The Third Age of FaB: alternatives to card advantage

After 5 years, if you ask a Flesh and Blood player what the most iconic cards in the game are, a few cards are likely to come up: Fyendal’s Spring Tunic, Command and Conquer, Art of War, Tome of Fyendal, maybe a couple more. That is why the banning of 9 September 2024 is such a huge deal: Art of War and Tome of Fyendal are gone. Uh oh. Don’t worry though, these cards live on in the Living Legend format, at least for now. However, these two iconic cards were not the only victims of this banlist update. In fact, we are dealing with a proper book burning here, banning almost all ‘tomes’ from the game. I don’t believe this has anything to do with LSS hating books, but more with the fact that tomes represent card draw in Flesh and Blood. And as it turns out, in a game where everything is balanced around drawing up to your hand size at the end of your turn, playing with more cards than allotted can lead to some over-the-top action and a runaway leader problem. Hence, LSS has announced that they will be moving away from easily accessible card draw in the future. This is the second time they correct course, after FaB 2.0 rejecting the idea of action-points-on-a-stick, leading us well and truly into an exciting Third Age.

Was that really necessary?

In a game predicated on having a fixed amount of cards each turn (ignoring the arsenal slot) and where the cards have an almost predetermined value to them, drawing an extra card is a lot of value. In Flesh and Blood, players draw up to their hand size at the end of each turn, after which they decide how many cards to spend on defence before having the opportunity to use the remaining cards offensively. Implicitly, this means that if you ever have any cards left when you draw up, you are losing value. If you decide to use your full hand defensively, it is typically worth about 12 points of defence. However, cards are usually worth a bit more on offence than on defence, thus ensuring that a number of cards spent offensively stick a few points of damage against the same amount of cards used defensively. Now, if the attacking player has access to a full extra card, it is likely dealing 3-4 additional damage that the defending player simply cannot interact with. An advantage of 3-4 damage may not seem like a lot, but in a game where a card’s numerical values are set according to a (admittedly sometimes loose) algorithm, such an advantage may be impossible to recover from without a similar advantage of your own. In practice, this sometimes means a game can come down to who drew their card advantage first. This problem is further exacerbated by so-called ‘cheerios’ decks, i.e. decks that string together multiple 0-cost attacks, and exploit cards like Art of War, whose value scales with the amount of attacks played, to gain truly enormous life leads in a single turn. Such a surge of damage may not outright kill the opponent, but they will be forced in a blocking position to hold on to their last few hit points, and lose the opportunity to play offensively.

So what does this book banning achieve then? Overall, games become less swingy, and more agency is placed in the hands of players to eke out value turn after turn. But if card advantage is off the table, how do you gain the upper hand? The game system’s built-in way is to use your arsenal effectively, holding back one card to have a larger hand later. This allows you to set up turns in which you do have card advantage, after playing a turn at a disadvantage. Often, the true power of a card only emerges in combination with other cards, and this is where the arsenal slot can truly shine. But there are other ways to accrue value as well…

Winning the turn cycle

In discussions around Flesh and Blood, there is one concept that often rears its head: the turn cycle. This term is used to refer to a set of two turns, your opponent’s and yours, occurring between two events of you drawing up to your hand size. Each turn cycle, you can calculate how much value you got out of your 4 cards by adding up the damage prevented and the damage presented during the turn cycle. The player that got more value out of their 4 cards is then said to ‘have won the turn cycle’. However, due to the option to carry over a card from one turn cycle to the next, using the arsenal slot, this concept is not always well-defined, and there are a few more ways to get more value out of your cards. Let’s look at a couple of them.

Resource advantage

Without a doubt, the most iconic form of resource advantage in Flesh and Blood, is Fyendal’s Spring Tunic. Even though it only gives you one additional resource every 3 turns, this card has been the chest piece of choice in many competitive decks since its release in the very first set. Looking at Flesh and Blood’s hand management aspect, it is not difficult to see why. Every turn you are limited by the cards you draw, and to play a card, you regularly have to get rid of another card to pay the play cost of the first card. If you have other means of gaining resources, through Fyendal’s Spring Tunic or perhaps an Energy Potion, this means you need to keep less cards to pay for the ones you want to play, meaning you can either play the card you saved, block with it, or tuck it in arsenal to set up for the following turn. In a way, resource advantage is a form of card advantage, but unlike the “Draw 2 cards”-clauses found on Tomes, resource advantage has a deckbuilding cost: you need to put cards in your deck that cost resources. This might not seem like much of a cost, but for every turn where you benefit from resource advantage, there will be turns where you wish that you had that extra resource to elevate your hand from mediocre to great. The old Command and Conquer + Pummel combo is great, but you cannot pay for it with a single card. It can only be played effectively every 3 turns when your Tunic is fired up.

Arena permanents

Another way to elevate your 4-card hands to another level is if you start your turn with permanents in play. These can be items, like the Energy Potion mentioned before, or something less generic, like Mechanologist’s Teklo Pounder or Illusionist’s Azvolai, or even the ban-worthy Amulet of Ice. What these permanents have in common, is that they allow you to sacrifice some value on the turn you play them (they don’t deal or defend against any damage immediately) to enhance later turns. This can be as face-up as Teklo Pounder’s damage spread over 3 turns, or as subtle as Amulet of Ice’s threat of activation at any inopportune moment. In essence, they fill a similar role as the arsenal slot.

Deck health

Finally, I would like to mention deck health. Most aggressive decks rely on playing as many cards as effectively as possible to present loads of damage every turn. The other side of the spectrum, fatigue decks, do the exact oppossite: be as efficient as possible with how many cards you lose from your deck whilst defending. After all, if they run out of cards before you run out of health and cards to defend with, you can fall back on your trusty weapon to finish the job. Whereas these aggressive decks will play many 0-cost 4-attacks, defensive decks like Guardian are happy spending one card to activate their weapon. In the case of Anothos, activating it with a single blue card is effectively the same as playing Wounding Blow, except you are not losing a card from your deck because your pitch goes to the bottom again. Similarly, playing Unmovable does not only give you an extra point of value compared to blocking with two actions, it also saves you one card on pitch. Now, what if we could get effects like “If you have more cards in deck than your opponent, …”

Conclusion

Happy 5th birthday, Flesh and Blood! I am curious to see how you will explore ways for people to gain edges, both through the mechanics I mentioned above, and through ways I am not smart enough to think of. To many more years of bringing people together through the common language of playing great games!