Meta Bottom Feeders ft. Anthony Pham (Rerelease)

Hi everyone, it's Joel, your second favorite host. For this week's re released episode, I chose Meta Bottom Feeders featuring Anthony Pham. I picked this episode because it's our first guest with a non pigeon tuning member and because Meta Bottom feeders are near and dear to all hearts at the podcast. Anthony is a great player, community leader and friend that perfectly exemplifies the type of guest we want for the podcast.

It makes me so excited thinking about all the guests that we have in store for you in 2025. See you there. Welcome to Pitch It to Me podcast, a show about subjective past, present and potential future of flesh and blood design. Why did intoxicating shot cross the road? Why? To get to the other side for today's episode, we'll be talking about all the bottom feeders, the low tier heroes that have won our hearts without winning any events.

On red pitch, we'll discuss how the community engages with poor performing heroes. On yellow pitch, we'll talk about which heroes are chumming it up at the bottom tier bucket. And on blue pitch, we'll round out our conversation with what can be added to help the bottom feeder heroes. You can find us across all socials such as TikTok and Instagram at Pitcher to Me podcast. I'm Clark. I'm Joel. And I'm fuzzy. And we have a guest. Please welcome to the podcast, Anthony Pham.

Hello everybody, I'm Anthony Pham, resident Riptide Enjoyer. So Anthony, I want to ask all of our guests who come on the show, what do you think is your like proudest achievement as a member of the flesh and blood community? Yeah, my proudest achievement definitely, I think, would be

community engagement. I put a lot of work into trying to make sure the armies fire and that everyone gets the cards they need to. So I always joke around that, hey, if you want a card from me, come play the first round of my Armory. So that's a huge thing that I like to do just to get people in the seats, people playing in the game. So I think Flesh and Blood should be played in the flesh and blood.

But also, I'm really proud of this Riptide deck that I've made recently, the red liner Riptide, literally red liner. It feels like the first deck I've made that I've made from scratch from zero to 80 cards, and it's just something that I really enjoy playing at the moment. And what card shop do you work at? Where? Where can we catch you? Yeah, I work currently at Kingsterry Games. We have 3 locations right now. I work at the one mainly in Fountain Valley. I'm the manager there.

We also have locations in Oceanside, CA and Lake Forest, CA. Nice. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. We also want to take a moment here in our Turn 0 to shout out our executive producer, Town Stradley, who just wrote up and released an article at a time of recording. He just released an article on rate times all about his fatigue. Riptide lists, right? And I know that you, Anthony and him, just met up at APQ and talked about your different approaches.

Yep, Yep, that was a lot of fun. It is. It is cool to see Riptide built in so many different ways and the the way people react to it too. There was actually a funny part where someone thought I was on Talons list so they were like, I'm dredging another fatigue game and I'm like here with my 60 card clean 60 aggro Riptide. So it's pretty fun to see all the different reactions to Riptide. Yeah, not only that you brought Riptide to APQ, but the polar opposites that your decks are so

funny. It's good. It was good, for me at least, that Talon was so notorious in that area with this Riptide bill. All right, let's go ahead and jump into our red pitch. We wanted to start off our red pitch by talking about community engagement, sort of like how does the community engage with a lot of these bottom tier heroes and really just with getting

into the game. Yeah, it's, it's funny you say that Clark, because a lot of the community engagement with Flesh and Blood often is has nothing to do with our topic for today. It usually has to do with net decking, which means just taking whatever performs really well in the Flesh and Blood meta and copying that list either card for card or changing a few cards that suit their specific metas or their tastes, whatever. Flesh and Blood players are total net deckers.

It's like, I think all trading card games are pretty net decky. I I don't, I think it's because everyone who plays a trading card game generally wants to win and so we're always looking at what is winning. I think that's mostly true. I think with Magic the Gathering, like Commander is a very forgiving format where you can have whatever deck you wanted. You can bring your random brew up to a commander table and do reasonably well with it.

I think the difference would be like Magic the Gathering. Modern or Standard is usually a lot of net deckers, yeah. On the topic, I think Flesh and Blood is a newer game and net decking is specifically prevalent in here because the carpool is very small, so it's not there's not that much room for innovation. So when people look up decks or try to build something from scratch, they're like why not just copy an 80 that's already successful and just play that.

There's not a lot of variance between decks right now, especially when there are heroes that don't have talents. Because now these heroes only have their class cards and their generic cards. Whereas heroes that are elemental have all these ice cards, you know, earth cards, lightning cards, that they have availability available to them and they can use that however they'd like. Especially with he was like Breyer who can use generic cards very well as well. Yeah, right.

A word that you just made me think of is expression. Like a lot of the times when people talk about commander in Magic Gathering and like, why did that format pop off as hard as it did? It's because it gave players a lot of expression. They could put pet cards in their deck, right? And they can do weird strategies, rares that they just had lying around. And so each deck felt uniquely theirs.

Flesh and Blood isn't there yet, but I think you do start to see it in some of those elemental heroes where they have the big expanded card lists. I've seen so many different Lexi lists and a lot of people who express themselves through the little choices that they make in their Lexi lists in a way that I don't quite see with other heroes.

I've also noticed the inverse. Like Anthony, you brought this up previously in in our prep, but Michael Hamilton with his bowl in your list, he, even though he has a really catered cardpool of ice, ice wizard and just wizard, chose to have these really well stated like generic cards like famous fighting spirits and wounded bowl to use them in a way that no other hero

has been able to do in the past. And it kind of like shocked literally the world because he ended up winning worlds with it with how innovative play can be rewarded if you, you know, take the time to really test like the full card list you have access to, as shallow as it might be, right? Yeah, and we see also see the perils of net decking too, because a lot of people they will copy these very aggressive lists because aggro is very easy to play.

And then Charles Dunn comes out of nowhere with this very fatigue heavy Briar list that everyone expects will be playing snatch and all these aggro cards, right. And he just fatigues everyone. So it can be at your own peril too, because that means if you're net decking, you might have know all the insurance and outs of your deck and you're not ready for, you know, on the fly strategies like playing against fatigue Briar or all arcane Iceland even.

