As Flesh and Blood‘s latest set, Bright Lights, gets released throughout the world, we take a look at the latter half of the Mechanologist attack action cards (first half is covered here) and what they hold for the metagame at large.

Notably, due to how the set numbers are laid out, most, if not all, Evo cards have been reviewed in the prior article, So there’ll be fewer Teklovossen, Esteemed Magnate synergies to be found here. The bulk of the remaining cards are likewise commons and rares, so it’s time to boost away and go dumpster diving through the scrapyard for some notable hits.

Redundancy Is Good

In many card games, the goal in deckbuilding is to reduce variance. This now comes to Mechanologist in the form of the latest vanilla boost cards Zero to Fifty, Razzle Dazzle, and Full Tilt, which are all “worse” copies of Zero to Sixty, Zipper Hit, and Throttle, respectively. However, there is some considerable merit in their inclusion in some Classic Constructed decks, especially the zero-cost cards. Plus, others may find use in the hyper-aggresive decks of Blitz and Commoner.

Big Shot is a bigger and more conditional Throttle, but might just be one of the class’s beefiest single attacks thus far. The cost is prohibitive, though.

Under Loop might just be better than Over Loop due to simple price reduction at the cost of one less power. However, the effect remains the same. I’ve already seen discussion on Dash players making the change, and I concur.

Sideboard Picks

Steel Street Hoons is such a flexible four-block blue pitch card that may warrant sideboard spots in Dash I/O decks that want to take a slower approach to the game.

Spring a Leak and Smash and Grab are both in-faction sideboard cards that have powerful anti-mirror effects that’ll certainly see sideboard spots as players test out Mechanologist builds. Smashing Good Time and Mischievous Meeps are still great cards, but we want Mech cards to not mess up our boost plans, should we run a boost-centric deck.

Gigawatt is an interesting card, as it compresses the boost into just the buffed card instead of spreading it across two boost attacks. We’re still uncertain how fast the new, more aggressive Dash decks can deck themselves out, but this card’s a contender for a slot in case. The two-block is killer, though. There are also hyper-aggro Dash I/O lists floating around that don’t utilize this card, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

Vroom Vroom!

Maxx ‘The Hype’ Nitro truly screams FAB 2.0, and for good reason – there’s a lot going on in his ability and it might take long before we crack the code on the optimal Maxx list. For example, how greedy can we be on all the Hyper Driver synergy, or is it more of just an occasional ability and we just play normal Flesh and Blood with him with the occassional crank?

Either way, I think Big Bertha is going to be an auto-include in any Maxx deck – and we might just want all three colors to make it redundant.

Rev Up is functionally a Throttle in Maxx lists, and the rainbow colors might be building blocks just for how efficient they should be. Notably, the red variant also serves as a Phantasm Popper.

Living In the Database

Dash I/O is an exciting hero to experiment with, and she brings so many possibilities to the table. Data Link and Dive Through Data are basically just better copies of Zero to Fifty and Razzle Dazzle. Again, redundancy might just be good, so there’s no harm in having these cards take up a common slot in an already dizzying set.

Sprocket Rocket and Dumpster Dive have a lot of synergy with the aforementioned opt attacks, but likewise with the new Dash, so they may be second inclusions after reliable classics such as Zero to Sixty and Zipper Hit.

Synergies Galore

Expedite and MetEx have the potential to be extremely broken – cheating cards into play has always been a good mechanic. However, they’re no match (but serve as a complement) to the previously reviewed Heist.

These cards also allow us to cheat on action points, as we can pop in crank cards and immediately gain an action point, aside from the go again we gained from boost. This may serve as a combat trick and is extremely nutty with Spark of Genius.

These two cards also synergize with the slew of galvanize cards we have, especially perhaps to feed Cognition Field for a control type of deck.

Boost, Boost

With Mechanologist being near-synonymous with the keyword boost for the longest time, it is all but fitting for one of, if not the best, card this set to simply boost two times.

Notably, when we play Twin Drive, before paying costs, we have to declare how many times we want to boost – we can’t see what we banish then decide if we want to boost a second time.

This is an insanely pushed card that revitalizes old Mechanologist cards. And even though much of the set doesn’t play well with the older cards, Twin Drive might still just be enough to keep them at the top of the meta. The simple fact that we get two boosts off of one card opens up so much more space for Mechanologist decks.

The list of synergies are endless – Bios Update now has two potential hits in a single card, while Pulsewave Harpoon requires fewer attacks to get its full effect. In fact, you might just need Twin Drive and the harpoon for a full hand peek.

The biggest winner is High Octane, which gives us three action points from a single attack. This then leads to the stock of Spark of Genius and Tome of Fyendal going up as well.

Meanwhile, Maximum Velocity has become so much easier to pull off, only requiring just one more boost. Twin Drive is terrifying.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the meta frontrunners after this set is Dash I/O with Twin Drive, Heist, plus all the old synergy cards discussed above.

The latter half of the set is filled with a lot of similar effect deck-fillers, which is boring but not insignificant, and is worth a deeper review just for how many near-functional reprints we have. Deck tuners will have a field day with all these rares and commons! Happy Bright Lights release!

Other Bright Lights set reviews:

Heroes & Weapons by Pheano Black

Equipment by Peter Buddensiek

Items by Tyler Horspool

Blocks, Instants, and Non-Attack Actions by Ethan Van Sant

Attack Actions Pt 1 by Valera

Non-Mechanologist Cards by Jonah Lara