Your heart is pounding. You’ve been clinging to your last life point for who knows how long. Every turn you try to survive and find openings to hit your opponent. They’re in the same spot, fighting for their life against your finishing blows. Turn after turn you just try to do your best to out-maneuver each other in combat. The clock is ticking as your decks are depleting, but there must be a winner. Finally, they give you an opening. And you get to send that one big attack you have left. Their defenses can’t handle it. They die. You win.

Flesh and Blood is great.

Just great.

I’ve come to love this game. In some ways it feels like when I started playing Magic; going to a bunch of tournaments, hungry to learn more. It has a nice balance of skill expression and luck, and you often walk away from a loss feeling like you could have won. Oftentimes, the games are super close with both players at 1 life. Each turn feels like a new puzzle. And the organized play system has tons of tournaments with increasing support.

You might have been curious about Flesh and Blood. Or maybe you’re already into the game, but the gameplay is daunting since you draw a new hand every turn. This article will give you some guidance on how to approach your hands strategically. It’s designed to increase in difficulty the further you read, so new players might just want to practice with some of the first paragraphs before reading on, and more experienced players could find value by skipping some of the first steps.

It’s also written for people who have played Magic: the Gathering (as that is my own background) and will make some comparisons to that game, but you don’t need to be familiar with Magic to understand this article. I will also assume that you are already familiar with the rules of Flesh and Blood - luckily there’s plenty of resources available for this if you need a refresher!

- Legend Story Studios has a tutorial on their own website.

- I wrote up all the rules with visual demonstrations in a Twitter thread.

- Andrea Mengucci did a great gameplay walkthrough video.

Especially if you come from Magic, some of the gameplay mechanics might seem a bit foreign because this game works completely differently. No lands? Basically no permanents at all? Four new cards each turn? This is what I’m here to help you with.

As a reminder, when I say red card, yellow card or blue card, I’m referring to the amount of resources that the card pitches for: 1, 2 or 3 respectively. Also, I will try to have many of my examples be either classic generic cards or using cards from the 1st Strike introductory decks, Aurora and Terra, which I absolutely recommend for picking up the game. You can learn more about them here.

Formats

Just like in Magic, Flesh and Blood have both limited and constructed formats. Classic Constructed is the most played format and the standard way to play the game. You play with 60 cards, max 3 of each card and have an adult hero - meaning that they typically start with 40 life. There’s a tightly monitored banlist for specific cards, and when a hero has won enough tournaments, they rotate out of the format - and become a Living Legend.

Living Legend is the Vintage equivalent. It’s similar to Classic Constructed, but you can play with all heroes ever and cards aren’t banned but just restricted to one copy maximum, which leads to much more powerful strategies available.

Blitz is a quick form of the game, played with 40 card decks, max 2 of each card, and young heroes that typically start at 20 life. Rounds in Blitz take half as long as they do for Classic Constructed, there’s a separate banlist and there are heroes unique to Blitz.

All games are best of one, but you reveal your heroes to each other first and can then sideboard accordingly. Each game takes a long time - for tournament Classic Constructed the round timer is 55 minutes - and there are so many decisions during a game that it doesn’t really feel like the game is missing out by being best of 1.

In addition to these Constructed formats you have the classics Limited ones: Sealed and Draft. Limited formats are played with decks of exactly 30 cards (no more, no less) and young heroes. Sealed decks are built out of 8 packs, which often makes them stronger than draft decks. 

Draft works like in Magic with 3 packs and 8 players, but the structure of each draft set is different. There’s either 3, 4 or 6 available heroes to draft in each format, restricted to 2, 3 or 4 Classes. As an example, in the latest set, Rosetta, you could draft any of these four:

- Lightning Runeblade, Aurora

- Lightning Wizard, Oscilio

- Earth Wizard, Verdance

- Earth Runeblade, Florian

The set before, Part the Mistveil, had a Mystic Ninja, a Mystic Illusionist and a Mystic Assassin. Before that was Heavy Hitters with two different Brutes, two different Warriors and two different Guardians. 

I love drafts for a few reasons. Each set lets you play with new combinations of classes and new structures, and they each introduce new puzzles to solve. Also, the gameplay is phenomenal! Limited is where you’ll most often get these razor close games. You not only have to consider your optimal value hand to hand, but because decks are so small, you are quite likely to loop back to the cards you pitch in the early game, and it becomes important to also plan for the future. And of course, playing draft lets you get around the admittedly high entry cost to buying the constructed stables while building a collection. 

