For a long time, Bravo has been one of the stronger choices in Blitz due to his consistency and ability to force damage. His consistency has largely come from his blocking ability combined with an efficient weapon. Today’s article is focusing on a Bravo deck that asks the question “What if a quarter of my deck blocked for four?”

Connect Four Bravo

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Hero (1) 1 Bravo Weapons (1) 1 Titan’s Fist Equipment (5) 1 Civic Steps 1 Crown of Providence 1 Gauntlets of Iron Will 1 Steelbraid Buckler 1 Tectonic Plating Main (40) 2 Chokeslam red 2 Command and Conquer 2 Crippling Crush 2 Fate Foreseen red 2 Macho Grande red 2 Pulverize 2 Sink Below red 2 Spinal Crush 2 Test of Might red 2 Test of Strength red 2 Test of Vigor red 2 Star Struck yellow 2 Buckling Blow blue 2 Chokeslam blue 2 Cranial Crush 2 Debilitate blue 2 Disable blue 2 Macho Grande blue 2 Thunder Quake blue 2 Thunk blue Inventory (6) 2 Pummel red 2 Staunch Response red 1 Nullrune Boots 1 Rampart of the Ram’s Head

Boots and Bonks

This list rides on the back of some of the strongest equipment in the game. The whole fridge (equip suite) covers 13 damage over the duration of a game. This is really helpful into other dominate decks and beatdown decks like Brute. When it comes to weapons, we only bring one in the form of Titan’s Fist. While this hammer can only swing four damage per turn, it’s enough for this deck to stay relevant and chip away throughout the game.

“You Play TEN!!! Four-Blocks???”

The deck at its core is a pile of four-block cards via defense reactions and the clash blocks from Heavy Hitters. These tools serve to try and keep the general hand-to-hand value of the deck higher than most. The first question most people have about this build is “Don’t you lose all your clashes?” The answer is most of them, but you don’t care because you side out any that are overly detrimental to lose. Things like not giving Cash In decks Gold tokens or not giving Brute a Vigor to bridge the gap to swing one more attack at you.

Our clash suite is all of the block clashes that are legal for Bravo. These are Test of Might, Test of Vigor, and Test of Strength. When we win these, they’re great. When the opponent wins them, it’s usually inconsequential. The rest of the four-blocks are the usual suspects for a control deck in the form of Sink Below and Fate Foreseen. These have always been the gold standard for control decks. They’re great for stopping breakpoints and have a good amount of utility in their textboxes.

The Other Stuff

While blocking four is great, a deck has to have some other tricks up its sleeve. When it comes to our other cards in the main deck, it’s split into two categories: threats and blues.

Threats

For threats, the deck has the usual Bravo stuff. There are two Crippling Crushes. Pitch stacking these for endgame can quickly flip the game on its head and should be a priority for any matchup where you know you need to present a big endgame threat. There’s also a set of Star Struck. These can be a whole skipped turn for the opponent if you can land the crush effect. Star Struck and Crippling can be great attacks to send without dominate to try to get the opponent to give you cards as well. Continuing in the big cost, big reward attacks, there’s Macho Grande. This attack is an amazing card to play on the first or last turn of a game. It’s nothing flashy, but ten damage is a lot in a twenty life format, and dominate is nothing to sneeze at either.

The other threats in the deck are pretty potent as well. Command and Conquer is one of the most powerful cards in the game and does a great job in this list. Blitz has plenty of decks that try for one blowout turn by arsenalling their power card to sit on it for a turn or two. There’s also Spinal Crush, because it turns out that doing more than one thing a turn is the game plan for a lot of decks.

Chokeslam makes an appearance mostly for counter play to Bloodrush Bellow and other Guardians playing Pummel. Finally, and most iconically for Guardian, there is Pulverize. This attack hits for 14. There is almost no deck that can ignore a Pulverize and win. There are barely decks that can full block a Pulverize and send anything relevant back.

Blues

The blues in the deck aren’t super exciting, but they’re important to keep the deck functional. This pile actually runs fewer than a lot of Bravo piles due to its game plan. It’s looking to weed out red defensive pieces in first cycle while mitigating damage and chipping with the hammer. Then it hits a second cycle of threats and blues to power them out. The blue suite is also very Illusionist conscious with none of the blue cards having less than six power.

The most important part of the blue suite is probably the eight-power attacks that help threaten relevant damage when games go towards a fatigue state.

Inventory Shenanigans

The inventory is relatively simple for this deck. There’s a set of Pummel that comes in for any matchup where you need to be more proactive, like fatigue Warrior decks. There are also two copies of Staunch Response to play into tall strategies.

As for equipment in the inventory, there’s Nullrune Boots for all your arcane prevention needs (Wizards can’t hurt me if I just pretend they don’t exist), and a Rampart of the Ram’s Head that can be brought in for Dash on Induction Chamber and Runeblades.

To Bonk or Not to Bonk?

At the end of the day you have to make this decision, and this deck is one that will let you do both in one game. If you like big numbers with a side of being a little annoying, this deck should be added to your list of things to try.

Further Reading

What to Expect at a Flesh and Blood Skirmish

How to Build Dash, Database in Blitz

Where to Start in Flesh and Blood

Jo O'Brien

Jo (they/them) is an avid Flesh and Blood player, judge and, writer. They are one of the blitz specialists here at FABREC. Jo has played a lot of classes and heroes but, they have an affinity for two heroes in particular, Dash and Valda. When not playing FaB, Jo is typically filling their free time playing guitar, playing Apex Legends, or building their next Rube Goldberg machine of a deck.