Michael Hamilton’s trophy case for Flesh and Blood accolades is running out of space. His number of major titles is somehow already higher than the age of the game. The three-time Calling winner is also the reigning World and U.S. National champion. But there is one signature win he’s missing — a Pro Tour title.
It’s not like Hamilton has had a lot of chances. Flesh and Blood’s third Pro Tour is set for this weekend in Baltimore, MD and will test the best players in the world in Classic Constructed and Outsiders Draft. The tournament features a $200,000 prize pool with $50,000 for first place. For Hamilton, it’s another shot to become a Pro Tour champion and build on his quickly growing legacy.
Despite only playing Flesh and Blood for a year and a half, Hamilton is considered by his peers as the best player in the game. And it’s not just his fellow competitors giving him that praise, his results and No. 1 Constructed Elo and No. 4 Limited Elo ratings hammer it home. He has surpassed players who have competed since the game’s creation in 2019. He won the first World Championship in November. He won the only National Championship he entered two months before that. He has made the Top 8 in all four of the individual Callings he has played, winning three of them, including back-to-back wins in Orlando in November of 2021 and Indianapolis in March of 2022.
But Hamilton still hasn’t played on a Pro Tour Sunday. Of course, he hasn’t bombed out of one either. He finished in 17th place at Pro Tour 1 in Secaucus, New Jersey and 24th at Pro Tour 2 in Lille, France — results many would take in an instant. Still, the allure of becoming a Pro Tour Champion, an accomplishment heralded in multiple TCGs, remains.
“A Pro Tour is the last type of event that I haven’t won, but it’s also the last kind of event that I’d like to win,” Hamilton said. “Winning the PT is the goal I have, but on a more achievable goal, I really want to feel like I am happy with my play and my processes for testing.”
That mind set of working on and tuning the process of preparing is one of the things that makes Hamilton great. There is no rest when there is always a next tournament. There is no basking in the glory of his incredible rise to the top of the game. He still struggles to articulate an answer when asked to point out what separates him from the other top players or even reflect on his dominance. What he can formulate is the route he took to become the player he is now.
While there are many important things to learn in Flesh and Blood — figuring out how to use your armor, how to preserve threats in your deck, and pitch stacking (remembering where and when you will redraw cards you used earlier in the game for resources) — Hamilton said the most important skill, by far, is getting the most value from your hands. Not only how to generate the maximum value from each hand you draw in terms of dealing damage or preventing damage, but doing it quickly enough to let you parse different lines of play depending on what the opponent might do.
“Learning that and getting good at that very early allowed me to shift my mental energy to other things. Like pitch stacking with Starvo and Oldhim, figuring out my plans with Iyslander in a bunch of different matchups, and identifying how to specifically disrupt their hands and stop them from getting value based on the different cards they could have,” Hamilton said. “A lot of people jump into to trying these more complicated mechanics, but then they miss out maximizing their hands. You can have these perfect pitch stacks, have good decision making on how to use your armor, but if you are leaving a point of value on the table every other turn, you just are going to lose a bunch of games by a couple points.”
Hamilton mastered this aspect of the game first and it has turned into his trademark among his rivals. Tariq Patel, the current Canadian National Champion and former U.S. National Champion, even references Hamilton when testing with some of the top players in Canada. If someone leaves a point of damage on the table or doesn’t get the most value of out their hand, they say, “That isn’t what Mike would have done.” Being like Mike, borrowing a fitting slogan from a classic Gatorade commercial featuring Michael Jordan, is the goal when evaluating how to play hands. Patel singles out that ability when talking about Hamilton’s play.
“There are a lot of high-level players from all around the world in Flesh and Blood, but I think what elevates Michael to a level beyond your average pro is his uncanny ability to not only always play fundamentally and mathematically sound, but also be able to have very high situational awareness on when to deviate,” Patel said. “His Top 8 match at Worlds comes to mind where he traps his opponent’s defense reaction in arsenal, functionally winning the game. Then again in the finals of the most recent Calling in Indianapolis where he is able to deviate from his original game plan and find a winning avenue in what was originally a very bleak situation.”
But even with the amount of success he has found, Hamilton still attributes much of his success to luck. A timely draw here, an opponent’s mistake there, fading a bad matchup until in the later rounds of the tournament to lessen the blow on his tiebreakers. Recognizing his success and internalizing it doesn’t get any easier as the wins pile on and his notoriety rises.
“I am trying to get it into my head that I have really good results, but even if I am the best player, a lot of those [wins] are because I got lucky in quite a few spots. Knowing that, I feel like there shouldn’t be the pressure, but I still feel it” Hamilton said. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to sitting down for a match with someone I’ve never met before, saying, ‘Hi, I’m Michael’ and them saying, ‘I know who you are.'”
