By: Dimos

Dealing damage to your opponent in Flesh and Blood is the driving point. It dictates the flow of the game and the ultimate winner. Trading equal damage back-and-forth is only really relevant if the life totals are close. Once someone pulls ahead on how much damage they’ve dealt, the game has shifted entirely for both players. It stops being about eking out incremental advantages and building them and becomes about keeping up the pressure or surviving the onslaught until the tide can turn. Some decks are in their sweet spot trading two-card hands back and forth for the majority of the game. If you present six damage to these mid-range, mid-pace decks, there is no jeopardy for them while blocking. You are basically playing their game. In order to make damage hurt in FaB, you need to force your opponent to make difficult decisions or back them into a corner. Generally speaking, each incremental point of damage that you can push against your opponent is worth more. The relative value of a point of damage skyrockets once you go beyond what someone is comfortable or capable of blocking. Dealing 20 damage on one turn is orders of magnitude better than dealing 10 damage for two turns in a row.  This is because dealing more than 12 damage in a turn nearly guarantees that your opponent actually takes some damage. Damage matters when it reduces your opponent’s life total, but it also matters when it forces them to block beyond their comfort. Either way, by presenting 20 damage, you’re inflicting some significantly painful decisions on your opponent, even if it takes a lot of combo cards and on-board resources (equipment, items, etc.).

While the game rules currently have three types of damage defined (arcane damage, attack damage, and untyped damage), I find that this is not the most useful way to think about damage. In my view, there are three relevant classes of damage in FaB: raw damage, damage with positive on-hit effects, and disruptive damage. Each one of these will see players respond differently to the changing scenarios. Breakpoints are a key element in all of these damage types because they force your opponent to make difficult decisions. I previously wrote about the value of breakpoints here.

Raw damage, that is just a number with no tricks or frills attached, usually hits the hardest. My main message for raw damage is that it doesn’t matter until the very last life point you have. Okay, maybe it sometimes matters a bit before that for certain cards that deal hard-to-prevent damage on your turn like Reckless Swing, Steelblade Shunt, or some arcane damage effects. But generally, so long as you have at least one life left, your opponent doesn’t have Go Again, and their attack doesn’t have an additional effect, you’re probably okay with taking the damage. Very broadly speaking, a card without an additional effect will deal one more point of damage than an equivalent card with an effect. Over the course of a turn for a very aggressive deck, that can be three or more damage. This allows you to get your opponent into kill range a meaningful amount of turns faster. More importantly, it makes it easier to get over the 12-damage golden threshold that guarantees you’ll be pushing past what your opponent can block. The sheer power of cards without on-hit effects, such as Scar for a Scar, Ravenous Rabble, or Shrill of Skullform make it much easier to push damage against a player that is blocking very aggressively. By contrast, Brandish or Drowning Dire are much easier to block out, while costing the same or more, due to the lower attack they have to compensate for their additional effects. The main advantage of raw damage’s higher numbers lets you threaten to end the game sooner. Some simple but solid advice: If you can threaten a lethal amount of damage, do it. Use your equipment to force it, use your arsenal, or bluff an attack reaction that could end the game. Throw everything and the kitchen sink at them. Especially do this when you notice your opponent is trying hard to keep cards in their hand (such as by blocking with armor), as now your raw damage has become disruptive to them. Hidden information is particularly useful at this stage of the game, and even a bit before it. There are countless games that have been decided because someone over- or under-blocked an attack that was followed up with a Razor Reflex or a Pummel.