Yeah. And you know, The funny thing about that is how baked into the game it is. You know, if you sit down across from Charles Dunn, who has not, who's about to win nationals but hasn't yet, you don't really have any way of knowing that he's about to play a fatigue list unless like you maybe scout scouted it out from other

tables, right? Like if he's already been doing well, to be able to play something that's so different than the norm can really give you an advantage in a game like Flesh and Blood because it's a best of one format. Other games best of three format, they allow you to get a taste of their deck before you make all their final decisions for what goes into your deck. Right? Because best of one is the way that we play Flesh and Blood.

It can actually like, fundamentally lead to innovative decks performing better because they're different than everything else, and they trip people up with their sideboard, for better or for worse. Or even decks with lower play rates and heroes with lower play rates. I know that when I was preparing for The Calling, I was slamming games against all the top deck lists and then I ended up playing against a Rhinar and a Durinthia and I was like

dropping these games. And it's like, why am I dropping against Rhinar and Durinthia? Because I never tested my deck against them. I didn't know the insurance and outs of that match up. And that's just going to get worse as time goes on for. Sure, for sure. So many more new heroes are coming. Yeah, it's going to become a lot harder to keep track of them all because didn't they announce that like there's gonna be 15 new heroes in the next year, in 2024?

So we're going to get a lot of new heroes entering our formats. 15 plus was the number that was floated out there. We don't know if James White in that article is saying, oh, the blitz hero and the adult hero, That's two unique heroes. We don't know if that's what's happening. True. So it could just be 7. I, I don't think that's the case.

We don't know how many of those are blitz specific, but if that's CC, that is close to nearly doubling the amount of playable heroes in the meta over the course of one year. Not all of those heroes are going to be at the top of the meta. They are not all going to be

competing for world slot. So I think there's a really big conversation that we need to have as a community of how do we as a community manage a flood of new heroes coming in when we know that a vast majority of them are not going to be competing for those top slots, they're not going to be the most competitively viable heroes. How do we we accept that new players are going to want to play them?

How do we accept that we're going to want to play them and then bring them to tournaments and lose on them? No. Never could be me, but it couldn't be me. I think the bottom two hills, when they 1st come out, they I think most of them are just going to be unsolved. It's sort of like this puzzle

that comes out. LSS always says that, you know, they have a specific kind of archetype in mind when heroes come out, and they said it with Prism, how Prism was a little bit underpowered and what they're testing, but they think Vincet is really strong. So I think LSS on release always has an idea for these heroes and it's up to players to kind of put the jigsaw puzzle together to see if they can solve it in

time. And I think that that will be a never ending solution until they retire because there's always new cards that are entering the card pool, new generics. Sometimes the generics work really well with some classes, sometimes they don't. Like Snatch works really well in aggro decks, whereas, you know, sync blow works really well in mid range decks or tank decks. And that's just going to be the case for all these heroes, right?

What's to say another hero just uses Snatch really well and then now they can just exploit that in some way? Yeah, that's interesting because with like when you double the the the amount of heroes, like a lot of them might not even get touched until some of them like prove we've mentioned in a previous episode that aggro kind of like pushes the meta to see like where everything else falls like controlled eggs are very

reactive in that way. So we're going to probably see the aggressive heroes that come out in the following year, how well they use the current generics, how they use their card pool that they come out with, but also how they revitalize the class cards that they share with the older

heroes. And I could definitely see like, you know, them like similar to how Lexi came out and cannibalized Azaleas cards and even cannibalize Riptide's cards, you know, with the new Brute warrior and Guardian, like there's going to be a non zero chance of that happening. And when you have more heroes than you can kind of like reliably test in a given pro season, you know Vincette and Prism are probably going to move from like 2 unused hero to like,

maybe. Like 10, like maybe only 5 are, are really that good and can compete in a, in a competitive landscape. Yeah. And I think you bring up something great, which is there's only so many players like in flesh and blood and only so many players at these events. Sample size is a big thing to consider here. We're like, we're only really going to know if a hero is good or bad the moment that there is

a mass of players playing them. There's always going to be, you know, 1 tricks or small dedicated player bases who may they even get results on these heroes, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're good. Yeah, I think sample size is very important too. Like obviously the people that are serious about winning and competitive, all all the competitive reasons they're going to play what they think is the best deck and more than not, that's the most played deck.

Whereas, you know, if the pro of a professional picks up Riptide or Vincet, they might have a different angle or different mentality than, you know, someone that is A1 trick or someone that's just starting out. So I feel like there's this lack of sort of the competitive side to these bottom tier heroes because they don't want to play them for tournaments. They don't want to use them for, you know, practice or bring them to these big these big tournaments that are behind paywalls.

You know, like it takes like $70.00 to play like at a calling. So like they don't want to spend 70 bucks just to play Riptide and lose, you know, three games out of nowhere. So I think we're lacking this sort of innovation from the competitive players in terms of these bottom tier decks, just because they want to win, they want to play the best deck, they're going to play whatever they think is, yeah. That's such a good point.

Yeah, Yeah, really interesting because you know, we've already talked about a little bit how the innovators can find really great success with the element of surprise and having very unique play styles into a very specific meta like Michael Hamilton and Charles Dunn, like we've, you know, mentioned

before. But not everyone is incentivized to do that like you said, because Riptide on paper probably doesn't have the greatest shot at winning until the one tricks team up with the pro players and have this insane strategy come out of it. But that's how often is that gonna happen? It takes a very unique set of circumstances to really pull off. And even one of those decks that we talked about, Michael Hamilton Bowl Lander list, Icelander is a good hero, Right?

And I think Bolander was pretty early on in Icelander's history. Correct. Yes. Yeah. So even before the wider community understood how good Icelander was as a hero, a pro player had already picked her up as being one of the better heroes and then designed the deck and surprised everyone. It's going to be a lot that's a little bit different than Riptide, where Riptide wasn't immediately sort of picked out by pro players as a hero to invest time into.

So they're not. And all of their skill and expertise both in deck building and flexible play patterns and meta sniping, all of that just got all that effort and expertise that they have got focused on two other heroes and left Riptide by the wayside. Maybe if that energy was focused on to Riptide, Riptide would be getting way more results for sure. Yeah, you can see that exactly in the current in the current Joe my list.

I think a lot of people now are running cadaverous contraband to be able to hit a dragon, kill like a big Uvia and now put rake on their top of their deck, put as well on the top of their deck. So like if that amount of, you know, manpower went into building something that Riptide can use, maybe Riptide would be in a better place.

