Understanding Fatigue

One mechanic unique to Flesh and Blood is the focus of each individual card being a resource. If you were to block with Crippling Crush, you’d be down one of your best threats for the rest of the game. Is it worth it? Or do you bleed to preserve the threat? The balance of preserving threats, setting up powerful turns and waving away disruption dictates success long games.

Flesh and Blood, at the most basic level, involves creating the most efficient hands out of each turn cycle. While in a normal matchup where life is the primary resource players are fighting for, it’s usually effective, blunting your opponent’s assault whilst generating an efficient counterattack. However, if a player leverages deck size as a resource, the game is changed.

This results in games whereby your attacks appear to chip your opponents life total gradually, but you are unable to finish the last few points of damage before your opponent turns the table on you, running your deck out of relevant threats. This is known as fatigue in Flesh and Blood. While frustrating as you feel powerless to such strategies, there are methods in defeating such tactics built into the game system. Here are the methods to beating this strategy.

Identifying Fatigue

Firstly, it begins by identifying an opponent that’s trying to leverage your deck size as a resource. An opponent who’s taking more defensive lines, blocking out critical attacks, sometimes even tossing their hand and letting you have your way. While inefficient, they’re preserving their life totals. In the end, one way to think about your deck is as a brick of damage and block value, and once you’re out, you’re out. An opponent might be presenting smaller, efficient, or disruptive hands, maybe even having begun the game with a large deck size. Some heroes warrant precaution to this strategy, which will be addressed later.

The most obvious example of a fatigue opponent are Decimator Great Axe decks, which make blocking extremely inefficient (using two cards to completely stop the damage, when they used no cards), yet not blocking causes your life total to drop surprisingly quickly. Alternatively, opponents might use disruptive attacks to hamper your assault, blunting your blows and making your assaults manageable. These range from small hands such as Warmonger’s Diplomacy and Leave No Witnesses, to oppressive tempo-stealing attacks alike Crippling Crush and aimed Barbed Undertow forcing blocks, and hence deteriorating your deck. 

So how do we combat this?

Methods of Fighting Fatigue

The key to defeating defense in Flesh and Blood is being patient and setting up. And setup comes in many forms. 

Five-Card Hands

The first method is utilizing explosive five-card hands. Instead of mindlessly throwing out attacks, setting up massive hands that go above the 12-block thresholds most decks have is one way to defeat fatigue. Examples of such are maximizing Rain Razors turns from Ranger decks, going over the top of most defenses, or sculpting a five-card Art of War hand as a Ninja player, threatening massive damage that wouldn’t be possible without setup. This is key in Flesh and Blood and mastering the fine balance of keeping your opponent honest via presenting threats, yet chaining together openings for powerful explosive turns is what often befalls defensive strategies.

Weapons

Next is one subtle but powerful method of preserving your deck’s threats: swinging your weapon! Attacking with your weapon preserves cards in your deck, causing your opponent to utilize cards to prevent damage. This is a good method to fill out your turns after being disrupted, continuing to set up a more powerful assault on a future turn via arsenalling. Going out of your way to swing Harmonized Kodachis instead of presenting a line involving greater damage is a way to preserve threats in your deck, whilst also getting chip damage in on your opponents, for example.

Pitch Stacking

Pitch Stacking, while an intimidating concept to some, is an advanced method of defeating fatigue decks, via preserving threats in the deck for the later game. Nothing feels worse than going through your first cycle, then returning to hands of nothing but weak blues to attempt to close. Sneaking convenient reds whilst presenting your first cycle assault ensures that you’re not out of the count early. 

The classic example is pitching Crippling Crush for Anothos swings in the first cycle, leading to dominated Crippling Crushes alongside a host of blues in the end game to close when your opponent’s assault is weakened. This strategy applies to all heroes, however, from stacking intimidate sources together as Rhinar, Reckless Rampage, to actively preserving buffs for arrows to dominate in the late game as Azalea, Ace in the Hole.The preservation of these threats can also be done subtly, via using Sink Below, Fate Foreseen, Crown of Providence, or Enlightened Strike to hide important threats for the late game. I was so shocked when I battled a Briar, Warden of Thorns who hid all her Channel Mount Heroics in the second cycle, and destroyed me then! 