I might write a guide specifically for drafting and limited game play in the future, but this article will serve as a general strategy guide.

Choosing you hero

Currently there are 33 legal heroes in Classic Constructed to choose from, with a few more coming out in the next set, The Hunted, in late January. You can view them all here.

These span across 10 different classes: Assassin, Brute, Guardian, Illusionist, Mechanologist, Ninja, Ranger, Runeblade, Warrior and Wizard, with at least two heroes in each class. Some of them also have an additional type, a Talent. This could be Light, Shadow, Draconic, Mystic or Elemental (which is broken up into Lightning, Earth and Ice). The talents and classes determine which cards you get to play with, so for instance Aurora gets to play with Elemental, Lightning and Runeblade cards. Each class has their own mechanical identity and each hero takes its own spin on that identity, sometimes through cards that are specializations and legal for that hero only. 

It might seem overwhelming in the beginning, but I’d urge you to pick out a few of the heroes that catch your interest, either because of their gameplay style or just their vibes. www.fabrary.com is a great place to read about the heroes and the game, look at decklists from tournaments and build your own. 

You can also try out the decks from Fabrary for free on the community-driven platform www.talishar.net (once you’ve familiarized yourself with the UI). There are no tournaments on this platform, as Flesh and Blood is designed to be played in, well, Flesh and Blood, but it’s a great place to try out ideas and familiarize yourself with the game mechanics.

With the 1st Strike intro decks you get to play as Aurora, the Lightning Runeblade, and Terra, the Earth Guardian. Terra is currently not available as an adult hero to play in Classic Constructed, but Aurora is one of the best decks. There are also Blitz precons for most heroes, which are similarly 40 card decks with just a tad more complexity. Generally, even these low complexity decks have great and deep gameplay, and it can be a nice entry point to just play them against each other. You can even use them as foundations for building up towards competitive decks, as these still often include a good amount of commons. There are also a handful of Armoury Decks available, which are preconstructed Classic Constructed decks that don’t need a ton of upgrades.

With the formats and heroes covered, we can move on to the strategic concepts that help you play the game.

Defining Value

Flesh and Blood is a game built around a simple formula: 

“One card is worth 3 points.”

That’s not, by itself, the most helpful piece of advice. 3 points of… what exactly? In Magic we are used to just considering cards as units - we talk about trading a card for a card when you block their attacker. When you play Divination you go up on cards. Life total is considered to be something separate, and you don’t talk about a card being worth “3 damage” just because it has 3 power (unless you are playing Burn of course. Then you’re forever the exception).

But because Flesh and Blood has no such thing as a board state, the only thing we are attacking and protecting is the life total directly, and that means the value of each card is directly tied to how well it can affect yours or your opponent’s life total.

So if a card defends for 3, that means it has fulfilled its job of being worth 3 points. If a card attacks for 3, same story. If a card attacks for 6 but costs 3 resources, those 3 resources are being paid for by pitching another card, essentially making the two cards combine to be on rate. 

A point in this system means one point of life or one resource. 

There’s a difference between the colors of the cards. Red cards are the most obvious ones to apply this logic to. You can compare the three variants of Fry and see that only the red one is on rate by itself. 

Blue cards get their value from the resources they produce. They exchange two points of attack value to produce two more resources, which in turn can help you play stronger attacks. This is apparent if you pitch a blue Concuss to attack with Redwood Hammer - you are literally exchanging 3 resources for 3 damage.

Yellow cards, compared to red ones, get one less point of power for one extra resource which means they won’t quite hit the rate of 3 points either way you use them, but in theory they make up for this by their flexibility.

In terms of value, yellow Fry and yellow Sigil of Shelter are identical. Value is not just how much damage you can deal when playing aggro and how much damage you can defend when playing control. These lines are blurred in Flesh and Blood because if the aggro deck can keep its life total high, it’s more likely to be able to keep a full hand to send damage at you. And conversely, the defensive deck also wants to bring down your life so that it can eventually put you in the squeeze where you have to block.

The 3 points per card will refer to either how much it attacks for, defends for, or how many resources it creates when pitched. If a card can be used to hit 3 or more on either of these metrics, it is “on rate”. Additionally, attack action cards are designed so that they get +1 extra value if they consume your action point - that is, don’t have Go Again. This is beautifully illustrated by the cycle of Wounding Blow, Critical Strike, Brutal Assault and Raging Onslaught.