But we'll probably never see that for the time being just because there's more competitive heroes out there that these people that are are travelling all across the world they're

playing in events for. And Clark, I feel like we're kind of nearing the end of this conversation, but I remember you saying that you've had some rather unpleasant experiences when trying to find alternatives to deckless that you see pro players use and trying to adapt it to either your own meta or own budget even, and having some really, you know, interesting backlash. I'll say, say with nice words.

So when we move into a meta with 15 new heroes, like how like, you know, how do we encourage innovation not not just from a necessity standpoint to target a certain meta, but also just to

promote brewing? Yeah, we we've talked a little bit before the episode started and I mentioned some of the experiences I've been having in the online official Flesh and Blood Discord channels for specific heroes, most notably the Max and the Viscera ones, because that's just what I'm focusing a lot of my time on right now. But I feel like you can see it as this general online sentiment of being negative towards people who are trying really different

unique builds. And I think that there's, you know, a little bit of give and take. I think if you're someone who maybe has some prestige in the community, you're given a bit more space to do that and talk about it in these spaces. I think if you are someone who has 1 results elsewhere, people are going to give you more benefit of the doubt. You know, it's one thing when a random Andy pops into the chats. Like guys, no Riptide's going to

be #1 this season. Trust me, I got the crazy new tech scar for scar and it's like no buddy like we've. That's me, everybody. Yeah, but it's. It's definitely a general negative sentiment. Like literally just the other day we were talking that a tweet came out where someone's like, oh, it's so annoying when some random person hops into the Discord and talks about how they've been brewing with Riptide and it's like, why? Why is that annoying to you? If if anything, it should be

generally encouraged. But the same time, I also see why people don't like it if we're trying to find as a community, if we're trying to find just that one or two cards to change to make our hero good, It's really frustrating when people are coming in and rehashing a conversation that we had three weeks ago about a card. Like we, we already agreed, like I'm not saying this is true for a riptide, but as using that example, dude, we've already agreed scoffers are not great. Let's not use it.

We've we're like, we're here now catch up, right? So there's definitely that conversation. But I agree with where you're coming from. Like not everyone is going to be joining the community at the same time. Other people have while they're having these conversations about a more competitive landscape. Like if I first joined, like the Bolton chat for for instance, I'd go in there like once in a blue moon and I'm like, hey, this guy came out with the hatchets.

Is he using the hatchets? And everyone's like, no, use red and use Centauri Sabres. Not in that same tone. But, you know, just trying to relate it to more than just Riptide because Bolton has seen a bit more play. But there's that same, you know, negative sentiment, like whether or not it's like has good intentions behind it. There's going to be like that, that backlash between a new

player and an entrenched player. I feel like maybe this is like the anthropology major in me, but I keep wanting to like explain this as like a trend because of the way that people communicate. Like you're on a Discord server where like you pop in with a quick question and you kind of

expect a quick answer. And the people trying to supply that quick answer are gonna try to give you like the common knowledge, you know, call it like the cultural knowledge of like this is what people in general think about Riptide right now. And it's like, do it this way or like this is like what we as a group know. And it becomes a lot less about like individual experience. You know, like, imagine if someone came and like, this is,

I have personally tested that. And this is what I found, right. Like you're not gonna get that kind of answer on Discord because the people that are able to respond immediately is not necessarily the people that have specifically the perfect answer to your question, right. Yeah. The best they can do is like, this is what we know as a group. And that's gonna be very limited. You know, it's gonna be snappy. And I'm not saying that like. I don't know what I'm trying to say here.

Something about like how Discord, a Discord server is going to lend itself to answers like that. Yeah. And if you want a nuanced answer, you probably will not find it on a Discord server or on Twitter. But it gets really rough when, like, that's the main ways that we engage with the community right now, right? Or new.

Players, I mean the thing that really triggered this for me was that someone came into the Max chat and said I do not have the money to buy Nitromechanoid. What other lists are there? And people said, then you're just going, going to lose. It's like, how is that the correct response? How is the response? Oh, you don't have the money lose, fucking give up. Like, how is that the response? It's such a Dick thing to say. And like you it it that is

what's frustrating. It feels like a lot of the time in these chats, and just in flesh and blood in general, there's such a high emphasis on winning that it overrides creativity. But then like, in order for someone to come up with a different, better answer to that question, they'd have to have like testing experience, right? And so far, like, we've only had like a month of pro quests and people were probably testing Nitromechanoid, you know?

And it's hard to like invest money in a deck list, even a cheap deck list, and then bring it to a tournament, like for all these reasons that we've been mentioning before. So like, it is a shame to see that the attitudes can really quickly be dismissive in Discord or whatever, insert online forum here, but and I'd definitely like be excited to see things move in a different direction where we're able to foster new

ideas in a different way. Yeah, it's funny how we reward such creativity, just like the Ray Adams list or the bull lender list from Michael Hamilton. But we are also ridiculing these people for trying out new decks, new heroes, new cards and these already established decks like Promise of Plenty and Dromi say, for example, like we would ridicule that deck because it's not Snatch, it's not dust up, right? So little story I played.

I played Icelander at the Age Players Championship with crazy brew and gamblers gloves. And you won that event. I did. I. Did end up winning that event. Both of those were kind of use cases for several different decks and I kind of posted the deck list online after that and there were some some feedback, I guess I could say. Towards. Gamblers, bells and crazy brew, you know, Icelanders, this sort of hyper efficient deck that like winds turn cycles over and

over and over. And anytime you kind of stray away from that with these rolling sort of mechanics or like equipment that doesn't block and has a weird effect, people kind of ridicule you for that. So it's just kind of funny how there's always and the people trying to innovate the game, but then when it's not successful,

it's kind of too weird. People will ridicule you for doing so. If you were LSS or if you were like a community head, like how would you promote this innovation for new strategies with testing teams, for instance, they would be mostly focusing on the top list and maybe debating on like one or two card choices, like maybe less of XYZ card to add 1 of this card that will be good for

a specific matchup. I would say seldom would they say, let's try, you know, fatigue Briar, like that's a very specific situation that that needs to go down. So like, how, how would you promote something like that in a, in a community? Yeah, I, I think there's two trains of thought there. I think there's the first train of thought where you take, what do you think is the going to be the most successful deck into the field?

