calling 100.

saturday, october 10th, 2026.

Zippi and I standing in front of the Calling 100 display in Atlanta.

Before I get into things, here's my Calling 100 Slippy decklist!

Y'all. We had an amazing time at Calling 100 in Atlanta last weekend. The main event, the 100th Calling, sold out within an hour and a half online— turns out that people want to see big events in Atlanta and they really wanted to get their hands on this friggin' cool promo alt-art copy of Sink Below that LSS gave away at a bunch of the side events. Zippi and I managed to get our hands on 6 copies between the two of us and, despite the exorbitant valuation of the card, I think I'm going to just play with a playset of them. As a sort of commemoration for an amazing weekend.

Perhaps the biggest thing for me, personally, was making day 2 of my first tier 3 event! More on that later. Aside from that, we had a great time seeing a bunch of our friends, both from our LGS in middle Georgia and from the Atlanta area. We saw some great cosplays, saw some great art (snagged a bunch of tokens from Opus Arts), jammed a bunch of fun games, and even got to see Daði Freyr perform at the Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points. The Daði show? Amazing. One guy on a stage, a bunch of instruments and synthesizers and some displays showing some weird-ass art? I don't know how he managed to do it but he had everyone in that venue dancing and having a great time. Super recommend catching him live if you get a chance.

top 32 slippy.

The Calling sold out at 600 players, and I managed to make it to friggin' 31st piloting this Arakni, 5L!p3d 7hRu 7h3 cR4X deck. Went 9-4 over two days of the most fun Flesh & Blood I've ever experienced at the competitive level. Considering this is the first time I've even made day 2, I'm chuffed as hell. Hopefully this is the first of many strong competitive runs for Slippy and me!

Friday, I played a few CC side events with my planned tournament deck expecting a bunch of fatigue opponents. Turns out, my local meta is not what the meta was at the Marriott Marquis that weekend. I ran into a bunch of warriors, ninjas, brutes, and Dash I/O players. Reading the room, I realized that the meta for the weekend was more aggro, so I decided to go back to the hotel room that night and rebuild my decklist. Took out anti-fatigue tools like Enlightened Strike and Hyper Inflation, siding in a few silver bullets for decks I expected to see: Frailty Trap for the warriors and CNC & Descend into Madness for Jarl and any other fatigue guardians I might see.

On Saturday at 9:00am, I paired into a player running counterburn Oscilio— a deck incredibly strong against redline aggro decks like the one I was playing. My plan, aside from lose since I'd written that matchup off, was to try to lean forward and race my opponent down. Anyway, Oscilio sent 20+ arcane at me in turn 1 or 2 and there was just no way I was coming back from that. Turns out, my round 1 opponent, Thomas Battaglia, eventually won the Calling!

"Oh, so this is how the Calling is gonna go," I thought to myself, dismayed. But the rest of the day I paired into 3 Boltyns, a Levia, a Kassai, and a Cindra. Perfect! Just the sorts of decks I rewickered my deck to tech against in the hotel room the night before. Frailty Trap was a rockstar in the warrior MUs— sometimes getting 8-10 value on Boltyn's Lumina Ascension turns off of one card. Ended up with a 7-1 record on day 1. More on the warrior MUs below.

the midrange sideboard.

The main deck for my Calling 100 list was 48 cards. So you need at least 12 cards to have a legal 60. Here's the sideboard I presented for most of the warrior MUs:

And equipment:

The general idea with my play into warriors is this: 8 dreacts lets me bait out their attack reacts and power plays, then cover up on-hits. The rest of the deck is geared to straight value play and disruption.

An example Slippy hand: Sink, Lobotomy, LFAS, and Codex of Frailty.

As an example, an ideal hand might be:

Generally, when playing this Slippy deck, I try to keep one hand slot free for equipping a dagger. If I had this hand, I'd block with the Sink Below, then on my turn: CL1 Lobotomy equipping an Orbitoclast, then flick the Orbitoclast for its on-hit effect and a resource off of Blood Splattered Vest. CL2 Looking for a Scrap off of the BSV resource, banishing the Orbitoclast for 5 go again. Break chain, Codex into LNW (or Meet Madness / Mark of the Black Widow / Lobotomy if no LNW to target). Total value: 4 on Sink block, 3+1 on Lobotomy / flick, 5 on LFAS, 4 on Codex / LNW, plus disruption / frailty / ponder. 17 value by straight block / dmg math, maybe +6 if you count disruption and ponder at 3 value each.

This is the sort of Christmasland hand Slippy hopes to build to gain tempo and outvalue its opponents. My goal into warrior and other midrange decks is to survive long enough to see these crazy hands. You have 60 cards to dig through and a lot of cards that aren't necessarily relevant for the MU. One of the great things about playing Assassin is that most cards turn sideways and block 3. Sending the occasional Mark of the Black Widow or Meet Madness on your way to drawing your power hands is usually enough to keep your opponents off of a full grip of 4 or 5 cards.

Against ninjas like Fai or Cindra, you could swap out the TTox for Horrors of the Past, which is an absolutely fantastic disruptive tool for chain link 2. They're not inclined to block, so the TTox will be less useful there. Instead: do what you can to prevent Mask of Momentum or Mask of the Pouncing Lynx from drawing a card. Lynx is going to happen during the game— try to block it on their last or second-to-last chain link.

the racing sideboard.