Take Brutal Assault for example. You’d get 2 points of attack value from the 2 resources you pay, 3 points for the card itself and then +1 bonus point for consuming your only action for the turn. This adds up to the 6 attack value on the card. 

If Brutal Assault and any blue card are the only two cards in your hand, then you can make a 6 value for two cards, which is just on rate. But if you combine it with something that costs 1 and has go again, you can capitalize on that extra value. Aurora could be a good home for the card because of her weapon, Star Fall, which does exactly that (if you have started your turn with a lightning card).

Consider a 3-card hand with Fry, any blue card and a Brutal Assault when playing Aurora. This would combine to do 3+2+6=11 value for three cards, which is even two points above expectation! 

Playing a hand

So on offense you can combine cards to get more value out of them. This concept is key to how we build our decks and consider our turns. The primitive goal of each hand is to figure out how to maximize the value you can get from it. Keep in mind that the total value includes both offensive value and defensive value.

Let’s look at an example hand. You are playing Terra from the 1st Strike intro decks, and you just finished your turn. Now you draw these four cards and ask yourself, what can you do with them?

Keep in mind that you don’t get to use them yet. You draw up at the end of your turn, so it would be your opponents turn now, and they will probably send an attack at you. Before you do anything, stop to consider everything. This is the spot to think. Start off with the question: what’s the most amount of damage you can do if you use as many cards as possible?

There’s some trickiness here. Burgeoning would be played from your hand and not get its bonus, so you can’t use it with Flourish. And Concuss is not an Earth card for Strong Wood.

You can use a trick here called “overpitching”. You aren’t allowed to pitch cards if you have nothing to pay for, but you are allowed to pitch inefficiently. In this case, you can play Flourish and then declare that you are playing Strong Wood. First you pitch Burgeoning to it. Then you still need to pay two more which you can do by pitching Concuss. This even leaves you with one extra resource that you can then use for Terras ability at the end of turn. 

In total, this line does 3+7+1=11 value (remembering to count the Might token from Terra as a point of value even though it doesn’t get cashed in until the next turn). 

It’s important to think about how much your hand can do in total on offense. But it’s not the only option. Remember that we are still on the opponents turn, and they are sending an attack at you. Playing full offense as described would also require that you don’t block with anything. If you try to include the block value of cards, can you get to a bigger number?

Blocking with all four is just 10 value, so that would be worse than going all offense. But if you block with Strong Wood and Concuss on their turn, then pitch Flourish to attack with Burgeoning on your turn, you get to do 3+3+6=12 value with your hand, counting both the block values and the attack values.

It might seem like a small difference, between 10, 11 and 12 for the three lines here, but Flesh and Blood is a game of precision. A lot of times, you will experience winning at just one life or being one life away from the victory, and so optimizing your value is everything. In this case, you can calculate that ideally you’d want to block for 6 during their turn so it can be important to block when you have the chance. 

These calculations are what should be going through your head whenever you draw a new hand and before you decide on how to block their first attack, because your upcoming turn will decide how you want to defend right now. You aren’t going to draw any new cards in between now and then, so this is the spot to stop and think. What are you going to do on your own turn, and what do you have left to block with? What gives you the most value?

There are also more interesting nuances to how you play each hand, but before I get to those, I’ll have to explain some other strategic concepts first. If you are a beginner at the game, it might be a good idea to start practicing these thought patterns, so you get used to thinking this way whenever you draw a new hand before moving on to the more advanced stuff.

How to Value the Arsenal

A lot of the strategic depth in Flesh and Blood comes from the arsenal. This lets you make decisions outside of each individual 4-card hand and plan for the future. But it’s not always super clear how the arsenal should factor into your decision-making.

In the most simple terms, a card in arsenal is just another card and so it should be worth 3 points. In the Terra example above, we actually have two more lines available that I didn’t discuss: 

We can just block for 3 with the blue Concuss, attack for 6 with Burgeoning and put Strong Wood in our arsenal. 

We can just block for 3 with Strong Wood, pitch Concuss to attack for 6 and put Flourish in our arsenal.

If we value our arsenal at exactly 3 points, both of these lines also make 12 value, just like the line that blocks for 6. So how do we process what we actually get out of having a card in your arsenal?