And then kind of tecking that however, which way you want, like say you really want, you think Dromi is going to be the best deck coming up, right? You want to detect this Dromi deck for, you know, other Dromi is the mirror or whatever else you think will be very popular. And then there's the other train of thought, which is my personal favorite train of thought, which is playing the anti meta where you know that Dromi will be the most favored hero. So that you build a hero to kind

of counter that. And whenever you see a Dromi pop up, you know they pretty much ought to win. Yeah. And that could be like Phi or if you can hunt, you can even go deeper than that. You can go anti anti meta where you predict that there will be a lot of Phi because of Dromi. So you play Riptide which has a line 95% win rate into into Phi in my history. Or you can go anti anti anti meta. Just play drum. Just destroy riptide.

Yeah, and then and then when you lose as riptide like I can't believe you detect for me with that anti. The meta is just an oroboros. This is a snake. Eating its own. Oh my God, that's so funny. Oh you're a meta chaser? No, I'm an anti anti anti. I knew you'd be playing. We've talked a little bit about how the community engages with low tier heroes in general, but let's get into some more specifics for yellow pitch.

Let's hear some more about like what heroes right now we would consider to be those bottom feeders, those Chum Bucket heroes. Anthony, what do you think? What is what sticks out in your mind? Well, the bottom of the bear unfortunately at everyone's competitive tier lists, all the videos coming out and also the living legend point system is my personal favorite Riptide. He's just kind of in this weird in between position between Lexi and Azalea where you kind of are.

I feel like his hero mechanics kind of support you playing buff so that you can load arrows in the arsenal. But then again, that's just the worst Azalea and then you don't have a neat go again. So then again, you're just the worst Voltaire. So I think he's kind of in this weird position where not all the traps are applicable to every hero, so you kind of have to find this kind of weird in

between spot. Ted is such a weird example too because you read that hero card, free uninteractable damage and like I get to reload for free. I don't even need to like use my bow. Like it seems like a really awesome hero ability, but then in practice for whatever reason it just like isn't. It's so super interesting to me.

Yeah, and also heroes have like, usually, like heroes that have less starting health are kind of, you know, on this radar of kind of more broken because they do damage outside of their turn, right? But it just feels like Riptide, the one damage ping isn't enough to kind of push him over the edge. Yeah, like like you know, playing traps throughout the game, depending on the matchup, you might go and we you see this in talents article as well.

You can go anywhere from like 0 damage all game or two or even like upwards of 10 if you just like really see them at all the right times, right. It's so match up dependent of. And situational. And situational, yeah, you can. You can have the right match up and just not have it line up on the turn where it happens to be relevant, right? Yeah, I feel like Riptide is kind of like this blowout hero where his traps can be overwhelming, but it happens like a very small amount of the time.

Like if collapsing trap happens the right time, if buzz saw happens at the right time, it can be a turn ender. But there's times where, you know, you draw and they throw a CNC at you and now you either have to trench it away or don't block it all or use it to for your quiver or whatever. So now you're not seeing that for the rest of the game, right. So like there's very it's a very difficult hero.

I feel like to get all the factors that make him win lineup and that's why he probably doesn't see as much. You know, kind of talking about another low tier hero, or at least pretty low in terms of living legend points is me and Joe's favorite Lavaya. They're. Going to say Iraqi. I'm like, don't you dare. No, I would never associate you with Iraq. Thank you. I appreciate that the. First time I was like, Arachne has good hero design.

You literally laughed at me. I'm never gonna associate you with Arachne. I don't care how much you grow to love. Him love them. That's a very Joel comment. I just. Said you're not allowed to sit at my table. No, you're not. You bullied me for years. Go sit with the cool kids, Arachne and I. We don't need you. I love how Leviath's the cool

kids. That's crazy. But Leviah, Leviah Leviah is pretty cool now, but Leviah is also considered one of the like higher variance heroes, Especially with using scab skins to like really try to explode out your turns. Do we think this is what leads to a hero being low tier is being too reliant on higher variation to make them powerful? Yeah, because every every trading card game and every hero will have some level of variance and you can exploit that variance for really insane

amount of resources or power. But with Leviah, like literally every card in her kit will say random or like draw to which you know implies more randomness, right? Like banish 3 random cards from graveyard. Now with brute in general, like for instance blood rush spells like the premier brute card, it says discard a random card from hand. But the way you play your turn by turn, most times when you play it, you're going to have only other sixes minus your pitch card after you, you know,

choose to play that card. But it's, you know, still random and all of her blood deck cards that are supposedly overstated and don't require a day's card from hand in exchange for other benefits like go again or buffs on the card itself still says 3

random cards from graveyard. And the longer the game goes, the wider your graveyard gets and the randomness starts to feel like way more overwhelming than just having like only sixes in graveyard and having more quote UN quote misses, right so. So Oviah does have a lot of randomness for sure. Is the randomness the thing that makes her low tier? I think it is, yes, because when people say low tier, it means

consistency and winning. You know, these big events and these big events have 14 rounds, 15 rounds that you have to play. And there's going to be a game where you get wrecked by scabskins. There's going to be a game where you just didn't banish something off. Dread screaming, right? Right. Heroes like brutes have more susceptibility to randomness. So, you know, the more you expose yourself to this sort of dice rolling mechanic, the more you're gonna get burned by it.

And you know, it could happen in game one, It could happen in game 14. You can run hot all day and just not have that happen. But a hero like, you know, a more consistent hero like Lexi that just has arrows every hand.

I mean, being able to use Voltaire to load everything, that's going to be more consistent throughout a long tournament day as compared to Ryanar who's going to be rolling scabskins going to be discarding a random card blood rush bellow might hit your blue instead of your red. So like there's a lot of factors that come with brute and these low tier heroes and a lot more has to go right for them.

Whereas these top tier heroes have a sort of a form of consistency where they can kind of replicate the same powerful play over and over and over. Whereas these lower tier heroes can do that, but at a very lower of much lower rate than for sure top of the meta. Yeah, cuz you know, I've heard it put in a way from, you know, a barraging Blake.

You know, scabskin rolls. Like whenever you choose to roll it, there's a 5050 chance that you get 2 action points and a one in 36 chance that you get either A1 or A6. And eventually when enough brutes go to events, there's going to be Reiner's and Levy is a place really high or God forbid, win something. And that's because they are quite literally the one in 36 and the other 5050 or the other like side of the spectrum. They're me having like 03 games

or three 3, whatever. And so it can be kind of hard to measure the power level of the cards at face value when you're, like you said, Anthony, when you're tied to this like inherently random and prone to bad luck mechanic. Yeah I agree. Like most of the bottom 2 heroes like Arachne, Riptide and Levy even, they can all blow out a hero. Like if Arachne finds a good double cut to the chase, eradicate turn, then just hit all of your art of wars is fine you might win that game.

