Alternative win conditions

Whenever I pick up a new card game, the first decks I gravitate towards are OTK (One Turn Kill) decks, i.e. decks that draw out the game until they have all the pieces to win in one big turn. Considering the article’s title, this was probably not the opening statement you were expecting, but bear with me. When I get into a new game, I find that OTK decks allow me to challenge more experienced players to adapt to my game plan. At the same time, it allows me to focus on one aspect of the game (defence) whilst I learn about the other aspects by observing. So when I discovered Flesh and Blood after the release of Monarch, the first deck that caught my interest was Viserai. No, not the Sonata Arcanix Viserai, but the old-school pumped Arknight Ascendancy, Rattle Bones, Ninth Blade combo. This deck was never very consistent, and I never won an Armory with it.

The first time I won an Armory (Blitz, I should note), was with a deck that is still around: combo Boltyn. With this deck you defend and build up soul until you have multiple copies of Lumina Ascension for a pop-off turn that exploits Courage of Bladehold in combination with Cintari Sabers and Gallantry Gold, easily presenting upward of 30 damage in a single turn, and gaining life in the process.

And then I picked up Kano. But we do not need to get into that. What all these decks have in common, though, is that they have a unique win condition. They do not really trade blows back and forth like regular Flesh and Blood decks. Instead, they prolong the game until they have the right cards to (pretty much) win instantly. Whilst I find such playstyles quite enjoyable, I never feel like I am actively pursuing winning. I am simply delaying the end until the game state turns in my favour. However, I love unique playstyles, which is why I would love to see heroes who have to play proactively to achieve an alternative win condition.

What is an alternative win condition?

In any competitive game, the rules will state what a player has to achieve to claim victory. For Flesh and Blood (and many other card games), the goal of the game is to reduce your opponent’s life total to zero. For card games in particular, this means that most cards exist to further that goal: think of weapons, attack (re)actions, arcane damage, etc. All of these threaten to deal damage to your opponent, such that activating or playing them brings you closer to victory. For the purpose of this article, I will define an alternative win condition as any effect that tells you you win the game if something specific happens, or that advances you toward the general win condition in a way that modifies how you (and/or your opponent!) have to play the game.

Alternative win conditions in other games

Before turning my attention to Flesh and Blood, I would like to take the time to illustrate this concept by highlighting alternative win conditions in a few other card games that I have played.

Legends of Runeterra

Let us start with the game that is arguably the closest in design to Flesh and Blood. In Legends of Runeterra, both players try to reduce the other player’s life total to zero. They do this by committing units to the board that have an attack value (lower left) and health total (lower right), similar to Dromai’s dragons, and attacking with them. After declaring an attack, the opponent decides which units they want to commit to their defence, and which of the attacking units they will trade blows with. If the defending player selects a unit to defend against an attacking unit, that attacking unit will damage the defending unit rather than your life total (of course, as in any card game, unless it has specific keywords).

In this game, one of my favorite decks quickly became Fiora Shen. Reading Fiora’s (levelled up) ability, the goal of the deck is clear. Rather than reducing your opponent’s life total to zero, this deck has an alternative win condition printed on the Fiora card: kill 4 enemy units with Fiora and have her survive. To do so, she is aided by the Challenger keyword, which means that the attacker gets to decide the unit that will defend Fiora’s attack. The second core half of the deck, Shen, focuses on keeping Fiora alive by granting her Barrier, an effect that prevents the next source of damage to a unit that has it. This creates a coherent game plan that is radically different from other decks, and requires your opponent to adapt their playstyle too!

(Another reason to play this deck, is that the Fiora victory animation is also the best animation in the game.)

KeyForge

The second game I would like to highlight, is KeyForge. Similarly to Legends of Runeterra, KeyForge has creatures battling it out, but the goal of the game is different. In this game, your aim is to be the first to forge three keys, which you do by spending a resource called Æmber. This resource is generated by playing certain cards and activating your creatures to “reap” rather than fight. Then, at the start of your turn, if you have 6 or more Æmber, you can trade them in for a key.

Since the game’s release, several of the factions have received a card that allows you to forge a key without spending any Æmber. One of them asks you to play 7 cards of a single faction in one turn, which is made harder by the fact that your hand size is 6. Another one asks you to sacrifice your own creatures. A third one is simply a ticking time bomb, and a fourth one forces your opponents to interact with your creatures more. All of these ask either you or your opponent to adapt their game plan, leading to interesting play patterns.

Android: Netrunner

And how could I talk about other card games without mentioning my first love? Android: Netrunner is an asymmetrical card game that sees one player take on the role of a hacker, called the Runner, whilst the other player represents a (definitely evil) Corporation, abbreviated to Corp. The Corp’s deck features cards called Agendas, which the Corp must try to score before the Runner hacks into their systems and steals their plans. Each Agenda is worth a number of points, and the first to reach 7 points is the winner!

