Card creation and upgrades

With the release of the latest set, Part the Mistveil, deckbuilding for the new heroes has started to pervade online discussions surrounding the game. The main shtick of the Mystic Ninja in this new set revolves around creating Crouching Tigers. These are 0-cost 0-attack actions without pitch or defence value with the keyword ephemeral, meaning they cannot start in your deck and are removed from the game if they woud be put into your graveyard. Though they cannot start in your deck, there is a little combo that allows you to shuffle them into your deck. You see, if you play Shifting Winds of the Mystic Beast and give a Crouching Tiger the name Hundred Winds, it will be shuffled into your deck if you follow it up with Winds of Eternity. Why would you want this, you ask? Well, you probably don’t, considering all Tiger stats are either zero or non-existent, but it serves as a great introduction to what we will be talking about today: creating cards during play that go into your deck (or non-hand zone)!

Though I already entertained this subject briefly in my post for April Fools’ Day, Pitch snack, the reveal of the mechanics in Part the Mistveil seemed like an opportune time to revisit the idea in more detail.

Upgrade!

As a game that simulates two people battling it out, heroes in Flesh and Blood typically start at their strongest. You have a pristine set of equipment and a healthy amount of red power cards in your deck. As play progresses, your equipment will get worn down or used up, and red cards are generally played whereas blue cards are pitched and go to the bottom of your deck. In this way, your hero’s power decreases as the game drags on. However, it does not have to be this way. A great example of this is the Mechanologist class. Since the class’s inception and the support in Crucible of War, they have had access to an archetype that starts with the relatively weak Teklo Plasma Pistol in play, but gradually builds towards an overwhelming endgame with the supporting items Induction Chamber and Plasma Purifier, which start in their deck. In this way, the class starts out weak in this playstyle but becomes stronger with time, in line with what you would expect from an inventor. This theme of upgrading was further explored with the likes of (Construct) Nitro Mechanoid and upgrading your equipment with Evo pieces and cards scaling with Evos.

I love the idea of going against the game’s general design, just trying to survive your opponent’s strongest attacks until you yourself have done your setup to become unstoppable. As outlined above, this theme is heavily engrained in the Mechanologist class, but in Part the Mistveil another mechanic represents a similar theme: transcending. When a card transcends, it is flipped to its other side, Inner Chi. This is a premium resource that can be pitched as regular resources or to activate special Mystic-specific effects. Since it is pitched, the Inner Chi will be put back into your deck at the end of the turn, effectively representing an upgrade to one of your blue cards.

Creating and upgrading cards

There are various approaches to upgrading your deck during play, but the most straightforward ones might be flipping cards, like with the transcend mechanic, and creating “token” cards that enter your deck, not unlike the ephemeral cards discussed above. Since I believe the transcend mechanic covers the first type quite well, I will not spend any further time on it here. Instead, we will focus on creating cards in deck and a form of upgrade unique to Flesh and Blood: pitch upgrades.

Creating cards

To upgrade your deck during play, you can use the design of cards that create other, more powerful cards in your deck. This pay-off at a later time should be compensated by making the card that creates the other one weaker. In the extreme, this means that the only thing a card does, is creating another card in your deck. If you sacrifice early-game efficiency to set up for a strong endgame, this will bring a unique flavour of impending doom for your opponent to your game, similar to how Viserai sometimes just accumulates more and more Runechants on the board. Especially if you are not taking a lot of damage for doing so.

Upgrade pitch colours

The second upgrade angle that I would like to highlight here, that is quite unique to Flesh and Blood, pertains to exploiting “pitch cycles”. Most cards at the common and rare rarity levels come in three colours: red, yellow, and blue. Red cards have stronger attacks or effects whilst the blue versions generate more resources. The idea I would like to propose here is that of a card shifting colours whenever its condition is satisfied, and re-entering the game transformed. This may be a blue card transforming into a red card or a red card becoming or creating a yellow version. Combined with a variety of conditions, the possibilities are endless.

Examples

With these two ideas, let us have a look at an example of both.

Card creation

Imagine you are playing a Wizard facing an opponent with lots of arcane barrier or spellvoid. How do you get around this? The answer is pitch stacking, i.e. setting up an unpreventable combo for when you have cycled through your deck. But what if there was a card that rendered your opponent’s equipment useless? That would be too strong to just be able to include in your deck. However, it could be an interesting part of a pitch stack combo. Hence, consider the pair of custom cards below: Insomniac Inspiration and Sleep. People generally don’t sleep in their armour, so let us have Sleep disable prevention effects on equipment. Since this would be too powerful to include in your deck, we give it the ephemeral keyword and pair it with a “generator”, Insomniac Inspiration. As a blue 3-block, many people will not be unhappy to include it in their deck, and it gives the player a chance to set up a strong endgame combo against defensive decks. A fine example of upgrading your deck through card creation.

Pitch upgrades

Okay, now let’s play with pitch. The simplest example would probably be something like a blue attack that says “When this would be put on the bottom of your deck from your pitch zone, instead remove this from the game and place a red [card name] on the bottom of your deck.” Rather than this, I would like to explore something a bit more interesting. Lately, I have really been enjoying Levia and what intrigues me about her design, is how players have to manage their graveyard. With most attacks banishing 3 cards from your graveyard, you need a way to get cards in your graveyard. At the same time, you want the cards in your graveyard to be attacks with 6 or more power to turn of blood debt. Now consider the custom card Recurring Nightmare (red) below. When it is banished from your graveyard, it will turn of blood debt through Levia’s ability, but also replace itself in the graveyard with a yellow copy (which should have the ephemeral keyword). Great, you turned of blood debt without seeing your graveyard dwindle too much! Now, the yellow copy will have one power less than the red one, and create a blue copy when banished. This first part is good, as the yellow one is still a 6-attack, but once that one is gone, it places a 5-attack in your graveyard, which does not turn of blood debt when banished. This way, playing with creating cards of different pitch colours can introduce more nuanced interactions too.

Conclusion

In this article, we explored the creation of cards in deck or graveyard, as opposed to hand as seen in Part the Mistveil, as a way to upgrade your deck for the late game. In my opinion, a particularly unique way of doing that in Flesh and Blood, is by exploiting the “pitch cycle” to modify stats by changing colour.

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