But that's not going to happen every game because you got insanely lucky there, right? So there are these power plays built into these lower tier heroes that can happen, but they happen way less often than these top here. For sure. See, that's interesting because I was going to bring up how Arachne I almost feel is counter to this because Arachne is so consistent turn by turn, but there's still something holding Arachne back from being a good hero in terms of competitive results.

Because I've played against Arachne's, we have a couple people who just slam assassins at our locals. I've played against a good amount of games. I've even played a lot of Arachne and Blitz and I have found turns are very consistent, right, based on how much I'm allowed to keep. I know what my turn is looking

like. I know that I'm if I have a blue, I'm going to be throwing a dagger and then if I have A1 cost attack, I'm going to throw that or that one cost could represent my razor reflex or it, or I can add a find also throw my other, right? There's so much I can do that I know generally what my turn is going to look like just based on how much I need to block. So Arachne is very consistent, but then Arachne still doesn't win anything.

So why is that? I think that might be to a fault too, in terms of Arachne's consistency. If he's this hype kind of consistent hero that can do like, you know, turn out to turn X amount of damage. Other heroes might be able to expect that, you know, there's not a sort of like randomness to the turns like blood rush bellow or, you know, three of a kind rain razors where you know, you

don't know what they drew. You don't know how to prepare Arachna. You can kind of like he's going to dagger into contract card or he's just going to contract card like 044. So you kind of know how to prepare yourself, you know, say with sink below or or stuff like that. You can kind of prepare for what he's about to throw at you. And also I think his mechanic is innately just kind of almost RNG ish where you kind of look at the top of the deck, you get info, but say it's not a good

card to banish. Now you put it at the bottom and then the next card you don't know anything. So if that's a good card, you might, you know, hedge some points towards your matchup in that way. Say you hit like a a codex from a Ranger right? That's gonna be a really big hit cuz now they're -1 codex right? Let's say you just hit a random card like a blue steering shot. Like that's probably not gonna help your game plan at all.

So you're still like getting closer to this like fatigue game plan, but the randomness is like after you bought them, after you resolve your cut to taste is like what else do they still have the deck? And based on what you banish, you might just get them even closer to their power cards even, which is another consideration. Yeah, yeah, I. Think it's also just sometimes it is literally what the ability is and whether or not that is good for winning games. Lexi's ability is very good for

winning games. Free frostbite or free go again. Great, wonderful, beautiful. Banishing a card off the top of the opponent's deck is not going to do as much for you. Like, it's not a bad ability per SE, but the fact that it doesn't do anything to quote UN quote impact the board I think really hurts Arachne. And it's why Arachne is all the way down there. It's an incredibly cool ability. It is so much fun to think about, but it just isn't actually a design that is competitive.

Yeah, it's a very macro ability, like it's going to impact the game definitely, if the game lasts that long, to get to that point where you can take advantage of the work you've been doing turn by turn, but like you said, doesn't do. Anything to the board state currently you're kind of just like love to or leave them to their own devices.

And that's why his best cards are either Eradicate, which lets Arachne banish a lot more cards, Surgical Extraction, which takes a card out of their hand, or leave no Witnesses, which takes a card out of their arsenal. All of those are the best Arachne cards because they all impact the board state in some way or in terms of Eradicate, it does so much more towards Arachne's game plan. But I think we just also see there's this other assassin hero that does it better. Yeah. I think.

I think comparing Arachne to Azuri kind of states how flesh and blood is designed. I think flesh and blood, you know, as a tempo based game where you kind of back and forth against the other hero. You want to be a Zurich kind of shines because she can do all this disruptive stuff that limits how well you can do on your turn. And then again, you're winning these turn cycles back and

forth, back and forth. Whereas Arachne is kind of having his own mini game in itself where he's like, you know, I'm going to make you mill and mill might not be a good Strat in flesh and blood because you get to keep your entire hand. You get to still all do all this damn that you damage that you want, whereas Zuri, you know, can hit you with a shakedown and just choose the best red in your

hand. So it's kind of tough, I feel like to compare the two because it feels like Arachne is almost kind of like a magic hero, like a some sort of alternative wincon hero, whereas Zuri is kind of built for flesh and blood where she's like back and forth. She's winning these, you know, 2 card hands, one card hands even with codex and and leave no witnesses. And whereas Arachne kind of is to the sort of the back end because he's playing kind of his own game plan, not not flesh and

blood. Something you just said kind of like makes me think the mini game aspect listeners in our notes, you can't see it, but we have like Levia slash Bolton because those are both my favorite heroes. But all these heroes, Arachne, Levaya, Bolton and Riptide, they have mini games in their hero ability. While they're very flavorful, very fun to play with, they're

just not impactful to the game. Like Leviah having blood deck cards like you can play from banished like at some point, maybe not immediately, which means like you're having to manage a lot more resources that if you don't see them right at the right time or set up just the right way, you get blown out. Arachne much longer game plan. You're going to be banished with a contract using your silver throughout the game. Riptide.

You want to be leaking in as much damage with your hero ability, which doesn't necessarily equate to anything in the middle of the game until like it's it's that really tight

knit end game. And then Bolton has like the storage mechanic that he banks for later, which again, unless you find a really great turn that you set up to take advantage of like multiple cards in the soul, then often times you're going to be like probably dead or dying when you're able to capitalize on these mini games. I like how you bring up this idea in mini games Joel, but I don't think I quite agree that it's only like a low tier hero thing. I feel like all kinds of flesh

and blood heroes. There are little mini games going on. Yeah, like what? I feel like the worst one is Dromi. I would call like her little Dragons that she sets up like a mini game. Like you have to like, do your game plan, but also I'm giving you a new game plan that you have to take care of and that's attack my Dragons. I mean, I will point out just right there, it is a mini game that requires the opponent to respond in some way.

Yeah, yeah. Which is a little bit different than what Lavaya and Iraqi and Bolton have going on, where it almost let's the other player have more room to breathe while Dromy's Dragons put more pressure onto the opponent. I would also count like ninja and mascot momentum like the 123 mini game. OK, but but again, that's putting pressure on those moments. On you to react to this sort of mini. Game, yeah, but you're right that mini games do exist in other heroes. But how that mini game?

