By Dimos K

Uprising officially releases this week, and with it comes something Flesh and Blood players haven’t seen in a very long time: a new generic Legendary card. Crown of Providence shares an equipment slot with the previous universal favourite of Arcanite Skullcap. 

Skullcap has long been the best “this class has nothing better to put here” equipment. It doesn’t allow for explosive plays like Snapdragon Scalers, and it doesn’t enable uniquely efficient 4-resource turns like Fyendal’s Spring Tunic. It really only adds three life to whichever hero chooses to run it. The conditional Arcane Barrier 3 on it rarely if ever gets used outside of desperation-blocking the 2 arcane damage from Rosetta Thorn. No self-respecting Kano player would ever allow it to be used to ruin their kill turn, but maybe it will have some use against Iyslander’s new tricks and Waning Moon. The effective Battleworn 2 effect of Skullcap is unique, as most helmets in the game either block poorly or have Blade Break. Some classes have strong equipment in the head slot and have long eschewed Skullcap as an option. These same classes will likely have little interest in Crown of Providence. For everyone else, Crown of Providence is Arcanite Skullcap but much, much better. I believe it to be a strict and universal upgrade over Arcanite Skullcap as the go-to generalist headgear.

Crown of Providence has a couple of mechanical strengths and what I consider to be a major conceptual strength. Mechanically, it can attempt to fix a bad hand or a bad arsenal, and conceptually, it represents a single-card, always-present pivot card. The hand and arsenal fix mechanic has different impacts for different classes, but everyone sees a direct and strong benefit. Most generically, it can turn a card that doesn’t block into one that does. This extends to an action card in the arsenal. Swapping that out for a three-block card to use on a follow-up attack can effectively make Crown of Providence block for five. Runeblades can use Crown of Providence to filter out all non-Attack Action hands or all Attack Action hands into something more balanced. Resource-hungry classes can swap reds for blues, blues for reds, or even expensive attacks for cheaper attacks. Boltyn can turn any card in arsenal into a card that either Charges or acts as Charge fodder. Any defending hero can help mitigate the effects of Intimidate or possibly deny bonus damage from Barraging Beatdown. Recently, Hope Merchant’s Hood has been gaining a lot of popularity as Flesh and Blood has sped up. Crown of Providence has significant similarities to Hope Merchant’s Hood but with armour value. It also has a few additional limitations. If it is being used to find another blocking card to save life, it needs to be against an attack that has Go Again, which is a limitation mitigated by the two armour points it has. It can also only replace one card rather than any number of cards. However, all of this pales in comparison to the fact that Crown of Providence can apply to an arsenal card.

Crown of Providence allows for one free bad arsenal choice per game. This is, I believe, massive for strategic planning and card advantage throughout the game. How many times have you been caught with an extra card in your hand because your opponent’s turn was less offensively threatening than you had predicted? Or when you held the tempo in the game and drew something so mediocre that you couldn’t play out all your cards while maintaining a decent arsenal target? Crown of Providence solves both of these issues. Guardian players are free to arsenal a trash blue card because it will still generate card advantage when Crown of Providence’s effect is triggered. Brute players can do the same. And just about anyone can benefit from being able to arsenal a surplus blue and then try to turn it into an extra red in hand next turn. The only universally perfect arsenal cards in Flesh and Blood are cards that cost 0, have Go Again, and have a stand-alone effect. There are few of these in the game, and they often don’t make it into arsenal because they will fit perfectly into the flow of any turn, including the turn that they are drawn. These cards are rare, and being able to play them out while arsenaling some extra resource card is a significant boon offered by Crown of Providence. The ability to swap out a card from hand is fine, but being able to swap a card out from arsenal is uniquely powerful.

Crown of Providence provides a unique choice of using defensive equipment offensively, which is a major conceptual strength. Generally speaking, equipment in Flesh and Blood is either offensive or defensive. Explosive cards generally block poorly, or penalize a player for using them to block. Snapdragon Scalers, Heartened Cross-Strap, and Goliath Gauntlet have no defensive value, Spellbound Creepers have Blade Break 1, and New Horizon destroys all cards in arsenal when it is used to defend. In contrast, defensive equipment such as Braveforge Bracers, Grasp of the Arknight, and Tectonic Plating provide excellent armour but little explosive power. They instead offer incremental benefits. There are some exceptions in powerful Temper equipment like Bloodsheath Skeleta and Courage of Bladehold, and also in Crown of Seeds. These are cards that can be used very effectively on both offense and defense. They also happen to be some of the strongest equipment in the game, with Bloodsheath Skeleta being banned and Crown of Seeds being the focus of frequent calls for a ban. I believe that Crown of Providence will be a very popular choice for similar reasons. It won’t be as strong as class-specific explosive cards like Bloodsheath or Bladehold, but it can provide an excellent tempo swing and turn some strong defense into strong offense. Having a card that is perpetually on the board that swings from defense to offense so seamlessly is a very powerful tool that was previously only afforded to a lucky few classes. In many ways, this piece of equipment is a single-card pivot. If the game is moving faster or slower than you thought it was when you arsenaled that defense reaction or combo piece, Crown of Providence lets you switch gears for free.

I think that using Crown of Providence optimally will involve a slight recalculation on when to use equipment blocks in Flesh and Blood. Arcanite Skullcap introduced this concept in certain ways, as it was common to see a “tempo block” with it. If a player knew that they were coming in for a large turn soon, they would block aggressively with Arcanite Skullcap to take advantage of the +1 armour effect from being at lower life. This would be done not to block a relevant on-hit effect (as is conventional FaB wisdom), but simply to get one extra life point of value because they expect that they will be on higher life than their opponent for the rest of the game. Similar thoughts exist for Temper and Battleworn equipment that is destroyed by its own effect (Breaking Scales, Courage of Bladehold, Barkbone Strapping, Bloodsheath Skeleta). Crown of Providence will have to be used in a similar way. Although it will always provide an extra two life in the form of armor, it may not always be used to block at the perfect time to deny on-hit effects. I don’t think this is a downside relative to Arcanite Skullcap, as the second point of defense on the older headpiece is conditional. Overall, I think that if you are using Arcanite Skullcap, you should swap to Crown of Providence. I would probably run Crown of Providence even if it only blocked for one.