(Kassai of the Golden Sand | Art by Alexander Mokhov)

New set, new heroes. New heroes, new decks. But what makes a deck good?

Heavy Hitters looms, and each of the heroes revealed so far presents interesting deck-building implications and looks to leave the Deathmatch Arena to impact the Flesh and Blood metagame. But what will it take to make these contenders good? How do players at the top tables choose their decks and refine them to perfection? Here’s the formula I have in mind.

(Good Math + Good Evasion) x Effective Interaction x Consistency

Math

Since the innovation of Michael Hamilton’s Iyslander, Stormbind and its dominance during the Uprising era, every player knows math flows through the veins of Flesh and Blood. In this game, “math” refers to the number of points of value your deck can generate. If I’ve blocked nine damage and dealt four, I’ve generated 13 points of value. “Good math” means creating more points of value than your opponent.

A majority of successful decks since Hamilton’s Iyslander have had good math. Alexandros Argyriou’s Fai, Rising Rebellion is a deck with excellent math, with the ability to generate hands that are consistently above-rate due to the power of Searing Emberblade. Another example is US Nationals 2023 champ Charles Dunn being a defensive Briar, Warden of Thorns, utilizing two-card eights and wielding powerful blocking ability for superior turn cycles.

The most infamous consideration of good math in Flesh and Blood is Bulllander, with the inclusion of efficient physical attacks to aid Iyslander, Stormbind‘s struggles in denting Guardian defense with spells alone.

Good math is the first check that most decks need in order to be successful. Flesh and Blood is about trading points of value, with skillful players generating more points of value each turn, creating a life advantage to leverage the point difference into a victory.

Evasion

Evasion takes many forms in Flesh and Blood. From Bravo, Showstopper‘s dominate ability, to arcane damage via the Runeblades and Wizards, to all the powerful intimidate from Rhinar, Reckless Rampage disabling blocking, each deck has methods to cause damage to overcome blocks rather than presenting an overwhelming amount of damage. Evasion is also important to ensure certain key attacks connect for their unique on hit effects.

While your math might be excellent, without evasion you might leave yourself vulnerable to fatigue. Decks such as Dash, Inventor Extraordinaire and Riptide, Lurker of the Deep are vulnerable to fatigue despite having access to powerful on-rate turns. This is due to the inherent drawbacks of their classes (boost with Dash and being weaponless in Riptide). While decks have gotten past this via overwhelming numbers, they require innovative deck-building and a skillful player to overcome these weaknesses.

Decks with poor evasion often suffer against defensive decks, giving them the space to generate their superior long-term value. With good math and good evasion, this sets up a deck’s potential to create an effective proactive strategy. However, Flesh and Blood also involves a tense back and forth with your opponent, and that leads to interaction.

Interaction

While what you do may be good, your opponent will have a say in your plays. Flesh and Blood carries interaction via several methods, such as disruption via Ice, or on hit effects such as Command and Conquer.

Interaction encompasses both proactive and reactive methods. Proactive interaction involves throwing threats that demand answers, lest they generate immense value. Examples of this would be Uzuri, Switchblade‘s Shake Down, Pummel effects, or Bravo, Showstopper‘s Crippling Crush. While proactive interactions lack good math at the surface, they provide powerful effects that put your opponent off their strategy effectively.

While reactive interaction is often known as debilitating effects such as Blizzard, defensive tools such as defense reactions, solid equipment, or abilities to circumvent proactive interaction are all effective tools to ensure your proactive plan goes smoothly. Examples of this include Levia, Shadowborn Abomination‘s unparalleled armor suite (e.g. Carrion Husk) deflecting attempts to soften her onslaught, or Fai, Rising Rebellion‘s decent equipment suite and defensive tool package of Reinforce the Line and Sink Below used for handling Bravo.

The above two forms of interaction are more widespread, and the lack of effective tools in interaction results in a weaker matchup against aggressive strategies, as they either outperform you via their proactive strategy, or host the tools to answer your attacks.

Interaction also refers to tools to handle specific heroes. Dromai, Ash Artist, for example, asks difficult questions that require unique answers. Rake the Embers produces a number of Aether Ashwings that require numerous small attacks to handle, lest they pile upon damage as the game draws long, alongside six-power Phantasm attacks. The duality between needing wide attacks as well as poppers to destroy hyper-efficient Illusionist attacks causes unique interactions to be needed for a good Illusionist matchup. 