Actually, both of the examples you just brought up gave us that revelation of is it a mini game that makes the opponent respond or can the opponent ignore it and keep blowing past them? Right, right. You can definitely ignore mascot momentum. No, you. Can he's No. You can't. He's psyopsing you so we can play kotsu at locals.

I mean, if you're just like making like go again or attack reactions, whatever, and like triggering Riptide traps basically without thinking about it, like you probably won't go that well for you because all of the stuff that Riptide does can like really screw over your turn, right? It is something you really have to play around, otherwise you'll probably lose. Yeah, I think Riptide's mini

game is situational as well. Whereas Katsu and Dromi, your two examples are kind of, you know what's coming, right? You know that Dromi is going to play a billion Dragons. You know that, Katsu, if you don't block this card, I'm going to draw a card. Proactive versus reactive. Exactly. So yeah, I think the the mini games differ in a lot of ways. And so it's very flavorful that, you know, Flesh and blood has these heroes that have mini games. That's really cool.

Yeah, but different kind of win cons are treated different ways in sort of flesh and bloods back and forth tempo based game where it's kind of you want to your opponent to do less while you are doing more. Some of these mini games and these heroes aren't contributing toward that, towards that, and some of them are contributing very heavily.

Right. Now actually that's let's talk about intoxicating shot then, because we're talking about proactive versus reactive pressure on the opponent versus pressure on yourself as the player around these mini games. So in terms of like the quadrant here, the worst quadrant to be in is a reactive game plan that does not put pressure on the opponent, which is how riptides traps feel. A lot of the time you don't have the ability to really play

around your opponent. So it's a very, very reactive. And then unless you're getting at least four points of value off on the turn, which is the difference in starting life total, it's also not really putting a lot of pressure on your opponent. So isn't it intoxicating Shot great because it gives you some proactivity in the mini game. It turns on so many of your traps.

I think theoretically it does because it does turn on your traps, but there is also some sort of deck building aspect that goes into the toxicating shot. You have to have some sort of critical mass of traps for it to work. And then again, like is the the value of the trap triggering going to help you out right? Is this inertia token going to help? Is this frailty going to help? Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes

it does. Sometimes you give them a courage and an agility token or whatever it may be and they hit you for CNC for seven, go again and you can't do anything. Just. Your defense reactions and sometimes they you don't draw the inertia trap, you draw the frailty trap. But now you give them a break point on their three go again. Made of four go again, right? Yeah. And they like play it from hand or something. See frailty won't even affect

them. So there's sort of this like RNG aspect behind intoxicating shot where the traps are so situational and you are now giving them, you know this plus one this go again. So traps that do trigger, but then again, even if they do trigger, do they help you out right? And I think the legendary traps are are very good for this because they triggering them will have bigger effects like discarding your hand or the attack goes back down to its base.

But these sort of like traps that you just put in the deck just to get one damage off, like, you know, frailty trap, inertia trap. Sometimes it won't even matter because you know, say they hit you with an arrow for five. Now it becomes 4. But then you it's it's still a break point. It has to go again and they get a ponder anyway to negate the inertia trap you just played? But do we? Do we like this design of taking a reactive game plan and giving some proactivity to it?

I think it's a step in the in the direction. It's not obviously for every deck and it's catered towards Trap Riptide especially. So I think Alice S did make a successful card overall, kind of introducing this new archetype of Trap Riptide and try to play more towards this second portion of his hero ability. But I think eventually there might be a card in the future that plays more towards his first ability, which is the reload mechanic.

I feel like he has kind of this dual aspect of a defensive mechanic and an offensive mechanic, similar to how Briar plays. How Briar has this, you know, offensive mechanic with Embodiment of Lightning, but she also has this defensive mechanic with Embodiment of Earth. So I think Riptide can kind of emulate that and with maybe more

support he can get there. Yeah, So it seems almost like a really great like base design, but he just hasn't been around a long enough to see like multiple sets of like these expansion slots because this is the first expansion slot that we're getting from Flesh and Blood. So maybe a few more sets down the line. He does like, you know, capitalize more on the reload aspect because that in itself, like not breaking the combat chain, could be extremely relevant for future Riptide cards.

So we just like can't see because it's there's still an R. And D or whatever. Now, is that kind of circling back a little bit to our red pitch here. Do we think that that is a healthy mindset for us to have as players of these Lower 2 heroes? Just wait, we're going to get our cards printed one of these days and then we're going to be top of the pack. Is that is that the right attitude that players should

have? I mean, I'll start off because this was me for like 2 months leading a dust hold on, hold on and my I. Think more like years. No, no, no, no. Literally since the inception of my about flesh and blood career, I'm like just you fucking wait, boys, every Armory not save. Trust me, stay away from him. And then it just kind of didn't happen. Like, you know, Levia got like quote UN quote fixed, like you just don't straight up die at 13 life.

But what did what did it really do for the hero? Like again, with my previous example, the one in 36 Levias one or placed really high at these calling or Proquest. But overall, the conversion rate for Leviah didn't change all that much. So it, you know, similar to circling back to what you said, Clark, are what we've been

talking about as a whole. We have to kind of go back to the drawing board to see like, OK, is there something we're missing in the original release of Leviah's cards or the cards that were released like in supplemental sets? Is there something in Dusseldon we're just not, you know, combining in the right way with like the past cards.

There's a lot to it, and I think as a whole, waiting for a new set to fix your hero, like you're just gonna set yourself up for a lot of frustration, which is what I've been experiencing in the past couple of months. I think you are not. Only setting yourself up for failure, but you're creating a conflict relationship with LSS. Yeah. When is LSS going to fix my hero? When is LSS going to do this

thing for me? And ultimately it's not their job to. At the end of the day, the only time we are going to have a perfectly balanced Flesh and Blood game is when two people are playing the same hero with the same equipment, the same weapon, and the same cards and deck. That is the only time you will have a perfectly fair game of Flesh and Blood. I recognize this analogy. You're talking about Fox Final Destination. No items only. Yeah, that is exactly what I'm talking about.

Until everything is exactly the same every single time and you run it over and over and over again. That's when you're going to remove all these extra variations and all this randomness and all this. That's what it's really going to be, only skill, right? And that's not the game that we're playing. As long as you sit down with a different hero than the other person, it's going to be unbalanced.