And with mounting success comes increasing pressure. At this point, the question isn’t will he do well, it’s when will he have a bad event? He felt the pressure growing after Nationals, especially after taking a month off work to prepare for Worlds. By winning the World Championship he pushed the pressure onto the next event. He thought that pressure would be lifted at the Indianapolis Calling earlier this year. He wasn’t confident in his deck choice for the event and figured it would be let down. Then he won that event, too.
“I expected to do a lot worse at Indianapolis than I did. I was thinking this would be the tournament that I do bad at and then stop pressuring myself to do well at everything, then that didn’t happen,” Hamilton said. “So, now I feel a lot of pressure going into to the Pro Tour, and I also feel very underprepared for it compared to where I would like to be.”
Unlike his early days around the end of Monarch’s Road to Nationals season, where he learned the game by playing Blitz decks and sealed with his friend, Roger Bodee, Hamilton has a massive team surrounding him. Hamilton and Bodee joined The Wolfpack, a testing team started by Ian Shaffer, Timothy Bunn, and Zach Bunn, at the end of June 2022 right before Pro Tour Lille. The team now has more than 20 members, including other top players like Michael Feng and Brodie Spurlock.
Like most modern testing teams, The Wolfpack use a Discord channel to streamline testing. Each hero has its own section, players share match feedback, maintain decklists, and the group manages to get together for a weekly team meeting. One of the main focuses going into the Pro Tour is practicing Outsiders draft. Friday and Saturday of the Pro Tour will each have a draft portion and the tournament will be the most high-profile event to showcase the set for Limited.
Without a digital client, drafting sets in Flesh and Blood is a tall order. The team manages to pull it off, but the time it takes to organize a draft is significant. Because of this, Hamilton puts a premium on playing more games with the draft decks than firing more drafts. He doesn’t find the idea of agonizing of draft pick orders worth the time.
“It can be really fun to draft the cards and draft cool decks and be like ‘this deck felt really good’ then want to draft again. But I think you get a lot more out of playing the draft games and looking at how the cards preform in the games than you do the drafting process,” Hamilton said. “Pick orders are great for the first three picks of the draft but then suddenly everything is very contextual. It is good to have baseline to know what you are deviating from, but it’s not as important as knowing which cards go well with which cards and what you need.”
Another wrinkle for Outsiders draft has emerged after the community discovered the pack print runs change depending on which region the cards were printed. Drafting experiences varied if the packs being opened came from Belgium or Japan. Legend Story Studios (LSS), the company that makes Flesh and Blood, published a statement that a solution will be implemented involving a unique booster mix to ensure fairness for all competitors. This fix will reward players who focus on proper draft fundamentals and not memorizing pack print runs.
Classic Constructed will make up the remainder of the rounds, including the Top 8 playoff. Outsiders looks to have a huge impact on the format with Rangers getting a boost thanks to Codex of Frailty taking the class from borderline unplayable to potentially top tier. Hamilton points to that and Premeditate and Bonds of Ancestry as the three most-notable cards from the latest set.
Just because Rangers like Azalea and Lexi are suddenly viable, Hamilton doesn’t think Ranger experts will have an edge due to how long the field has had to adjust and learn the heroes. That said, he still believes Azalea, Lexi, and Oldhim are in contention for being the best deck for the Pro Tour. Hamilton is no stranger with Oldhim, having won a Calling with the Elemental Guardian, but he still hasn’t picked a deck to sleeve up yet.
“I still don’t know what I am playing at the PT, so it’d be hard for me to say there is a best deck and then not know what I am playing, because I’d probably be playing it if we were convinced it was the best deck,” Hamilton said. “I’d say there are a few decks that could be perceived to be the best deck, but we still don’t know which one is the best.”
While Hamilton still has a lot to figure out between now and the start of the Pro Tour on Friday morning, working with his team helps relieve some of the pressure he puts on himself. As a competitor, he still very much wants to win, but he also wants to see his teammates do well after how much they have helped him. On top of working with The Wolfpack, Hamilton has more Flesh and Blood outlets since quitting his job to go full-time playing the game and making content. Hamilton and Bodee produce a Flesh and Blood podcast where they often feature teammates to discuss news and events. When he isn’t testing or making content, Hamilton has even added coaching to his docket.
Hamilton makes use of his additional free time since quitting his job by spending time with his wife, playing video games, hosting board game nights, and dabbling in game design. A familiar path with top players in card games is to work for the company making the game when they are finished competing, but Hamilton isn’t close to that point yet.
“I’m not at a point where I would want to step away from competitive Flesh and Blood. I love the game a lot and I really enjoy competing,” Hamilton said. “I love game design, I am designing a little game for my friends to play on my birthday and I’ll do it as a hobby for a while, but for now, I am good with FAB.”
For Hamilton, The Wolfpack, and all of the best Flesh and Blood players in the world, the Pro Tour offers a chance at history. Watch every round of action Twitch.tv/starcitygames starting at 9 AM ET Friday-Sunday.