How to Play Flesh and Blood
Hello, welcome to the Flesh and Blood Community a place where competition is always strong and interactions are simultaneously the most friendly you can have in any TCG Community. Think of going to your Local Armory to play as a Dojo, where the main goal is for that dojo to get stronger and better at doing what they do because helping others helps you too. Every single interaction I have had in Flesh and Blood so far has been competitive and very introspective of my personal gameplay.
So now to the topic of the article, how to play…first off just dive in and go to your local game store because everyone is going to walk you through it, we always want more players and for them to get better. For the intent of this article I will guide you through super basic concepts and delve into some deeper thoughts also. Checkout my previous article on figuring out who to play and lets begin.
Deck Composition
Classic Constructed decks are going to consist of a 60 card main deck and this is not including your equipment slots or hero. Total deck including Sideboard and Equipment slots is going to be 80 cards. The tool we use to build decklists for testing and playing on Talishar is Fabrary, ill include some snippets here for info as we talk more. What makes a Decklist good or….just work even? Good question, glad you asked it. Every hero class has unique requirements that need to be met and sometimes the hero itself. I’ll post two snippets that show the disparity between needs and speak to them here:
This first decklist is my current main hero, Jarl (Guardian):
The thing I want to highlight here is the breakdown for card colors we use and why. For my guardian, I need LOTS of blue cards for the 3 pitch value because my main attacks that are red usually have higher costs, 3 and up to 6 and get to swing one big time by “Going Tall”. But also as a guardian we get access to lots of good blue cards with block value and helps facilitate this hero class identity. On the opposite side of the spectrum we have Ira with LOTS of red color cards. This is because MANY ninja cards cost 0 or 1 and sometimes 2 so we can get away with having less blue cards in the decklist and if we do include them, we want them to very important and have good block values. You can get away with pitching 1 blue and “going very very wide” instead of going tall like my guardian. Theres of course more intricacies per hero, but overall you’ll come to learn what your hero class will need. Welp, now that our decks are made, lets start an actual game.
Starting your First Game
Let your opponent know what hero you are playing because since this game is a Best of 1 instead of Best of 3, we sideboard before we begin and knowing your opponent is important for sideboarding and changing out equipment if needed. For instance, if we are playing against a Wizard we want to bring in our Arcane Barrier Gear, and if its a Runeblade, its best to bring in some form of Arcane Barrier gear there too.
After you are done making your adjustments, lay out your hero and equipment, shuffle up your deck and then offer it to the opponent to cut the deck. Roll a Dice to see who goes first and after that decision is made, say GL, HF and draw your heroes intellect (Typically 4, we have Lyath going to be drawing 5 soon with Super Slam!) and let the games begin. This first turn of the game we like to call “Turn 0” and we say that because it helps delineate this one unique ruling and that is at the end of turn 0, BOTH heroes draw up to their intellect. This is the ONLY time both players will be doing this and moving forward you will only draw up to your intellect at the end of YOUR turn. Whoa, thats weird and unique lets talk about that for a second.
So you’ll notice a couple things here:
1) upkeep is at the end of the turn and not the beginning, very interesting.
2) both heroes are able to dump their hands for max attacking and blocking on turn 0 with little to no recourse.
So, what are the advantage of going first or second? Typically you will want to go first if you have a decklist that wants to set things up, for me and Jarl I love going first because I can use my Crumble to Eternity or imposing visage to get a -1 counter on equipment turn 0 to get my gameplan online immediately! I dont need to attack into my opponent so theres an advantage there for me personally, other guardians might want to go 2nd because we do block very well and since were drawing up at end of turn 0 we can just block out fully. I think the best way to look at this is, Do I have something I need to setup or can setup that doest require attacking, then I want to go first. Does my opponent have something that needs to be setup? In that case, I want to go first. Am I fighting against a deck that just attacks my face like a warrior or a ninja, then I think its okay to let them go first because we can block with the whole hand. Again, its all up to you and the more you play your hero, the easier the decision will become. Wait a minute….Do you know how to value cards in your hand, or even read them yet? OK quick sidebar..
Reading The Cards in your Hands
(The Sidebar edition)
Ok, my bad lets take a quick look at a card, I’m gonna go ahead and put up a little graphic here with some stuff to look at:
Alrighty, try not to ignore the 3rd grade looking numbering from MS Paint and take a quick look at my bullet points below!
This is the Pitch value of the card, this is going to represent the allotment of resources we gain when we put this card into our pitch stack for when we have to actually cast or use our abilities, for reference this card Pitches for 3 value.
This is the cost of the card, for reference this card Costs 1 Pitch resource.
This is the Attack value of the card, for reference this card attacks with 3 Power.
This is the Block value of the card, for reference this card Blocks for 3.
This is the type of card we are using, and again for reference, this is a “Ninja Action” and it is an “Attack”. (This game also has Reactions, both attack and defense. Auras and Instants)
Okay cool, now you can read! lets start to value a hand, I’ll throw up a random set of 4 in the next section.
Using and Valuing the Cards In Your Hand
This set of random 4 I generated from my Ira Decklist on Fabrary is actually pretty sweet. This Ira deck is so fun, but also im a guardian main so doing anything is honestly always cool.