Some cards in your arsenal are certainly worth less than 3. This is especially true for blue cards, because you can’t pitch cards from arsenal to make ressources, so you can’t access their full potential of being worth 3 points. Especially blue or even yellow cards that consume your action point might force you to take sub-optimal lines to even get them out of your arsenal.

And some cards even brick your arsenal completely. Those are the ones that don’t have a cost, such as Resource cards or Block cards. Since the only way to get a card out of your arsenal is by paying their cost to play them, they would just get stuck there. Though note the difference between Block cards and Defense Reactions in this. Both are used for defense, but reactions actually have a cost and get played, even if that cost is often 0. And Defense Reactions are actively good to have in your arsenal.

This is also why it’s important not to overvalue a random draw off the top even if you get to put it in the arsenal. The lack of flexibility means that it could often be worth less than 3 points, and even 0 points if the card is bad enough that you can’t arsenal it.

These are the best spots to use your arsenal:

Cards that specifically combo with another card in your deck to go wildly above rate. You can set them aside and wait until you draw the other half of the combo.

Starters that can un-brick a hand. Some heroes have a lot of cards that require you to start your turn with a card with Go Again of a specific type. The lightning flow cards in Aurora are a good example of this. You can try to keep a red Fry or similar in your arsenal for when you draw a hand that really needs it.

Good red cards in case you draw a hand with all blue cards. This is specifically relevant for blue-heavy classes like Guardian, where you might draw a hand that can’t play a red card. Though often you can just plan to block and use your weapon on those turns.

Defense reactions to stop a crucial turn from the opponent, interact with dominate and overpower or stop an attack reaction.

A good card in arsenal can be worth more than the face value of the card. It can be a consideration to avoid playing in a way that puts an average level card in your arsenal, because it might take the spot for when you draw a card that would be actively good to put in your arsenal. 

One example of a bad hand is if you play Guardian and draw a hand of 4 red cards that all cost 2 or 3 resources. This leaves you unable to do anything efficiently, and often your best use for the hand is blocking with 3 cards and putting the last one in your arsenal. But this only works if your arsenal is already empty.

For that reason, in the example above, I’d argue it’s better to just block for 6 and leave your arsenal free, because neither of the options are important enough to have in your arsenal and there is some value in having the slot available. Even though Strong Wood is a strong red card, saving it for the arsenal accomplishes very little because it’s always just 3 points more than swinging your Redwood Hammer, and you might as well get those 3 points of value now by blocking with it and leaving you more flexible. However, if there was a way to play efficiently and leave Burgeoning in your arsenal, that might be strong enough because with a blue earth card you make 7+1=8 value off the attack and Terras ability.

Breakpoints

If we’re just talking about each card being worth about 3 points on offense, and most cards block for 3, wouldn’t it just be possible to completely block out every turn of the opponent?

This can to some extent be a concern, and you can slow the game down a lot by playing defensively. That’s why, when you are trying to be the attacker, there is a lot of value in prioritizing break points.

An attack for 3 can be easily and cleanly blocked by a card. An attack for 6 gets blocked by two. But if you attack for 4, what is your opponent supposed to do? They can’t really put two cards in front, as that’s incredibly inefficient wasting two points of block value. So an attack for 4 often ends up dealing damage.

The same is also true for attacks of 1 or 7. They leak damage. 2 and 5 do so to a lesser extent - that is, the opponent might either have a 2-block or just be more comfortable wasting one point of block value.

So when you plan out your attacks, it might be worthwhile playing it in a way where you make it as awkward as possible for your opponents to use their blocks. This is effective against defensive decks or midrange decks. But if you pair a breakpoint with an on-hit effect, you can even make it relevant against aggro decks too. Consider Static Shock for instance. That card is so strong because it’s awkward for the opponent to block, and as such represents something closer to 5 value.

Another instance where breakpoints become extra relevant is if the opponent is at 1 life. Then they are always forced to defend awkwardly, putting two cards in front of your attack for 4 etc. It can be important to try and defend more against decks that are good at presenting multiple break points per turn, as it can spell doom if they get you too low.

Some ways to defend yourself against break points with on-hits are equipment and defense reactions. A lot of defense reactions, like Fate Foreseen, will block for 4 and can be great cards to put in your arsenal to wait for the right time to save you. 

Equipment with block values can also be great for covering up that extra one point when you want to avoid a critical on-hit without spending an extra card blocking. A lot of new players just start blocking with their equipment when they feel like they’re getting low and that they should “block with something”. But in reality, preventing yourself from falling from 7 life to 6 life doesn’t really matter, but it can matter a ton to have saved your equipment if your opponent sends a Static Shock a couple of turns from now.

