(Snapdragon Scalers | Art by Adolfo Navarro)

Hello and welcome to the third installment of Common & Conquer, in which I focus on what separates the greatest decks from the rest of the pack: the equipment.

Similar to the last article regarding heroes, I won’t be explicitly listing out the specific cards you should be playing, but rather some points to consider, since the joy of deckbuilding is in discovering an off-the-wall option you never realized existed or ever thought about.

With that being said, you need to figure out what the purpose of equipment is in your deck, and whether it helps facilitate the core game plan of your deck. Or whether it ensures your survival so that you can enact it.

Oftentimes, decks will have gear belonging in either camp within their spread, usually due in part to most classes lacking great options in every slot. Some are the exception to this rule, namely the more defensively-oriented Guardians, such as Oldhim, who can take a full suite of high block cards and the powerful addition of Steelbraid Buckler as a way to soak up more damage against the high firepower available from some of the top decks in the format.

From a deckbuilding lens, Commoner as a format is still suffering somewhat from the early days of less-than-stellar gear options, which resulted in a lot of Ironrots and Nullrunes being thrown into decklists just to fill out the 11 equipment slots. With the recent releases of Dusk Till Dawn and Round the Table bringing a lot of new pieces of gear, correctly selecting your equipment suite in deckbuilding has never been more important.

The Basics of Gear

In broad strokes, the way to think about the functionality of gear in Flesh and Blood is as follows: headgear provides card advantage, whether through card selection, filtration, or outright draw; chest pieces give advantages in resources, oftentimes reducing costs or creating pitch; arms provide some form of attack bonus; and legs tend to be centered around extending your turn through providing go again or extra action points. The flipside of this is that each gear slot also has a purely defensive-oriented alternative within Commoner (gear sets such as the Ironhide equipment from Monarch are a prime example). It’s your job to identify which is best for your hero.

Gear: Utility

Much like finding the identity of your hero and what unique aspects they’re trying to leverage in the gameplay, the equipment plays a similar role. Oftentimes you’ll be faced with the choice of utility for defense, and understanding which to prioritize is essential.

A prime example of this is Hope Merchant’s Hood. One of the strongest generic pieces of headgear in Commoner, it allows the extremely aggressive decks to mulligan away bricked hands and keep up the offense. The trade-off of zero block value and being bad on the defensive side of things is outweighed in the strength it provides when being on the offensive. This is especially true in the case of the most attacking decks in the format, such as Dash, with a typical equipment spread that forgoes any form of defense in favor of trying to end the game as soon as possible.

I’d go so far as to say that figuring out what gear is most suitable for your hero is at its most important right now, as the format is still in a state where there’s a slight premium placed on deckbuilding over actual gameplay.

Highlighting a personal example, one of my proudest creations is a Levia list that I brewed with my friend. In our theory-crafting sessions we identified that running enough one-cost attacks meant that playing Snapdragon Scalers was quite feasible and potentially better than the default Shadow Brute option of Hooves. Upon further testing and theory-crafting, we found that there were enough blues in the list and that the games played out in a manner where the first instance of go again given by the Scalers still left us with one or two cards in hand. This led to the realization that something like Time Skippers could provide much better use-cases and more explosive turns with a stocked graveyard.

In identifying what the deck needed and what its play patterns were, we found ourselves breaking away from the default option and to a more unconventional choice of legs, leading to a few very successful Armories where we were able to race the best aggro decks.

Gear: Defense

The other side of the coin to pure utility is absolute defense, and in the world of Commoner that takes the form of one-shot equipment, such as the Ironrot and Ironhide sets. As I mentioned in the introduction, some decks such as Oldhim and other block-oriented Guardians use pure defensive gear as part of facilitating their game plan, but that’s very much the exception rather than the rule.

In a world where Dash and Ira are sending anywhere from 10 to 20 damage at you, simply not dying is as imperative as understanding your role within the meta and Commoner ecosystem.

A newer inclusion to Commoner, the Radiant, Darkness, and Frontline sets in Dusk Till Dawn are the gold standard in universal defensive options, and are something I hope LSS continues to provide in future releases. Covering both physical and arcane damage, the Darkness and Radiant sets are fantastic ways for heroes that can’t afford to pay for high Arcane Barrier numbers while also being useful in surviving big turns against the aggressive decks.

Similarly, the Frontline equipment is excellent in decks such as Kano, who simply need time to find a combination of cards to sling lethal amounts of damage at their opponent. While not directly impacting to the game plan of the heroes, the damage being prevented allows them to simply play on and try to set up their optimal game state.

My Soapbox About Nullrune

In the earliest days of Commoner, it was quite difficult for a hero to actually have enough viable equipment options to fill out the full 11 slots, so oftentimes players would include a full set of Nullrune simply because it was “free.” With the advent of a proper sideboard in line with the newest Blitz deck construction rules, these slots can now be better served with matchup-dependent cards.

As stated in the previous section, the overlapping roles of equipment fulfilling double duty in being relevant against arcane and physical attacks means that Nullrune isn’t as necessary for many decks, allowing for more dedicated sideboard space. This is not to say that every deck should stop registering Nullrune, but understanding that your hero may be extremely hard pressed in paying for Arcane Barrier 3-5 should translate to only taking the specific pieces of Arcane Barrier gear that are required and using the freed up slots on cards that can contribute to shoring up a particular matchup.

Lastly, the decks which erroneously register Nulrunes and can’t actually pay for the Arcane Barrier 5 needed to block out a Voltic Bolt tend to be other aggressive decks, where the objective isn’t to weather out the storm, but rather to survive just long enough so they can emerge victorious. The mental gymnastics that some people have deciding which pieces of gear to switch out for Nullrune is quite flawed when the decks which tend to beat down also rely heavily on their utility equipment and can only have two gear slots that are interchangeable with anti-arcane options. In these scenarios, perhaps something as temporary as a piece of Spell Fray might yield better results. Retaining the card in hand for your following turn is almost certainly better than preventing a few more arcane damage over the course of a dragged out game where you’ll need to run defense on both players’ turns, given the nature of Wizards.

Concluding Thoughts

There are a lot of things to consider when deciding on the best equipment loadout for your hero. Understanding the tension between utility and defense in your options and what’s best for your hero’s identity and game plan is paramount to a cohesive deck and vision. With the recent rule changes to Commoner allowing for a small sideboard to exist, the choice to not simply register a full set of Nullrunes “because you can” has a real benefit to your Commoner journey, especially in a large open tournament as this article series is geared towards.

In the next and final installment of Common & Conquer, I’ll do a brief rundown on the current Commoner landscape, the pillars of the format, and how you can hope to approach these titans at their own game.

Daniel Yam

Daniel is a competitive psychopath who has relegated himself into playing the most casual format of Commoner. Starting Magic at the onset of Shards block, he jumped into Flesh and Blood when the Ira demo decks were being given out to Australian stores and is a proud holder of a 4-digit GEM ID. In his spare time, he enjoys trying to convince his friends to play increasingly worse cards, going to museums, and playing Guild Wars.