Lets look at this from the perspective of defense on lets say a turn three. Defensively it seems okay, we have three 3 blocks and one 2 block in hand. Two Attack Reaction cards and I think we want to prioritze retaining the Legacy of Ikaru because it’ll let us draw one on hit in helping to go wide, but also we might want to look at taking the incoming damage because we could honestly pitch the razor reflex and cast this whole hand too. Maybe we actually pitch the Seek Vengeance on our turn and pump some attacks, maybe we actually block with the Seek Vengeance to mitigate damage and crack back for a little bit. Regardless of the incoming situation and what we have in this hand, you can see that you’re trying to think ahead with the line of logic of “what am I going to be able to produce on my turn, what am I allowed to take as incoming damage, should I or shouldn’t I assign blocks?” Every single hand and every single card will provide value for each and every one of these decisions and the play lines can be very complex because we have to remember, upkeep is only at the END of OUR turn. We are stuck with what remains for our turn to attack with. So, thats cool now we understand how to think about our turns and the cards in our hands, we basically have seen what its like to play a turn with the cards in our hands both offensively and defensively. What about our equipment?
Equipment!
Equipment will start on the board and from this we are starting out the game at our strongest state. Some equipment is best used Offensively and some is best used Defensively, but when should we use them? Let’s take a look at my Ira Decklist Equipment Suite below and how we present them on the table as we play:
We want to use our equipment when we will get the most value out of it because usually our equipment goes away when we use it and for our example above all of our equipment pieces have “Blade Break” and they will be destroyed when we close the combat chain in which they defend in. Some defend for 2, some for 1 and some for 0. For our ninja hero class our equipment will be doing quite a bit offensively, lets take a look closer at our Iris of the Blossom below:
This headpiece has an ability we can use at Instant speed. We can tap it and discard a card from hand to go search for one of our big power cards called “Whirling Mist Blossom” but we need to make sure we can play it on this turn we activate this ability AND we can only do this is we’ve hit this turn. In my decklist I have one target that is great for discarding at the moment called “Sirens of Safe Harbor”. When it gets put into the graveyard we gain 1 life. So that one card is providing value potentially offensively, defensively and is a great target for one of our equipment abilities. If at all possible we do not want to actually block with this equipment unless we absolutely have to. Another point of view to consider with this piece of equipment is, if we have cast all 3 of our “Whirling Mist Blossom” in our deck, then it does become safe to block with and we’ve gotten full value out of it! Below are the two cards I just used for reference:
Oh wow, that was cool taking a look at equipment, and sure we only looked at some strong offensively based equipment, but as you play and see more you’ll find some equipment is really good at being defensive too! Every Hero has a unique set of equipment needs and adds flavor for their class. What else can we cover? Lets talk about the Arsenal for a second.
The Arsenal
The Arsenal is an extension of our hand and the most importnat thing to know is that you cannot put Block cards in the Arsenal, we can only put action and reaction cards in there. The arsenal is represented on the board as being just under our Hero and weapon cards, and face down unless stated otherwise. We want to utilize our arsenal as much as possible! This allows for maximum potential from our hands either defensively or offensively. Having access to what is a five card hand is huge! With that fifth card we can be hyper aggressive with some Attack reactions, or very defensive with a Defense reaction, or maybe we end our turn and still have an attack action in our hand, go ahead and put it in there. We fill up our arsenal slot at the end of our turn, before we draw cards into our hands. So the order of a turn will go: Pitch, Attack, Arsenal and Draw. Theres going to be turns when we dont use our arsenal because we went ham using everything in our hand and thats okay, but when we can, nine times out of ten we want to utilize it. Lets also briefly talk about Reactions and Instants.
Reactions and Instants
I’ve mentioned Reactions a few times in this article, lets take a look at one card that we’ve seen from our hand example, Razor Reflex (Red):
So after we declare our attacks and our opponent declares blocks we then go to the Reaction step. In the reaction step we can use Attack Reaction, Defense Reactions and Instants. Priority is given to the Player whose turn it is to choose to use an attack reaction, then it is given to the opponent to choose a defense reaction, then back and forth priority is passed until no more reactions are taken. Then you will add up all the effects and resolve the combat.
What are Instants then? Well simply put, instants are cards that do not require an Action point to use and each hero starts their turn with one of those only. You see these most often against wizards and they can cast these instants causing you damage on your turn! This makes combat really interesting and forces a whole new level of determining value from your cards. Lets talk about interacting with wizards here for a bit. I touched on this in a previous article for new players that I referenced above too.
Arcane Damage
Arcane Damage can come both as actions and at instant speed so you need to be cautious when using your resources. We need to be able to pitch resources to defend against Arcane damage, and we use our resources pitched by utilizing our Arcane Barrier gear that we brought in for this specific matchup. You see Arcane Barrier gear in our Boots, Head, Legs, Arms and theres also an Arcane Lantern to be used in the Off-hand…actually theres a weapon I believe that has Arcane Barrier too. You will see Equipment that states “Arcane Barrier 1” this means that piece of equipment can use resources to prevent 1 point of Arcane Damage and we can only use that Arcane Barrier 1 to prevent 1 point of arcane damage from a specific source. So if we have an Attack dealing 6 Arcane Damage to us and we have a total of Arcane barrier 3 in the form of our boots, arms and head piece, we can pitch one blue card to get 3 resources and use those 3 resources to account for each one of our pieces of gear for that one specific attack. We would still take 3 damage from that attack because we can only cover 3 damage due to our Arcane Barrier 3 gear total.
Now you know everything that happens or can happen during a turn. We do this alllll the way until our opponents health reaches 0. Then you win and say Good Game. For a while you will lose and then you will say Good Game, but the time will come when you win and you say Good Game and it will be awesome!
I’m going to leave comments up on this Article and if I’ve missed anything or random situations come up, feel free to leave a comment! When you do decide to start playing and have a decklist, give my TCGPlayer ProStore a visit and help me out by buying some cards. Again, welcome to the Flesh and Blood Community, dive in head first, everyone is here to help!