Right, that's so true. Yeah, I think success is, you know, also measured by what tools you're given to, right? Like how do you perform under these specific circumstances, like back against the wall and you with CNC in a really difficult spot, like how do you react? And you know, the better players will make the better decisions at that time for sure. And me personally, I think, you know, going back to what you said about the lower hero, like,

should we just sit and wait? I, I recognize that Riptide is, you know, not as strong as some other heroes in the format currently. And he's kind of like my pet deck. Would I bring him to say, worlds if I was going? Probably not just because I want to be able to play a more powerful deck that can, you know, live up to standards against the majority of the

meta, right. But I'm not going to sit here and kind of like, you know, complain that, you know, LSS, you should have given us a better specialization card. You could have done all this stuff. It is kind of weird though, right, That, you know, Dromi, for example, was this kind of weird example of a hero that was really bad into Phi when Phi was really strong. And then that sort of, you know, all the Dromi specialist kept playing her, stayed threw her all this time.

Phi gets nerfed and now she becomes super popular because she counters the best Lexi or has the best time to Lexi, and then now she gets her rewarded with a really good specialization card in Tome. So we've seen the other side of that coin where you can kind of like wait on this sort of new set to come out and you get rewarded with it too. So I think there's not a right answer for it in the end.

I think, like, I think flesh and bud should just be played the way you enjoy playing it. Say, if you you like, you know, a lower tier hero, you shouldn't be measured by how well you do with that hero. Say, for example, you should be measured by how much, how fun you're having. Same way goes for a successful hero with, you know, a competitive person. So say you're playing Lexi to win, you should be measured not by how well you're doing, but because of how much fun you're having.

And if winning is why you're having fun, then so be it, right? But you shouldn't be be dogging on someone because they're having fun trying out a lower tier hero. And not winning. I feel. So true. And that kind of circles back to our previous conversation about how to get more players into the game. I think if we sort of stop like like inherently dogging on these lower tier heroes and like that people want to play them, like I think every hero is going to have a community that just like

loves this fucking hero. Like, you know, they're Lexi and Joy is far, far before she was top of the meta for seven months. They'd like ice Lexi, they liked her control, like mid range play style and they had to adapt because their ice version was far outclassed by this more aggressive art of war, like three of a kind version.

And so, you know, for instance, when I'm playing Leviah, I I can't wait for LSS to make this hero broken, because the only thing that's going to do is make the top players abuse the new power of this hero and probably get them LL quicker or probably get a card band. Because like, if you were to get like your fear, like quote UN quote fixed. You have this really big power spike with these like over

pushed cards. The only thing it's really going to contribute to is more pro players picking picking up your specific hero and getting them LL quicker or getting them, you know, specific cards banned. So really what your focus should be is like you said, Anthony, have more fun with it.

You should be like, you know, putting reps into this here because it's your favorite hero and not because you're like on this weird binge of like, you know, OK, go down the list of heroes that could be like anti meta. Because what I really enjoy about flesh and blood and we see it time and time again is specialists are rewarded.

Like if you like really put in the time, figure out why this hero is good into XYZ and either wait for like one or two push cards to really help the strategy you're going for, or just figure out a way you can pivot in a way that for this specific meta, you have a really good shot at winning your armories, winning your proquest, whatever the case may be.

That way you have a bit more fun with the game and not don't get like really frustrated or really like shut down when the support that was supposed to save your hero just doesn't pan out that way. And I think that was a really great point. Something that I always think about is when my heroes aren't doing well, that is an opportunity. It's an opportunity to try looking at the hero in a completely different way, right.

So like I've been testing OTK viscera and go tall viscera because without Rosetta Thorne, the really nice go wide strategy that we had been doing for months, it's not as good anymore. And I don't want to play the same Visser I that isn't as good and wasn't doing well in the meta right before we lost it. So why not try something new? Why not go way off the beaten path and try something new, right? Bring it to your Armory, give it a shot. Oh, it didn't work out well?

You had fun playing your hero in a new way. Like I think that's a great way of approaching having a hero that isn't doing well in the meta. For sure. I think there's also the case of a hero maybe getting too much support or going too far too. I know Yuki, who's a prolific Lexi player in our community.

She's been talking about how she kind of misses Lexi, and she's also quoted that, you know, when Lexi got her outsiders arrows and you know, started straying away from these elemental cards and just played straight arrows, rain razors, three of a kind. It kind of got away from the flavor and how she enjoyed Lexi herself, right? So I feel like sometimes the support that makes your hero good and viable can kind of stray away from what you like your hero to be, right?

Maybe like Riptide or whatever here, Levia because of her flavor or her lore or her ability to do this X thing. And now they've introduced a new way to play Levia that's just like, more generic or a different way than you like. Right. And then everyone's playing her because she's good. And it's just kind of, you know, straying away. Yeah. Far away. You like. Exactly. Yeah. So there's like another flip side to that. Right. Yeah that's so true.

I haven't had the pleasure of people wanting to play my hero in masses cause all of my favorite heroes suck, but we'll get to a point I'm sure. We have tried though. I think they have for sure once when when Dustin came out. I think Levia redeemed was like one of the coolest cards we've ever for sure. Ohhh yeah, yeah. And a lot of people did try that one.

That first event right after the Dusseldon, a lot of people played Levia. Levia was one of the most played decks and people realized she sucks like she uses to herself so often. Yeah. Yeah. And people just, like, saw it. See, that's what happens when a new card gets introduced. People think that she they're good or people kind of go towards it because it's the new craziest thing. And then now they realize, you know, there's a fundamental flaw

with this hero. There's a fundamental flaw in how she plays. And they just scrap it right away and they go back to whatever they're playing. Yeah, right. I think it's about time for us to move on to another topic for Blue Pitch. We were going to talk about like what can be added to the game as well as what underutilized cards specifically exist already.

Moving away from like heroes and deck archetypes that perhaps could see more play and going into specific cards that maybe haven't found the right home or do have the right home, we just don't know about it. Yeah, this kind of ties into what we briefly mentioned in red pitch, which was LSS every so often going you guys haven't solved been set yet, you haven't figured her out. You don't. You don't know. What she can.