Implied Value

As we have seen an example of, some hands require a very specific amount of cards that they want to block with to utilize their full value. This means that there can be some hidden value in controlling their defenses, by either forcing them to block or denying them the ability to block.

Consider the Terra-hand from above, where we determine that we get the best value by blocking for 6. If the opponent only sends four damage at us, we might have to settle for the slightly lower 11 value, or plan to block with one card and arsenal a card. The same can also happen with evasion, like overpower, which will only allow us to block with one action card as seen on Log Fall.

In either scenario, the opponent will get about one point of value from denying the full block. This is an invisible point of value that can be hard to spot, but it can be important to be aware of its existence.

Consider this following excellent all-red hand from Aurora:

It’s not a difficult hand to play. You have all red cards that cost 0, plenty of go again and exactly one chain ender (that’s what we call the card without go again). On offense, it’s a 4-card 13, and all your cards attack for more than they block for, so there is no reason to consider another line.

Now imagine that this happens: Your Terra opponent sends a red Concuss at you, buffed by a Might token. This is an attack for 7, and if it hits, you have to discard a card.

Even though the Aurora player could cover up this damage by blocking with two Sizzles and the Crackling, that would reduce their turn to 7+3=10 value from the 7 block and the 3 attack from the Fry, much less than the 13 originally promised. The lost value is even so significant that Aurora could consider taking all 7 damage, discarding the Fry and just sending 10 damage back, as that is equal value.

In this specific scenario though, the better play would often be to just accept that you have been disrupted and block 7, then attack with nothing and put Fry into your arsenal. Not only does this guarantee that you get to start with a Lightning card on a future turn where you might need it, but you also get to do some implied value back at Terra by not presenting any attacks for him to block. You can then gear up for a big turn and be safe from having to block again, as presumably stopping all damage from the Concuss leaves you at a high enough life total.

Just like I mentioned in the previous section on breakpoints, the end game can lead to a ton of forced blocks when a player is a 1 life. This is also important to keep in mind especially if your deck blocks worse than it attacks, that you might not necessarily be favored in the positions where both players are at 1 and you are always forced to block out every attack.

Chaining forced block turns together can be a massive advantage. You can make the opponent block with so many cards that they can’t threaten you on their turn, which again lets you keep a full hand to force them to block again, turn after turn. This is also called playing with full tempo, when you are the one who gets to keep all of your cards for offensive output, while the opponent doesn’t. Classes with lots of disruptive on-hit effects like Assassin, Ranger or Guardian excel at this playstyle.

It can be hard to break out of these cycles, but being patient and defensive usually helps, sneaking in damage when you can. You keep your life total high enough that when they eventually brick and send a weak turn, you can take the damage and start attacking them back.

On-Turn, Off-turn

This can be an effective tactic to be aware of, especially when playing against decks that want to block you out every turn. You might find that playing your 4 cards every turn makes it hard to break through, so you can instead try to have a turn where you just set up and leave a card in arsenal for a big 5-card attack next turn. Classes like Mechanologist and Runeblade specialize in this strategy with their items and auras. Or you can just use your arsenal to alternate between sending a 3-card hand and a 5-card hand.

This hand from Terra is an example of taking a full turn to set up. You can block with Concuss, then pitch Autumn’s Touch to play Seeds of Strength, making 3 Might tokens, then making a fourth Might with Terras ability and arsenal the Thrive. Now you are set up to have a huge attack next turn, buffed by Thrive which affects each Might token, sending way more damage than you’d normally be able to.

Aurora has the concept of off-turn/on-turn baked into her hero ability. As I mentioned earlier, attack actions without Go Again usually get to have one extra point of power, so we can value the Embodiment of Lightning token at about 1 value if you get to use it properly. But you are paying 2 resources for it, which makes her ability net negative. This is offset by having an above-rate weapon that combines perfectly, turning 1 resource into 2 value, but also by the ability to use an off-turn to set up an on-turn. Consider this hand:

You could just play this out as a 4-card hand, sending Fry, make an embodiment, send Heaven’s Claws and Crackling for a total of 11 value. But we can get more value if we play to set up an arsenal and have a much bigger turn next turn.