But each side has a darker, alternative win condition…

If the Corp ever has to draw a card whilst their deck is empty, their R&D comes up blank and the Runner wins. On the other hand, if any of the Corp’s effects ever deal more damage to the Runner than they have cards in their hand, that is the end, goodbye, you are dead, my dear Runner. Though these alternative win conditions are baked into Netrunner’s design, not every deck has a real chance of winning this way. If your Runner deck does not actively trash cards from the Corp’s deck, it is very unlikely that they will ever deck out. On the Corp’s side, you have to actively choose to include cards that deal damage in your deck, giving up valuable slots that could be spent on other cards. Hence, decks typically only commit to this alternative win condition if their identity’s ability lends itself to it, like Noise’s ability milling a Corp card every time you install a virus, or Argus Security dealing damage or giving the Runner a tag, which are required to play kill cards from hand, whenever they steal an Agenda.

Design

So how does this concept translate to Flesh and Blood? Let us distill a few crucial design principles out of the examples from other card games.

Unique playstyle

First and foremost, alternative win conditions have to incentivise at least one player to interact with the game state in a unique way. If this is not the case, you are still going through the same motions and the deck will not feel distinct enough from other options. Consider again the Epic Quest card from KeyForge. Since you will start your turn with 6 cards, you need to work towards a turn in which you can get extra cards in your hand to play them out in one huge turn. This probably means that you have to hold back on building a strong board state to set up for your alternative win condition.

Counterplay

Secondly, when you bring a deck with a unique win condition to the table, your opponent should also be forced to adapt the way they play. To illustrate this, take another look at the Fiora Shen deck from Legends of Runeterra. Fiora has a gigantic target on her back and your opponent will want to avoid interacting with her altogether, unless they are confident they can kill her. Of course, Shen’s protection means that your opponent must commit extra resources, e.g. damage spells, to punch through the Barrier before they can kill her, usually resulting in back-and-forth spell activation between attacker and defender.

Deckbuilding

And finally, alternative win conditions should push you to build your deck in a specific way that complements your strategy. Taking another look at the Netrunner example, Noise has to include a variety of virus cards in his deck to consistently trash cards off the top of his opponent’s deck whilst the Argus Security player will want to include many low-value Agenda cards and kill cards that interact with tags to get as much value out of their ability as possible.

Example

Naturally, with all this talk of alternative win conditions, I could not leave you hanging without an example to get your creative juices flowing. Since Light heroes are all about getting cards into their soul to use as an exclusive resource, I suggest a hero who is all about the opposite. He would rather not use his soul and hoard it instead.

So how does this hero satisfy the three design principles outlined above?

• Unique playstyle: Since its inception, Flesh and Blood has seen a few heroes that build a board state (Mechanologists and Illusionists) and use this power of permanents in the arena to put themselves in a position to win. Similarly, Cyrus tries to amass a critical mass of cards in soul (semi-permanents) and push through just enough damage to bring their opponent’s life down to that threshold. This unique application of soul is very different from other heroes, even to those that share the Light talent, like the game’s Light Warrior, Boltyn, who aims to charge his soul to make his attacks harder to block and expend the cards in soul to gain go again at opportune times.

• Counterplay: Though the Shadow talent has a few cards that target soul directly, like Lunartide Plunderer or Nasreth, the Soul Harrower, most heroes cannot interact with soul directly. This is why Cyrus features a detrimental clause that makes weapons target his soul. This probably makes Ninjas an annoying matchup if they swing with Kodachi every turn. At the same time, weapons without an attack value, like Storm of Sandikai, do not benefit from this effect. Nevertheless, this offers counterplay to a wide range of heroes, even if Rangers, Illusionists, and Wizards do not benefit from it. In this case, I do not believe this would be a big issue since charging is expensive card economy-wise (in Cyrus, you spend two cards to effectively attack for 3 or 4, and 1 unpreventable damage in the form of soul). It just means these classes are slightly less favoured than classes with access to conventional weapons.

• Deckbuilding: Due to the interaction between soul and life total, building this deck immediately becomes a question of how you want to approach your games: do you want to build a massive soul or will you try to have soul and life total meet somewhere halfway? The deckbuilding is further complicated by the fact that charging is a below-rate mechanic without Boltyn’s pay-off or reliably swinging Raydn, Duskbane. On the other hand, every card that enters your soul is effectively a point of damage they cannot block, which makes Soul Food a great turn 0 play. Additionally, when your opponent’s life total approaches the number of cards in your soul, cards like Soulbond Resolve and Soul Shield, which add cards to your soul during your opponent’s turn, effectively act as trap cards and leave them vulnerable to a sudden loss. And if they try to salvage the turn by threatening a weapon swing, you can close it out with Steelblade Shunt. Including too many tricks may hamper your offensive capabilities though, so make sure to strike a balance in deckbuilding.

Conclusion

In this article, I have tried to outline what an alternative win condition is and how it could appear in Flesh and Blood. After a detour through the card games of my past, I have concluded that a great alternative win condition requires both players to adapt their playstyle. In addition, the deck’s playstyle should be unique, whilst still offering enough counterplay (if your opponent is willing to adapt their playstyle) and requiring the player to think differently about how they construct their deck. Though the example in this article focused on the soul mechanic, Flesh and Blood has many moving parts that can be exploited to construct alternative win conditions (see e.g. last week’s article on variable pitch values), and I hope we get to see them some day.

As always, if you have any feedback, do not hesitate to contact me via email or on social media!

P.S. As I am sure you have noticed, I changed the display format for card images. Please let me know which format you prefer!