Gaining an Advantage Through Value: Information

Gaining an Advantage Through Value: Information

by Steven Jennings and, bloo, blood, building, deck, deck building, flesh, flesh and blood Leave a comment

Gaining an Advantage Through Value: Information By  Dimos Kaloupis   This is article two of three in the Value series.    Every turn, when you start your action phase, you are at a disadvantage. You want to deal damage to your opponent, but you don’t know how much they can defend for. And by virtue of you having to play the first attack to prompt a defence, they have more information when defending than you do while attacking. The best way to combat this is with attack reactions or other effects that complicate blocking, such as dominate.   Warrior has been a significant meta force since the beginning of Flesh and Blood, generating value not from sheer strength or powerful board states (Dawnblade counters excepted), but from being the class that offers the least amount of information to their opponent. If you have no defense react against a warrior, you either have to overblock (and lose cards for your turn, possibly unnecessarily), or risk getting blown out by attack reaction after attack reaction. Reprise complicates things further, as you may even end up being worse off if you block with a single card from hand. As the defender, you have no clue if the opponent has “standard” attack reactions that cost one and provide three damage, or the creative ones that become amazing with reprise (Singing Steelblade, Glint the Quicksilver, Rout). Even though Twinning Blade has no reprise effect, it is effective in punishing blocks from hand the same way that reprise effects generally do.   “How to block Warrior effectively” is probably one of the most asked-after pieces of information in FaB strategy. There are plenty of articles and videos that go into it (Session Blood did an excellent piece on this), so I won’t provide my take on it here. The prominence of this question illustrates the amount of value (both perceived and real) that stems from unknown elements. Are they holding a blue Ironsong Response for +1 or will I be blown out by +6 from an Overpower?    By denying your opponent information, you force them to make bad plays. If they have to overblock with three cards from hand, you get to arsenal your threat for free. Meanwhile, they’ve sent three cards to the discard and have one or two left for a weak response. Your threat has already done its job and it gets to double-dip next turn. Warrior is the clearest example of hidden information providing value, but other classes can eke out advantages with this as well.    Beyond decks and archetypes as a whole, there is value in hiding information through cards. Sink Below and Enlightened Strike would be good cards even if they did not allow you to hide a card at the bottom of your deck. The fact that they do allows you to hide information that would otherwise be public (the bottom of your deck is effectively public since your pitch that goes there is public). An excellent sneaky warrior play is to pitch Glint the Quicksilver to pay for a turn of attacks and sink a Twinning Blade to the bottom with a Sink Below on your opponents next turn, or an Enlightened Strike on yours. Now you know you have the extremely potent Glint-Twinning combo pitched for late game when your opponent is low on defence reactions and is forced to overblock. The key is they don’t know you have that. A good opponent would be keeping track of your pitch for such key combos, but only a great opponent would be able to assess the odds of you having hidden a Twinning Blade after that Glint, and even then, they couldn’t be 100% sure.    Outside of hiding sneaky combos, hiding a card is a great way to ensure that you keep a high threat density into the late game, especially since it hardly costs you anything. Sink Below’s effect is card neutral (although you lose information by exchanging a known card for an unknown draw), and Enlightened Strike is positive value if you hide a red card and view it as an alternative to pitching a blue to pay for a comparable attack (such as the 3-cost, 7-attack Raging Onslaught).    Overall, you can generate value and advantage by forcing your opponent to weigh the odds of what you have left to do during your turn or hiding your end-game win conditions. There are plenty of other ways to generate value through the unknown, like using go again effects to make your opponent consider if they want to block this attack or the next one. This is another reason Dash is so good! Do I block the first pistol hit for two or save my blocks for the boosted attacks that hit harder?    Find some information you can hide, and use it to force an advantage for yourself. Bluff the attack react in the arsenal and keep them guessing. If your opponent knows what you are doing on your turn and what your game plan is, then the only other way to win is by through sheer board state or breakpoint value. But don’t limit yourself, even the highest board-state-value classes in the game (Mech and Guardian) rely on surprises and asymmetric information to close out games.   Also remember: Don’t hide information against the spirit of the game. Don’t be that person. Hiding a card with Sink Below is a game mechanic. Hiding a card up your sleeve ruins it for everyone. Be honest when people ask about your board state, how many cards you have left, resources floating, et cetera.

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