The Wizard matchups also ask for interesting interactions. Not only do you need a heavy pitch count to prevent bleeding into combo range from Kano, Dracai of Aether‘s attacks, but also a fast clock with sufficient evasion to ensure Kano can’t set up a pitch stack for a powerful turn to guarantee a kill. This duality also limits the decks that have effective plans into Kano without other unique tools to handle the problem presented.

Consistency

Consistency is key, especially if you’re trying to get a deep run in a long tournament. While huge spikes of power are important in a field of refined decks, having your deck underperform due to variance often costs too many games to take you out of Top 8. Consistency involves many hands being active regardless of their layout, either with a high redundancy of key pieces for active turns, tools to fix faulty hands, or reliable turn cycles to execute your deck’s game plan over clunky combos. 

Examples of highly consistent decks are Redline Dromai, Ash Artist, with a great level of redundancy throughout her deck preventing bricks and always maintaining options of proactivity. The addition of Tome of Imperial Flame skyrocketed Dromai’s consistency, letting her see more cards, generate more active hands to the situation presented, and overwhelm the opponent. Decks that lack this consistency struggle to make a splash at the highest level. An example is Ser Boltyn, Breaker of Dawn, with his reliance on drawing the powerful spike of Lumina Ascension for winning odds, leaving your fate at the mercy of your draw.

Innovation

While decks appear to have weaknesses, the answer isn’t to throw them aside upon encountering them, but rather to innovate to shore up these weaknesses. There are many examples of this, but Ben Dodd’s Uzuri, Switchblade list is one of the cleanest cut.

Uzuri has very powerful two-card hands, with a weakness in utilizing higher hand sizes efficiently outside of swinging daggers. Ben innovates via trying to keep Uzuri’s cards as proactive as possible, minimizing blues and utilizing Nimblism, Nimble Strike, every zero-cost go again possible, and minimal interaction tools varied to the meta. This shores up Uzuri’s extremely poor Dromai, Ash Artist matchup to being playable by increasing his interaction on that front, alongside leaving themselves a solid matchup against other aggressive decks due to Uzuri’s inherent interaction.

Another example is classic Lexi, Livewire. Lexi’s traditional weakness to fatigue was mended in Outsiders. Via the utilization of six-card hands in New Horizon, the axis of attack enabled by the Codices caused defensive decks to play incredibly awkwardly around Lexi’s attacks, struggling to keep their arsenals filled in order to prevent the Codices causing a disarm due to Lexi’s ability. This, alongside her incredible math of over-rate attacks, Ice to keep aggro mirrors in check, and redundancy of vanilla arrows, caused Lexi to have an incredible matchup spread, dominating the metagame. 

Application of Theory

Maxx ‘The Hype’ Nitro was conceptualized as a deck which went all-in on its ability to cast Construct Nitro Mechanoid and utilize its powerful ability to severely outtrade its opponents. Maxx Nitro’s math is fantastic once he transforms, with a decent on-rate proactive strategy without accounting for the transformation condition due to powerful boost cards.

For evasion, Maxx aims to overcome defensive decks via utilizing High Octane to overwhelm their defenses by slamming the Mechanoid multiple times in one turn. Interaction is where he falls relatively flat. He does have several points of armor, however. Once he flips, he can utilize the massive base armor of the Mechanoid to ward away some attacks as he sets up his devastating retaliation. But with the Mech class’s access to defense reactions being limited, he’s only able to utilize Firewall to deflect key on hits.

Lastly, while Maxx’s game plan is powerful, his consistency suffers due to the reliance on transforming to spike powerful turns. Deck-building concessions have to be made that detract from the proactive plan to enable the Nitro Mechanoid plan.

Heavy Hitters

Now to apply these assumptions to the new heroes. Each of them presents unique potential strengths, and challenges that need to be overcome. We have yet to see the new suite of support for each of the heroes revealed at the time of this article’s writing, but here’s a quick overview.

Kayo, Armed and Dangerous & Rhinar, Reckless Rampage

Kayo, Armed and Dangerous‘s hero ability aims to fix the weakness of the Brute class, which is poor consistency. Due to the high volume of six-powers, it enables the previously inconsistent Brute cards such as Pulping or Tear Limb from Limb to become far more reliable, enabling Kayo’s onslaught. Kayo’s weaknesses initially appear to be his lack of natural evasion and the inherent Brute weakness of the lack of interaction. Unlike Rhinar, Reckless Rampage, Kayo doesn’t have a built-in form of interaction, and looks to present massive chains of damage to go over an opponent’s defense. Whether or not he’s vulnerable to fatigue depends on how spiky Kayo’s power turns are, especially since his attacks often involve discarding from hand.