If possible, keeping in mind your opponent’s pitch stack is a powerful tool. Noticing they’re pitching powerful cards together such as Steelblade Supremacy and Ironsong Determination is worrying, and an active plan to pressure your opponent in the late game is needed to ensure these powerful late-game combinations don’t overwhelm you in the second cycle.

The trick I advise others when beginning to pitch stack is not worrying about knowing each and every exact card in your stack. To battle fatigue, all you need to know is to actively preserve threats for the second cycle, and if possible, pitch powerful card combinations together. Learning to pitch stack is best done on a hero you’re already comfortable with, so you aren’t overwhelmed with too many things to worry about in the game, and is a critical and fun skill I implore everyone to learn to pick up! Believe me, nothing is more satisfying than a successful pitch-stacked kill.

Evasion

There’s also taking lines that prioritize evasion over efficiency. Evasion is any mechanic that makes things harder to block rather than presenting more upfront damage. Going out of your way to swing Harmonized Kodachis is an effective method for Ninjas to chip damage, rather than taking the most efficient line, for example. These are present in all heroes, going out of your way to take less efficient lines to dominate attacks as Azalea, Ace in the Hole, or taking additional damage to Isolate attacks as Uzuri, Switchblade. Something important to know is that as the game wears on, while your deck’s threats begin to waver, so do your opponent’s defensive options! Your opponent only has so many defense reactions to answer dominated attacks, and going out of your way to present evasive threats forces your opponent to utilize their defensive tools to answer them. Presenting these evasive threats in the second cycle causes them to be far more likely to connect against an unprepared opponent, rather than during the first cycle.

Sideboarding

Lastly, during deckbuilding, respect can be made to fatigue strategies in your sideboard. While the obvious options are cards such as Remembrance to replenish your threats, other options are available that are less specific to only battling fatigue strategies. Utilizing cards that aid setup for an overwhelming payoff are useful against fatigue strategies. Cards such as Energy Potion ensure a well set up turn can go over the top of any defense, or cards that provide precious evasion, such as Shred or Push Forward can be useful to combat such strategies.

Know Your Enemy

Now to know your enemy, and the common decks that leverage fatigue in their game plan.

Guardians

When people think of fatigue decks, often their mind returns to the ages of Oldhim dragging the game out through the dirt, and his current successors in modern Flesh and Blood. Among them, Bravo, Showstopper and Victor Goldmane, High and Mighty are the two more likely to attempt fatigue strategies. They do this via powerful defensive tools while retaliating with powerful attacks. The tall nature of Guardian attacks also mean that they preserve cards in their deck, pitching three cards rather than using three cards for their powerful assaults. Their blues are also extremely formidable, leading to an unprepared opponent dealing with a powerful second cycle, threats involving Tear Asunder and Macho Grande more than capable of closing out games. Their weapons are also formidable, being very efficient in terms of damage.

Taking on Guardians involves exploiting the high-cost nature of their attacks, and keeping them sufficiently pressured into small hands to prevent powerful retaliation. While it may initially seem their assault is unstoppable, they have to take your full assault in order to retaliate. Bravo is a greater victim of this, as his full hands offers evasion due to his hero power and connecting with powerful debilitating on hits. Victor on the other hand fights on the angle of raw efficiency, keeping your attacks honest with a massive onslaught. Tackling Victor involves setting up larger attacks as his attacks lack evasion, and weathering his assault until an opening arises. Defense reactions offer powerful respite to their attacks while you bide out time to find an opening to unleash a powerful counter attack.

