Last night I had this game that exemplified why I like playing FAB (Flesh and Blood) so much.
First, context. In a match of FAB you play as a hero battling another hero. You start each game with your hero's armor and weaponry in play, and the cards in your deck represent your character's fighting abilities and allies (mostly fighting abilities). You win one way - by reducing your opponent's life total from 40 to 0 (the game is best of 1) - but there are multiple ways to get to that one result.
Each hero is a representative of a class. The classes in the game are Assassin (in the newest set that is releasing this week), Brute (think barbarians), Guardians (big hitting defnders), Illusionists (summon Auras and Phantasms to attack with), Merchants (use currency to modify actions), Ninjas (lots of combo and multiple attacks), Runeblades (combine fighting and spells), Warriors ( weapon based ), and Wizards (lots of instant speed spell shenanigans).
I was a playing a Guardian mirror match - Bravo vs Bravo.
There are multiple ways to build Bravo, but more importantly there are multiple ways to play Bravo. It was my first game with the hero on Talishar.
What's cool is that there is no ramp-up resource development stage in the game at all. From turn 1 onward, you are attacking and defending back and forth. You don't start weak and build strength ( typical tcg flow) you start strong and fresh and gradually fatigue (which is very much like a real fight).
Our match starts with huge hits on both sides. My opponent led with an attack that did 1/4 of my starting health on the first turn! I defend a little bit and then go right back at them. Our first few turns took off nearly half of our health total as we waded in. Once we were at half, we both start to realize we can't keep this up. All it would take is one bad hand after taking a big hit to fall very far behind.
So after the slugfest, we start pre-meditating and setting up our turns a little more. I was trying to lead out with my weapon and chip away at my opponent's hand. You use cards in hand to block along with equipment (which becomes less useful every time it defends and can easily break in a match), and you only draw at the end of your turn. What this means is that sometimes a form of defense is actually making strong enough attacks into your opponent that draw some cards or armor out. If an opponent spends two cards to defend, they can only attack with two cards on their next turn. You've limited their offense by attacking.
I spend most of my turns blocking and then chipping away with the weapon. I have protected my life total very well, am wearing down my opponent's armor until they have almost nothing left to help them defend. My opponent is swinging into me pretty hard, but over time, I am going to wear them down. At one point I let myself go down to one to hit my opponent back hard.
Now we're both at 1! The game plan is continuing, and I feel that I can take my opponent out...until I notice tmy fatigue.
So, the thing to now at this point is that you pay for cards in FAB by "pitching" other cards in hand. Each card has a cost and a pitch value, meaning a card can be played or used to pay for other cards you play.
Cards that you play by attacking or defending go to your graveyard, while cards you pitch go to the bottom of your deck each turn. The game doesn't end because you run out of cards in your deck, but without a deck you can't pay for abilities, so...the game goes south really really fast.
What had been happening with my defensive plan was that I was playing multiple cards to block one big card, while my opponent was pitching multiple cards to pay for the big attack.
Once my opponent noticed the disparity in our deck sizes, they started to lean on their defense more. Now I had to start swinging, trying to get them to open up.
I attacked him with the last of my strength, but as my deck reached zero, I was too worn out to fight any longer.
I took the knee and yielded.
It was an amazing game and I loved wawtching both myself and my opponent evolve in our choices and strategies. I love being able to shift midgame to play long or set up something in the short term. There are so many lines of play each turn that most games feel like epic confrontations between two legendary warriors, which I think is the point of the game!
I have played dozens of games of FAB and have never felt that I couldn't play the game. Not every hand is created equal, but not having to worry about a resource development phase means that you never get games where one person gets the resources to play and you don't.
OK, just had to talk about this epic battle I had last night.