(Pulverize | Art by Federico Musetti)

Hi, howdy, and hello cardboard rectangle enthusiasts! I hope all of you are doing well. I’m not, personally, seeing as I’m just now starting to recover from the worst flu I’ve had in recent memory. But one upside to that is that I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on my enjoyment of Flesh and Blood. Which is probably because I didn’t get to actually play the game since bloody November due to work at first, then the holidays, and now the bloody flu.

Get to the Point, Will Ya?

Alright, alright. I think I’ve honed in on one aspect that makes the game great which I have had a lot of difficulty putting into words: the way the game takes to heart lessons that other games have learned years before FAB even existed. I’ll get further into just what I mean by that in a moment, but allow me to dig deeper into this with an example. And a topical one at that!

The thing that really put this in the forefront of my mind was a preview from the upcoming set Heavy Hitters (keep an eye out for our set reviews soon). It included a mechanic that I recognized from Magic: the Gathering – clash!

Now clash isn’t just the name of the greatest unofficial format, one which our very own wunderkind Ethan ‘ManSant’ Van Sant had a hand in creating, it’s also one of Magic‘s many mechanics which ended up being considered a mistake by Magic design guru Mark Rosewater and the game’s fanbase alike. The way it works in Magic is thus: you and your opponent clash by revealing the top card of your deck. Whoever revealed the card with the higher mana value (resource cost in FAB terms) is considered to have won the clash and would get some kind of effect, depending on the card.

It ended up being somewhat awkward in Magic due to at least a third of your deck consisting of lands (cards that have no mana cost and therefore automatically lost the clash), and higher cost cards generally being less desirable in Magic due to the way the game played (they were unplayable for most of the game and you could literally lose the game before you could afford to cast them).

Wasn’t This Article Supposed to Be About Flesh and Blood?

Bear with me, I’m getting there. When I saw that clash had made its way to FAB, it instantly made sense to me, even outside of the tweak the designers at Legend Story Studios have applied to the mechanic, which is that the clash is decided based on the card’s power value, not its cost.

Due to FAB’s resource system, both of the issues that the clash mechanic has are just no longer a factor. There are no mandatory cards that automatically lose the clash and all the big cards aren’t a crippling liability in FAB, since you always get to draw a fresh hand and have the option to pitch them or defend with those chonkers.

So the designers have taken a flavorful idea (a test of strength), honed in on its central idea (by making the mechanic care about the card’s power rather than its cost) and applied it where it made the most sense (in a set flavored around arena combat with two out of three classes caring about cards with big attack values).

This isn’t exactly to say that I am absolutely certain that the clash mechanic will be a huge slam dunk this time around, only that I believe that it’s a very reasonable risk to take because the potential gameplay upside is absolutely there. Players in general love minigames, and FAB is in dire need of more little variables that can generate fun and engaging moments for the casual crowd.

I Think I Get It, but Where Else Are You Picking Up on This?

Where am I not picking up on this? FAB has woven into its design DNA many of the techniques that took other games decades to master. Just take the keyworded tokens that first took the form of Gold/Treasure/Clue tokens in Magic (or in other games, since I can’t actually be sure that Magic didn’t take inspiration from elsewhere).

These tokens, which I believe started out in FAB with the humble Quicken token all the way back in Welcome to Rathe, are absolutely ubiquitous by now. And for good reason: they compartmentalize complexity (pleasing alliteration there) by streamlining the number of words on a card, and the possibilities for little repeated effects that take little additional mental energy to learn or keep track of are endless.

Case in point, a mere five years after the release of Welcome to Rathe, we’re up to thirty different tokens with unique effects (and we already have a second subtype, too: ally tokens!), and I believe they all add something to the game. Well, maybe Spellbane Aegis could be taken out behind the shed. They can’t all be winners.

Even in matters other than design, LSS have done their homework: They announced that the winner of the upcoming celebrational will get their likeness immortalized in a card that they get to have a hand in designing, one of the absolutely sweetest ideas in TCG history! I could keep going here with more examples, but I think you get the idea. And I’m sadly not being paid based on my word count, amazing as that would be.

So What Are You Saying, Is FAB Derivative?

No. In fact, that’s pretty much the opposite of what I’m getting at with this whole thing. In fact, I believe that in game design, the thing you should be doing most is paying attention to what players respond to and how they respond to it. It would be incredibly arrogant to dismiss the notion of re-using an idea in your game just because you weren’t the one who came up with it first (as opposed to plagiarizing a game system wholesale, which you should never do, obviously).

In fact, the recontextualization of the clash mechanic is only really a good idea because the very engine of FAB is in many ways the inverse of Magic: the Gathering and many games that came after it: the game starts with no need for setup, interaction is near-constant with both players making decisions at every step (through blocking or attacking), there are no strictly dead cards, and the possibility of a deadlock is minimized by the constant refilling of the hand.

The very essence of the game is a testament to the fact that its design is the result of many decades of TCG experience. That allows FAB to give a mechanic that didn’t quite work in Magic a second shot at maybe being something truly great and memorable. There’s something beautiful to that idea. A beauty that I believe everybody who has a love for games can appreciate.

Further Reading:

Is Flesh and Blood More Than Just a Math Game?

Don’t Let Break-Even Decisions Break You in Flesh and Blood

The Genius of Flesh and Blood’s Pitch System

Jonah Lara

Raised on a steady diet of fantasy storys and video games, Jonah discovered trading card games at the impressionable age of 12 and has since spent over half his life and about the same percentage of each monthly salary on card games. If he's not brewing new decks or catching up on the latest FaB news, he's probably dead - or painting a new Warhammer mini.