Kayo’s forms of proactive interaction don’t go beyond tools in generics such as Command and Conquer and Erase Face, although he’s buffed by his Might tokens to push difficult thresholds. Defensively, Kayo boasts the usage of Scowling Flesh Bag to disrupt wide aggression, however it requires the sacrifice of the use of Skullhorn. Each inclusion of a defensive tool, much like Mechanologists, carries a risk, limiting the number of defensive tools he can include. As such, at a glance, a successful Kayo deck aims to maximize his proactive brutality, and find the balance of holding off his prey’s retaliation.

Rhinar’s return looks to fix his problems. He’s always had the best evasion in the game, forcing his damage through defenses outside of arsenaled defense reactions due to his intimidate. Where he’s traditionally faltered is the relative inefficiency of his attacks, struggling to keep them on rate outside of Bloodrush Bellow turns. His consistency has always been a balancing factor as well, as he lacks the ability to make his blue ratios or six-power ratios up to par simultaneously. His poor math and consistency could use improvements to bring him up to metagame standards.

Olympia, Prized Fighter & Kassai of the Golden Sand

Olympia, Prized Fighter has had little revealed, but boasts the strength of the Warrior’s class, incentivizing blocks and punishing them. With his specialization Up the Ante, alongside Take the Upper Hand, he looks to modify its attacks on the combat chain, forcing opponents into inefficient blocks, or scare opponents off  blocking altogether, enabling him to generate Gold. It hasn’t been shown whether Olympia has good math to back the Warrior’s powerful evasion. As his card pool is largely shrouded in mystery, all we can say for certain are the mind games around his wagers are likely his greatest strength.

Kassai of the Golden Sand, on the other hand, has a unique deck-building restriction, but looks to play a mathematics game. She attempts to generate Gold to draw cards, enabling powerful turns swinging her sabres, generating even more Gold. Reactions such as Glint the Quicksilver and Blade Runner present a difficult blocking puzzle. Kassai’s evasion comes from her specialization, Raise an Army, creating Sellsword tokens which are difficult to clear and to block, overcoming defenses if not dealt with. Kassai’s weakness may lie in her consistency, as her need for red and yellow cards ask for a unique deck-building challenge to ensure she can cast her cards.

At face value, both heroes lack proactive interaction outside of threatening efficient wagers to benefit themselves. The Warriors however have always boasted a powerful suite of armor that can be used to protect themselves from counter-attacks. Thus, if their proactive strategy is lacking, they may falter to other powerful aggressive strategies. However, if possible, these two heroes look to be nightmares to defend against in combat.

Betsy, Skin in the Game

The Guardian class’s strengths have traditionally been their interaction, but Betsy, Skin in the Game begs to differ. Her ability is similar to that of Bravo, Showstopper, adding additional pitch to add overpower to attacks she wagers. This evasion on demand is a huge strength, however, unlike Bravo, her attack suite is likely to differ as she has to wager the attacks rather than asking for Guardian attacks. The Guardian modus operandi has always been to weaken their opponents blunting their counter attack, while Betsy looks to go bigger with her specialization Bet Big.

While most traditional forms of Guardian disruption are too pitch-costly to be buffed then overpowered, cheaper attacks exist. Utilizing buffs like Money Where Ya Mouth Is on Command and Conquer or Erase Face allows for evasion to cards that normally don’t receive them.

When appropriate, Guardians use powerful attacks such as Spinal Crush to force an opponent onto defense. They’ve also traditionally suffered a weakness of consistency, due to the high-costed nature of their attacks, a good ratio of blues and reds have to be achieved to ensure Betsy has reds in every hand to assault her opponents, and have the energy to cast them.

For Betsy to be effective, she must be able to combat the opponent on the efficiency angle, presenting trades that favor her, carving advantages as she wins her wagers before closing the game with her ability.

Conclusion

With each new Heavy Hitters card previewed, consider what problems the card solves, and build decks as a whole considering how each hero fights on these axes. I wish all my readers luck in the Deathmatch Arena!

Further Reading:

Is Flesh and Blood Worth Playing at a Casual Level?

Improve Your Flesh and Blood Gameplay

The Benefits of Team Play in Flesh and Blood