So you can go Fry, pitch your blue card to attack with Star Fall, then attack with Crackling and finish off with Auroras ability which you can use at instant speed to create an Embodiment of Lightning for next turn. This would be 2+2+4=8 value this turn, which isn’t amazing but somewhat good for an off-turn. Because of the break points presented here you even make it awkward for the opponent if they wanted to defend with two 3-blocks. 

Then you put Heaven’s Claws into your arsenal and imagine drawing these four cards:

Now you can lead on the red Heaven’s Claws which will have go again from the Embodiment and you’d still have 2 more resources to attack with Starfall and play out the rest of your hand for a total of 5+2+3+3+4=17 value! Even if the opponent blocks with everything they have, you still push quite a lot of damage through.

Note that with these turns combined you get 8+17=25 value, which is just one point above rate. But the real value is in how those numbers are distributed, sending more damage on the same turn and potentially denying the opponent some efficient blocks on your off-turn.

If the deck you are facing is slow enough, you can get quite crazy with your off-turns. A great example of this is the quarterfinals of the latest World Championship. Michael Hamilton on a controlling Nuu, Mystic Assassin deck against Sam Sutherland on the Mechanologist Dash IO which can easily run out of cards in deck if you aren’t careful. 

It happens twice during the game that Sam just passes the turn with two cards still left in hand, not getting to draw the full four. He realizes that sending just a small attack will play into Hamilton’s defensive plans anyway, so you might as well save your cards for a big turn that will actually matter, and this gambit wins him the game!

Fatigue and Deck Damage

So far we have only considered getting the maximum value out of each of your hands, drawing four cards each turn. But if the game goes long enough, you might encounter a different kind of resource being depleted: cards in deck. 

This can be especially relevant in limited games because your decks are only 30 cards, but some constructed decks make it their main game plan to run you out of cards completely. In this game it works a bit differently than Magic where you lose immediately as soon as you’d try to draw from an empty deck. Here, your pitched cards go on bottom and eventually you’ll reach those cards again, called 2nd cycle, and if you go far enough you could even hit 3rd cycle. Eventually you might have used so many cards for blocking and attacking that you will only draw three cards for your turn, simply because you only have three cards left in your deck!

At this point, the opponent doesn’t need to threaten you much to run you out of any tools to work with at all. If they have one card left, and you have no cards, all they need is a weapon and they can pitch their one card each turn to attack you until you die (but usually you’d also be around 1 life at this stage anyways).

To account for these games of fatigue, we need a different system to evaluate value, because now we can actually talk about trading cards rather than just trading points of value. This philosophy is sometimes called deck damage or deck value, and stands in opposition to hand value.

Deck value is about how many points of life total we actually have gotten out of each card that went to the graveyard. Consider the blue Autumn’s Touch. If we take the philosophy to the extreme, you’d never block with this card, because by blocking you get 3 points out of it, but by attacking you’d get 5 points out of it. Nevermind that attacking would cost you an additional card from hand, because this is not what we are counting anymore - that card you pitch will eventually be drawn again to be cashed in for its value later.

The extreme version of this gameplay doesn’t even care about emptying out your hand each turn. Since you are going through each card anyways, you are in no rush to see new cards every turn, and you certainly wouldn’t waste the potential of cards just so that you could go deeper into your deck. If you send an attack that the opponent covers up by blocking with two cards, that’s how you get your 2-for-1, as the cards you pitch don’t leave your deck. 

In practice, you would never take the deck damage philosophy to its extreme, because you’d rarely be blocking, not sending much damage in return and very quickly just die to a normal opponent. 

In reality, we aren’t going to take 3 extra damage to hold on to a blue Autumn’s Touch for the upside that it might attack for 5 at some point. You simply just don’t have time to play all the big attacks in your deck over the course of the game, so you have to resign to blocking with a great deal of them.

But still, having awareness of fatigue play patterns and deck value can help you if the game does go long. Sometimes playing slightly inefficiently can help you out in these games, eking out enough value to be the one with the last card standing.

Consider the initial Terra example again, all the way back now. We conclude that blocking for 6 and attacking for 6 is the best value. But if you go for the full offense line, which pitches two cards and does 11 value, you also get to preserve a Burgeoning (6 deck value) and a blue Concuss (3 deck value) in your deck, whereas the other line only preserves a Flourish (3 deck value). 

So the full offense line gives up 1 point of hand value to gain 6 points of deck value. If you are playing a match-up that is slow enough, this could actually be a worthwhile trade-off. You just can’t do it turn after turn, because the leaked hand value will add up and eventually you’d have lost so much tempo that you don’t even reach the fatigue state anymore.