Assassin

Assassin is the other class traditionally associated with fatigue, with powerful defensive tools such as the traps, and different methods of evasion to disrupt or chew through your deck. Uzuri, Switchblade leverages her evasion via Isolated attacks, keeping your attacks honest with debilitating on hits, whileArakni, Huntsman utilizes raw efficiency of their contract attacks along with Silver generation, whilst removing threats from your deck, either via forcing blocks or burning your top deck.

Both of these heroes leverage fatigue differently and similarly in some aspects. Firstly, their weapon makes it extremely inefficient to block effectively and are very powerful late game threats when you can’t afford to take damage. Unlike Guardian, the most powerful Assassin hands often involve smaller hands, being able to weaken your assault to a greater degree whilst providing retaliation. 

Uzuri mostly leverages her weapons, evasion, and disruption in order to pull you into a longer game, whilst Arakni more directly interacts with fatigue, aiming to delete threats in your deck, and having the unique ability to disrupt an opponent’s pitch stack. With threats like Command and Conquer andLeave No Witnesses, a majority of their disruption aims to threaten your arsenal, preventing setup. They also have access to traps to disrupt an opponent’s assault. 

Battling Assassins involves weaving together powerful setup turns to overwhelm their defenses, battling them on the angle of efficiency before the game drags out too long. If several powerful setup turns are managed, an Assassin lacks the defensive tools to preserve their life total. Their pitch stack is also significantly weaker if improperly planned, lacking Guardian’s powerful blue attacks and requiring the Assassin player to pitch stack their own game-ending attacks. Be wary, Uzuri’s Isolates return back to her deck after use, to finish games in the second cycles if paired with a threat.

Warrior and Decimator Great Axe

The Warrior decks most known for fatigue is the Decimator Great Axe lists, wielding arguably the most powerful weapon in the game to wear away at its opponents, while stocking the deck full of defensive tools to weather the assault. However, Warriors are also capable of threatening fatigue with other weapons, as leveraging the deceptive nature of their attack reactions force opponents to over-blocks on occasion, and waste cards blocking non-existent threats. Alongside access to Steelblade Shunt, this leaves the Warriors surprisingly capable of playing a longer game, threatening your deck in the late game with their weapons.

Combating Warrior involves understanding that they lack disruptive tools to affect your proactive assault. Commanding Performance is the only Warrior specific disruption and involves you blocking them, yet if you are capable of properly setting up overwhelming attacks, it leads the Warrior to have to deal with your assault via reactive methods, lacking proactive options alike the aforementioned decks.

Riptide

Riptide, Lurker of the Deep is an often unjustly overlooked hero in Flesh and Blood, and utilizes fatigue as a primary win condition due to his lack of evasion. With a host of debilitating arrow on hits alikeImmobilizing Shot and Barbed Undertow and traps to blunt opposing assaults such asCollapsing Trap and Inertia Trap. Riptide is a deck that plays best at smaller hands due to the lack of on hits, and avoiding the triggers to his traps (go again and above-base attacks) is important to prevent his debilitating effects. One method that’s effective against Riptide is bringing more than 60 cards, as his lack of a weapon means he himself is vulnerable to fatigue to some extent.

Conclusion

While these are the main heroes threatening fatigue, any opponent that realizes your attacks are unplanned may resort to fatigue as an alternative win condition, especially if your hero is vulnerable to fatigue. This often occurs when you lack a powerful weapon to generate deck advantage, or lack evasion. Some decks vulnerable to fatigue in the current Classic Constructed metagame are Kayo, Armed and Dangerous and Azalea, Ace in the Hole, which have to actively keep in mind fatigue as a potential loss condition.

I hope this article aids you in approaching longer Flesh and Blood games, and to be more aware of the tools you have to combat a blocking opponent. While fatigue can be frustrating, overcoming an opponent via these tactics is extremely satisfying and I implore you to explore these strategies yourself in your coming matches!

Further Reading:

The Future of Fatigue in Flesh and Blood

Pro Flesh and Blood Players Tank, and You Should Too!

The Genius of Flesh and Blood’s Pitch System