon as we have them in hand. January’s Armory kit consists of the following:
- 1 Cold Foil Arakni, Huntsman to the winner of each event
- 1 Extended Art Rainbow Foil Cut to the Chase from any pitch value (2 of each available for each event) to 2nd - 7th place. Higher seed chooses first.
- 1 Surgical Extraction playmat to the point leader at the end of the month.
ProQuest Season 3:
If us shouting from the rooftops about this still has not been enough, Isengard will host its very first competitive Flesh and Blood event on the 21st of January! The winner receives both an invite to the FaB Pro Tour and a Gold Cold Foil. The prize pool for the rest of the field is also seriously lucrative so tell your friends, sleeve your decks and get your practice on for this momentous occasion.
You can read all about this event on our official event announcement here, pre-book your place in the tournament here (limited seats available) and share your excitement about the event on social media.
Outsiders:
The next set has been announced! Landing for pre-release on March 18th (more details about this event will follow in an upcoming announcement) and full release on the 24th of March, Outsiders will take us to the Pits, where all sorts of sinister machinations are at play. There’s little information known about the set itself as of the writing of this article, but if the rumors are anything to go by, Azalea and Mechanologist enthusiasts will get a lot of brand new toys to play with, and apparently this will be a 4 hero set. You can see the first card teased for this set below, which confirms Assassin as a class in the set as well, and if the speculation surrounding the relevant article are anything to go by, we’re also getting another new class, Alchemist! We haven’t had a 4 hero set since Monarch, so this will definitely have some interesting implications. You can be sure we’ll be keeping you updated with all the latest info about the set in each of our articles as we get closer to the set’s release.
Organized Play 2023:
Flesh and Blood really showed that it has what it takes to play with the best of them in the competitive card game scene. The past year has been the first official run of the Organized Play system offered by the game and there are some pretty impressive numbers to look through:
- 40,805 Armory Events
- 1220 Skirmish events across 2 seasons
- 296 Road to Nationals that qualified players for 37 National Championships
- 601 ProQuest events that qualified players for the Pro Tour
- 30 Battle Hardened
- 12 Callings in Indianapolis, Krakow, Taiwan, New Jersey, Las Vegas, Madrid, Sydney, Utrecht, Singapore, Lille, Charlotte, and San Jose.
- 3 World Premiere weekends in Las Vegas, Madrid, and Sydney
- 2 Pro Tours in USA and France
- 1 World Championship in San Jose
Nearly a million matches have been sanctioned through the GEM system and there are no signs of any of the above slowing down. 2022 was the year FaB proved itself. 2023 looks like a year of stabilizing the game’s current foothold and giving itself room to grow. All of what I’ll be mentioning below has been detailed in this article by the game’s creator James White. Here I’ll be summarizing the important bits and giving my two cents on the matter.
The Organized Play pathway has been detailed before and remains largely unchanged. Broken down into 4 Tiers, each providing a certain level of competition, from the most casual to the most competitive. As a community we too have grown, and as such more and more of these kinds of events are being awarded to our store. 2023 will be the first year Cyprus will have a ProQuest event. We are also receiving more frequent Pre-release and Skirmish events. As a community we want you all to help spread the word about this incredible game. It’s the only reason we were able to grow at the rate which we have been so far, and the only way we can continue to have more and more large scale events.
The $1million minimum commitment for competitive events has been upheld and is still the promise made by LSS for this year.
The main takeaway from the following section is the fact that LSS takes into account player feedback and wants to improve in a way that benefits everyone. Unlike certain other companies…
They aim to have more lead time heading towards major events, so that players can more comfortably make arrangements, such as traveling and accommodation. This is great to hear, especially for places such as Cyprus where traveling abroad is always a big undertaking.
LSS was not able at this time to provide the full details of all the events of 2023 but could provide some information about them. Specifically they mention that there will be three major events, each tied with one of the three major releases of the year. We are going to have 2 new standalone (draftable) sets, one of which will be the aforementioned Outsiders set releasing this March, and 1 expansion (non-draftable) set. Each of these releases will break down into ‘seasons’ with each having a major event tied to it as well as more local programs. Here is the breakdown:
|
Season |
Product |
Pinnacle Event |
Seasonal Programs |
|
March - June |
Outsiders |
Pro Tour 3 (USA) |
Road to Nationals, Skirmish Season 6 |
|
July - September |
Expansion Set |
National Championships |
Skirmish Season 7 |
|
October - January |
Standalone Set |
World Championship |
ProQuest Season 4 |
Details for the Pro Tour are not yet final, but will take place late April/early May. This will be especially important for our ProQuest winner in January. This Pro Tour will have a total payout of $200,000, since there will not be a second PT this year.
There will also be more Battle Hardened events around the world, and though we don’t expect any to happen in Cyprus, these events are options we can explore as a community for traveling to.
Calling cash payouts are also being revamped to reach further down the standings than they have been in the past. To achieve this, LSS has introduced a tiered payout system based on expected attendance of each Calling event.
More lead time between a new set release and the first bigger events taking place. This will allow players to acquire the new cards they need and also have ample time to test new strategies.
And that is all for this article. As always, you can check all about what we’re talking about in the relevant articles on the official FaB website, or if you’re too lazy to read, just pop by the store and ask the gatekeeper. I’m sure he will have all the answers and get nothing wrong ever.