By: Dimos

Flesh and Blood is a card game that can easily cost an arm and a leg. Unfortunately, I don’t live in an area where I can sell my actual blood to buy cards, so I’ve had to make do in more creative ways. The official announcement of the Commoner format got me thinking back to when the total cost of my deck was about 10 Canadian dollars  and the process with which I ended up with an Oldhim deck featuring five legendary cards priced at an insane $100-250 each. I personally think that this is too expensive for cards and would never have gone out of pocket for these. At heart, I am a budget player and think that there is a meaningful amount of learning to be done in the cheap end of the pool. I want to demonstrate that one doesn’t need a $1000 buy-in to play the game, even at a competitive level, and that there is so much game to be explored in the process of organically building a collection. In case you don’t want to read my FaB life story, here are my general guidelines for organically building a collection:

• Start with a starter deck, either made by LSS or by your local shop. Starter decks aren’t always the best value, but they are great at teaching you how to play the game and, more importantly, improve at the game.
• Practice makes perfect, learning how to play a common deck uncommonly well will go far. Play around with deck building too. Most communities will have some way of getting you bulk commons for free and rares for dirt cheap.
• Enter events and don’t be discouraged by early set-backs. It will take time to win. The participation and consolation prizes mean that you will still walk away with value.
• Learn why you are losing. Analyze your games after the fact. Could you have done anything to have won? Although this isn’t the most fun thing to do, it is the most effective way to improve in any game. Having a consciousness about your losses is the fastest road to winning.
• Keep an eye out for limited (draft and sealed) events and Commoner events, these offer a level playing field for those with $10 collections and those with $10,000 collections. Even though the price to enter a draft event can seem high, nearly every LGS will make sure you walk away with value after the event, either in the form of packs, in-store credit, or extra Armory participation prizes.
• Decide which class you like to play in constructed formats and practice. Learn the ins and outs of what the class can do on a budget. A deck running a $100 Tectonic Plating over a $0.05 Heartened Cross Strap loses access to Bravo’s most powerful turn: A Dominated, Pummeled, Crippling Crush.
• Focus your early upgrades on key Majestic cards. Powerful attacks like Crippling Crush, or combos with Majestic equipment like Courage of Bladehold or Vexing Quillhand.
• You don’t need to do it on your own! Talk to people at events and make some friends. Those new friends will probably let you borrow some of the key cards that you’re missing. This is a great bridge in the intermediate stages of deck upgrades. 
• Win a few more events, and roll that into a key class Legendary equipment. Many of these are key enablers in the decks in which they operate. Tectonic Plating makes 5-cost Guardian attacks amazing, and Mask of Momentum makes Katsu’s hero ability twice as strong while ensuring that there is always a reason for your opponent to block.
• Try the water at some slightly more competitive events. Road to Nationals and Proquests offer strong prize support from both LSS and (hopefully) your local store.
• Keep an eye out for windfalls. Some stores still have prizing from previous armory kits or events that are now more valuable. They will eventually host an event where these can be won. I won a cold foil Ira at a random event with little fanfare that I attended on a whim. While that may sound extremely lucky, I have rolled the dice of attending “small” events many, many, many times. Other stores will host cash-prize events or win-a-box events. Anything bigger than an armory but smaller than a Road to Nationals is definitely worth entering.
• Although this advice straddles finance and gameplay, always remember that it is a game and the main point of this collection-building process should be to have fun. Once it stops being fun, it stops being a hobby and becomes a job. At that point, you’re better off working an actual job and earning a consistent, reliable paycheque. FaB won’t be that unless you’re one of the best, consistently playing internationally at the highest levels.

To give a general outlook on my philosophy of the game, I currently consider myself a “high-level casual” player. I like going to events and giving them my best shot with decks that I think are both strong and fun (or occasionally bad and fun). I usually attend a couple of the bigger local events like Skirmishes and Proquests when they come around, but I don’t grind practice or strictly enforce rules against my opponents. When building a deck, I rarely playtest it enough to fine-tune the last few, very tight sideboard slots to improve ultra-specific matchups. Despite all of this, when I am playing a game, I am doing my best to stack and track pitch orders, keep an eye on my opponent’s graveyard, and keep my win conditions and outs consciously in my mind. I am trying to win the match. This philosophy has led me into some interesting situations at Flesh and Blood events. I attended Canadian Nationals with a mostly-untested deck, full of borrowed cards, that I picked up three days before the event. I managed to make top 8, but found the matches much too stressful to be enjoyable. I am lucky enough to be cash-positive in FaB (even when excluding windfall prizes like gold foils and some high-value cold foil heroes), and I fully intend to keep it that way. I have generally only ever spent money on event entries, relying on the spoils from those to fund any card purchases.

I started playing FaB during Welcome to Rathe Alpha, although I didn’t receive any kind of early adopter bonus. In the 30 or so packs of Alpha and Arcane Rising 1st edition that I opened, I managed to open a total of zero Majestics or cold foils. You don’t need to be self-made when it comes to starting FaB, and nor should you! The communities (at least in every community that I’ve played in) are very supportive. I have borrowed Legendaries from people, and I have lent Legendaries to people. My first real placing at an armory was with a fully borrowed deck. An experienced player at the shop I was playing at noticed I was playing with a Dorinthea starter deck (featuring a single “upgrade” in the form of a Crazy Brew). He offered to let me play with his full-power Dorinthea deck, complete with Legendaries and Majestics. This generosity won me a few packs and a cold foil Kodachi, which was the first promo card that I sold to help fund future events and my card collection. It was a while before I won my next armory, but at that event, my friend and I both placed well enough to win a cold foil promo and a mat. He was on a budget deck that he borrowed from me. I, like many other players, have a plethora of stories about success with borrowed cards, or the fun of watching someone succeed with cards that they’ve borrowed from you.

I also attribute my success in this collection-building endeavor to developing local knowledge. Knowing which LGS’s like to run which types of events (and which of those events you’re strongest at), and what their usual prize support is goes a long way. The easiest way to do this is to get involved with the local community and ask around. This is usually easiest to do via social media. FaB seems to centre around Discord and Facebook (at least in the anglosphere), so check there to see if there are resources online for your local community. Once the ball started rolling at armories, and I knew where other armories were being held, it began to snowball. Armories became Skirmishes became Road to Nationals and my decks went from being full of Commons to Rares to Majestics to Legendaries. It really is those first few steps, and the learning that comes with them, that are the toughest. But I think it is a game that is worth learning and I think it is a game worth playing at any level.

             All of this history is well and good, but promo cards were easier to come by and more valuable back in the day. Participation in Skirmish Season 1 was easy since they were all online and they offered cold foil adult heroes as raffle prizes. Armory promos hit an all-time high in the Crucible era, when I sold a couple Kassais for over $250. Despite recent declines in contemporary promo pricing, it is still very possible to fund a collection through rolling event winnings. Armory mats are now the consistently highest-selling items from the kit, and those are given out in raffles or by the People’s Champion system. It is rare that I have seen a new player show up for a few weeks to an LGS and not leave with a People’s Champ mat. Additionally, there are still high-value armory kits that are getting released. The recent Spectra aura armory kit has prizing that can fund nearly any Legendary card from a first place. FaB rewards people for playing it. If this is a path that interests you, just get out there and do it. There is no substitute for playing, and that’s what the game is for.