One great way to go up in deck value is trying to swing your weapon as often as possible. Since the weapon attack doesn’t cost you any cards from deck, you just gain card advantage every time you do it. This is both something to remember when you’re the one playing the fatigue deck and when you’re playing against it. 

Another thing you can do, that is actually reasonable in this game, is to just present more than 60 cards after you see their hero. We usually call this “fatdecking”, and it can be worthwhile to design your deck to be able to do this by including some blue cards in your sideboard. 

Another important aspect is that you can’t just win in fatigue by blocking everything the opponent does. Sure, you are way more likely to take the game to a state where fatigue is relevant, but blocking is less efficient for deck damage than attacking. Usually you don’t get to pitch cards when blocking, so the attacker gets to preserve some deck size every turn. Also break points and small attacks can make you block ineffciently, and the attacker also gets that bonus point of value on all of their chain enders that you don’t get to capitalize on if you’re just blocking. 

Especially blocking with 2-blocks can be dangerous for losing fatigue games. This is why we often talk about “fatigue by damage”, where it’s actually the offensive player that runs the defensive player out of cards because they continually force cards out of their hand.

Playing towards these fatigue states can be quite challenging, especially since it ideally involves keeping track of the cards you and your opponents pitch. And I would certainly not recommend experimenting with these tactics before being comfortable with playing hand value optimally. But thinking about fatigue and deck value can help you gain some hidden points and set you up for having much stronger hands in the 2nd cycle. 

What to pick when the values are equal?

Sometimes you will have calculated the hand value of two different lines to come up with the same result. It might be that taking all damage and sending your full hand is the same as blocking a bit and sending two cards. Consider a card like Photon Rush. Since it blocks for 3 and has go again most of the time, it will often be the same value whether you block with it or attack with it.

So what are you supposed to choose now that you can no longer be guided by the bigger number? In the case of Photon Rush, is it better to have both players’ life total be 3 points lower or save both players 3 points of life?

One heuristic you can use here is that blocking will make the game more about fatigue (deck value) and taking the damage will make the game more about tempo (hand value). That said, the game needs to have a reasonable shot of coming down to fatigue for deck value to even be relevant. 

In the cases where fatigue isn’t a relevant factor you can also consider this heuristic: not blocking will make the game go faster. This means that each player will get fewer hands before the game is over, and the game becomes more volatile, more likely to be decided by the luck of the draw on those few hands. So if someone is going to outvalue you in the long run, but you have some hands that are worth more than theirs, you might take your chances right now and play with both players at a lower life total.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that if you are playing aggro, you should take the damage. By taking the damage, you also accelerate the game to the point where both players are so low on life that they have to block and can only send 1- or 2-card hands back. And if your deck is worse at blocking and/or worse at presenting breakpoints, it might not be ideally suited for playing those games. You also make it less likely that you can set up your big 5-card on-turns.

In fact, aggro decks often welcome the chance to get to block efficiently, because you aren’t necessarily aiming to win quickly. Most heroes don’t get better as time goes on, but get worse as they lose more and more armor. So if you can keep your life total high while still chipping them down, and not risking that the game becomes about fatigue, then your breakpoints with on-hits can become more and more of a problem for your opponent, and you get more opportunities to send your best hands at them.

Additionally you can also consider the value of adding a card to your arsenal, and whether one of your lines has a chance to acquire some implicit value by denying or forcing blocks. If one line presents better break points, that might pull it over the top, or maybe you simply just play it defensively now and set up for that bigger turn later. As a rule of thumb I’ve found that this game tends to reward patience.

Once you are familiar with these concepts and have practiced them, you might feel less lost when drawing your 4-card hands. Even with all the strategic complexity and interplay highlighted here, there is still so much more to discover once you start delving into the different classes. 

Runeblades can create huge stacks of runechant tokens, letting you send them all at the opponent in one turn. Brutes have you consider fractions in your value math, as they have risk assessment and random effects baked into their identity. Assassin lets you take cards away from the opponent’s hand to disrupt them. Illusionists create board states of allies and additional weapons that they try to protect. And Wizards can just send 30 or more arcane damage during your opponent’s turn!

And no, I’m not going to explain further on any of those concepts. Diving into a new game is also a time of discovery, and honestly, to me, that is the most fun part!

Flesh and Blood is great.

Just great.