For Oscilio, Levia, and other accelerating decks: you need to put them down as fast as possible before they can build up the tools to do crazy damage to you. I'm pairing arcane Oscilio and Levia together here because your goal is simple: race them down. The sideboards look slightly different but the goal is basically the same.

Here's a sideboard for arcane Oscilio:

And equipment:

I'll be the first to admit, arcane Oscilio is one of the 2 worst matchups this Slippy build has. Do what you can to disrupt them and outvalue them. CNC is nice even if they can usually play instants out of their arsenal to evade the on-hit: it's still 6 damage that they can't block with their dreacts. Horrors of the Past is great for disruption because you can sidestep a blocked Persuasive Prognosis with Prognosis number two, or whatever other disruption you might send on chain link 1. It's pretty much the perfect "make your opponent make bad blocking decisions" card into aggro MUs.

And a sideboard for Levia:

And equipment:

The Levia MU is a weird one. She can send threats in the early game, but her gameplan is to build up her banished zone with playable Blood Debt attacks and enough Gates to i'Arathael and a Blasmophet to put together a turn or two of 30+ damage in the midgame. During the early game, your turn value is significantly higher and your disruption makes it harder for her to build up her midgame beast mode. An ideal early game hand would have something like:

The Sink Belows are there to help prevent on-hit Blasmophets & Gates and dig for your disruptive threats. You really want to prevent them from creating ways to play cards from their banished zone. A Mark of the Black Widow and a Spike with Bloodrot is a disruptive 8 value play on 2 cards (plus 1 of flick Klaive damage, which generates the resource for Spike off of BSV).

Sideboard for Levia entirely depends on whether or not she presents Scowling Flesh Bag— if she does, you want fewer attack reactions that she can intimidate out of your hand. If not, TTox is just a great way to ensure your disruptive stealths hit, maybe get a 6 value out of on a Kiss of Death, and potentially snipe a piece of temper equipment.

the fatigue sideboard.

As I mentioned above, I changed my Slippy decklist to focus on aggro / warrior more than fatigue decks like Betsy and Jarl. This deck's Jarl MU is abysmal. So take everything below with a grain of salt. I had to write off some matchups, and fatigue and counterburn Oscilio were the ones I hoped to not pair against.

Equipment for fatigue MUs:

Pretty much just fatdeck, I suppose? CNC is nice because your opponent's going to be on a bunch of dreacts. Descend into Madness was a terrible attempt at a silver bullet for Jarl— the idea was I'd send 2 cards, then react with Descend to hopefully break up their three card Oaken Old / Crumble to Eternity turns. It worked once, but I wound up getting fatigued in my one Jarl MU on day 2.

If I were to rebuild this deck to have a fighting chance against Jarl and fatigue guardians, I think I'd have 2x Enlightened Strike, 2x Hyper Inflation, and maybe a Death Touch, Inertia Traps, or Codices of Inertia in my sideboard. CNC and Descend underperformed and I think Pick Up the Point is a "meh" sort of filler card that can be argued against. Enlightened Strike and Hyper Inflation are absolute goats into any deck with a bunch of dreacts, though. Especially if those decks aren't presenting tunic— they'd have to pitch a card to block with their dreacts and thus you get more space & tempo to put together your threats and threaten them instead of getting perpetually Oaken / Felling / Plow Under / Ancient Earth Oak'd turn over turn.

day 2 & wrap-up.

Day 2 was where the top 8 had to be separated out from the almost-top-8s. I wound up losing to Andrew Lorenz' Fai, William Pistel's Levia, and Yasunari Sakuma's Jarl but winning 2 more against Tre Baroncini's Fai and David Bruner's Levia. Other than Yasu's Jarl, my other 2 losses were probably winnable— I made sideboarding / blocking mistakes against Lorenz (why did I have Pick Up the Point???) and the Pistel MU dragged on long enough for him to build up Levia's midgame beast mode. Better hands and play would've tilted that one!

But, that's plenty enough bellyaching. The folks that make top 8 on a Calling with six hundred players are the cream of the crop and I'm just glad I got to make my first ever day 2! Getting to rub elbows with a bunch of famous names was truly a delight and I'm beyond chuffed to have made it as far as I did. Getting paid $250 for placing as high as I did was truly a cherry on top of an amazing weekend. Plus the top tables were generally full of positivity— I particularly enjoyed playing against and laughing with David Bruner. I was smiling during our whole match!

So, yeah— I'll be playing those promo Sink Belows as a memento of a breakout performance, both for me personally and for post-Bonds-ban Slippy. This hero is real and has hands at the competitive level! I think my favorite part of modern Slippy is that most games are usually determined with a few HP left on the winner. Truly a sign of a well-fought and balanced battle— the epitome of what Flesh & Blood is to me.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Shout outs to my spouse Zippi, Team Daeton, the local middle Georgia scene, and fellow Slippy-head, Dizzy, who was happy to bounce ideas back and forth on what a competitive Slippy deck might look like, including the value-maxxing Looking for a Scrap. Thank you, everyone!

Until next time, be well. :)