The second class of damage to discuss is damage that comes with a positive on-hit effect for its controller. For these purposes, I consider cards that gains effects on the dealing of arcane damage to also be on-hit effects even though that is technically not the official terminology. These effects can be the drawing of a card, the creation of a token, or the direct compounding of further damage. As in any card game, drawing cards is a massive advantage in FaB. Going from a four-card hand to a five-card hand (six counting your arsenal) almost ensures that your damage will be able to go over the top of how much your opponent can block. Cards like Snatch and Whelming Gustwave are staples for a reason. Drawing a card allows you to continue a turn that would have otherwise ended. On-hit Go Again allows you to do the same thing, and the prime example of this is Razor Reflex. The chance to follow up the attack with a weapon swing usually means that if red Razor Reflex provides Go Again to an attack, it will deal an extra three or four damage in addition to the three-damage boost it gives its target attack. Effects that create a token (such as a Runechant or Spectral Shield) or offer compounding damage (as many Lightning and Wizard cards do) are effectively the same. All cards in this class generally boil down to one idea: block this or take a disproportionately high amount of damage. While cards with on-hit effects generally deal less damage than their raw damage counterparts, if their on-hit effects do trigger, the reward heavily outweighs the initial reduction in power. Fundamentally, this puts a significant burden on your opponent to navigate those waters carefully. One wrong step and they could get blown out by a Razor Reflex and Snatch combo, a surprise Blazing Aether, or multiple Shock Charmers triggers. If you are defending in these scenarios, consider what dangerous cards your opponent has left. A good risk assessment considers both the likelihood of disaster and the severity of that disaster. Generally speaking, these positive on-hit effects shine against those who don’t want to defend or cannot defend efficiently. Consequently, they often lose heavily to decks that can defend efficiently (see Katsu vs any Guardian).

The final class of damage that I’m discussing today is disruptive damage. This is the only type of damage that demands an immediate response from your opponent. At 40 life, your opponent may not care about taking 10 damage, or about taking eight damage and letting you draw a card to arsenal. But they are forced to care if your attack is threatening a discard. If they are okay with taking damage, it means they think their four- or five-card turn is better than your turn. By providing some disruption, you could be preventing them from playing Revel in Runeblood or another powerful turn-extending source of damage. However, I will provide a caution to anyone who is aiming to swing tempo with a single turn of disruption: You cannot simply take 15 damage to throw out a large disruptive attack in the middle of the game. Your damage rate is lower by virtue of having the additional effect, and you have no guarantee that you will draw another disruptive card to continue providing pressure. When you try to swing tempo with disruption, always have at least one turn’s worth of a back up plan. Play the Crippling Crush if you know that you can follow it up with the Spinal Crush in your arsenal. Take some damage to play a strong Chilling Icevein turn, knowing that you have an Ice Quake in your arsenal for next turn.

The other side of the damage coin is life. In many card games the idea that “life is a resource” is gospel. In Flesh and Blood, I think that this is less true. Life is a literal resource in some instances, such as on Blood Debt cards, but I do not consider it a resource in many other instances. One exception to this is in specific combo decks, like a one-turn-kill Viserai deck, a combo-oriented Kano or Iyslander deck, or the even more niche combo Briar deck. Life is a resource in those decks as it buys time to set up the combo. This is certainly a resource, but in nearly every other instance of Flesh and Blood, life is inextricably linked to tempo. Due to drawing a new hand each turn, that is always the same size as it was last turn and the same size as your opponent’s hand, Flesh and Blood makes it difficult to build a board state. (However, having a strong board state can be crucial, as I have discussed previously). Without a controlling board state, one can expect that each 4-card turn cycle is worth roughly 10 to 15 life, either in blocking or attacking. This makes it difficult to use life as a resource to drop low on health and then make a significant comeback, unless you have something very specific and deliberate in mind. When I say this, I mean to go beyond the thought process of “I’m being presented 10 damage this turn, but I can hit back with 15 immediately afterwards”. Something specific and deliberate can be taking a lot of damage because you know you will be drawing into your pitch stack now and will be able to throw out back-to-back-to-back powerful turns. Unless you have some multi-turn or game-closing plan, I think it is almost never worth dropping more than one turn cycle’s worth of life below your opponent.

There are many roads to go down to get your opponent to zero life, and each deck will focus on a different class of damage to get there. It is important that you know what type of damage your deck is trying to deal, and it is important that you know what type of damage your opponent’s deck is trying to deal. Without a clear image of these game elements in mind, you can quickly find yourself too far down the slope to climb back up, or too low on life to mount any meaningful counterattack.