Do, but like, hasn't James White said the same thing about like the potions in Everfest or something? Like who's saying this earlier? Was that you, Anthony? No, that was me. Wasn't that you, Joel? Yeah, I, I've, I've heard at least once or twice from devs that like, you know, we haven't fully explored or like a, a specific set of cards or to pay attention to a specific type of

card. Like I remember not only with Everfest, like all the items or like, you know, I feel like every class kind of incorporated whatever support they got. Like I think Dash got T-bone and like pulse wave harpoon, instant slot in right swing, big over set to card. Sweet. I'll take it. Swarming Gloomvale. Swarming Gloomvale. Yes, Thank you. Gloom blood and Revel and room blood. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, you know, when a dev says like, oh, you guys haven't really figured out everything in Everfest yet, I'm like, doesn't that leave just like the talismans or the potions?

Like how do we look at this in the scope of like all the heroes of flushing, but like how can each one individually use these items in a like, for instance, you know, Briar ran one of them for like a brief amount of time, like Talisman of Warfare, which says if you, you know, deal exactly to damage, you destroy both arsenals, which is like another CNC on your Rosetta Thorn, which I thought was an insane tech from the person who brought it. And I haven't really seen like

much more of that in other like top deck cliffs other than, you know, Anthony with his crazy brew tech. And another example I can think of before I pass it off to you guys is when Dusseldon was coming out, another dev I think was talking to Mansant and said pay attention to skull crack. And me, I'm like skull crack. But most of the support had nothing to do with discard effects. So I, you know, think comments like that make me curious.

Like, man, there really is a lot of layers to this game that I'm just not seeing that the devs have, like, you know, they have full access to everything. So they're like, OK, just maybe I should pay attention to this card. Let's go back to the drawing board. Pay attention to, you know, stuff that we haven't tried yet. I think it's interesting because I think that whatever play testing they're doing over there in New Zealand, I think they're just trying to have fun with the game.

I think that they are trying. They like look at these cards that aren't being played and then say, well, how can I build a deck with this? And then they start from there and it's a lot more creative. It's a lot more interesting and exciting and I think it draws out more of the power of these underutilized cards while we out here in the rest of the world at our local armories, we're thinking, how do we get that cold foil? How do I, how do I get that four

O on the weekend? That's what we care more about. And so we're not looking to utilize these random tech cards. We're looking to win games. And a lot of the times that means that we can't invest a bunch of time in trying to spec for these tech options. They're probably decent, but also we're not. It's just not something that I think we care about, really. Yeah. I think like going back to the mini game thing, I think a lot of cards out there are like supporting the sort of mini game

aspect. Like say I've got the name of the card, but it's the one where if you pitch like a non attack action and an attack action X effect happens. Right, a cryptic crossing. There we go, a yellow 3 for six. If you pitch a non attack action card and an attack action card, it gains. When this hits, your opponent discards a card and you draw a card. There you go and then see if you do that in sort of a vacuum,

that seems really good, right? You're spending the all these resources to be able to gain so many effects. But then again, it's just easier to do damage. It's easier to play this math game of instead of doing, you know, three card, I draw a card potentially if you don't block it and you also discard a card. I could also just give my Marvin my shirtless skull form, go again and swing my weapon after and make any chance right? Both both 3 cards. Hard hands, but one of them's better, yeah.

Yeah, so I think that's just like this sort of simplified math version of the game where you're just trying to pump out the biggest numbers turn to turn to turn. Whereas there's cards in the game that kind of kind of support this mini game aspect of, hey, if you don't do this, this this thing will happen. And then maybe that might

benefit me, maybe it might not. But I think for like general deck building, general gameplay, people will always stray towards like the easier line because it'll always work. It'll always present X amount of damage rather than rely flying on opponent blocking opponent variance to be able to do something. For sure. And there's an argument to be said like that time spent testing these random items from Everfest or these cards that nobody uses for good reason. And then you, you know, waste,

not wasted. But also, yeah, you wasted all this time testing this card when you could be getting reps with what is proven to be the better strategy. Yeah, like a similar potion inside Everfest. I'm not sure if it's a Talisman or a potion. It's the one where if 2 cards have been played with the same name, you can target hero discards. 2 cards I believe is what the effect is. Amulet of Echoes.

Amulet of echoes There you go like that seems like an insanely strong card, but like making it work is literally impossible because like if you play it now, you you kind of represent this like discard 2 in a certain moment of the game. But say like the five has a brand with cinder claw, a red and a blue. He's like, OK, I'll just instead of playing the other brand, I'll just. To searing Ember Blade you like opponents can play around these

potions down too. So I feel like there's there's always like cool little things with these potions, but them being like literal items on the arena public info and not instant speed sort of shenanigans allows for them to kind of play around it too. And that's such a situational item too. Like not a lot of heroes play 2 cards of the same name and still have cards in their hand after.

At least it's blue, it has go again and the ability is an instant so you don't have to spend any action points on this card at all. Yeah. Yeah, we did see some innovation from Talisman of Tights though in the chain versus old, the meta where they were attempting to counter a crown of seeds with Talisman of Tights to be able to, you know, kind of have the static item on the board and prevent the next time they crown seeds, they won't be able to draw that card from Crown of Seeds.

So there is like some potential and it was kind of like showed showcased in chain with Talisman of Tights. But I feel like most of the items are kind of hyper situational. Yeah. Whereas you know that that card is also hyper situational, but it had that sort of static effect on a very popular hill at the time with Crannys Seed Oldham.

Right. And so Anthony, would you say that like, would it be better or worse if that effect on an item was made into either a generic equipment or an instantly you could play from hand as a response? Like does that become more like counterspell or like hand trap from Yu-gi-oh? Or does that become just like an overly like oppressive hate card for this specific strategy in an equipment? Like where? Where's the middle ground here, if there is any?

Yeah, I think sort of this sort of mini game like Counterspell, like you were mentioning, Joel is the card, Blizzard of the ice card that you have to pay 2 or you lose, go again on a specific attack. It's sort of this like instant speed. You don't really, your opponent doesn't really know you have it. You can just kind of play it out there. So it's kind of this like finicky tool. It doesn't work in all scenarios, right? Sometimes Bravo just throws a

big attack at you. Blizzard doesn't do anything. It doesn't block, do anything. It's sort of like an Everfest potion in itself where you kind of play at a specific moment and it has specific matchup cases. Like, it's really good against Ninja, it's really good against Room Blade, but it's not good against all decks that swing just once. Right, that's interesting you say that that, you know, it is already an example of how these items can be turned into hand

traps. So maybe they're not as oppressive or as like unhealthy to the game as we originally thought because, you know, Blizzard has shut down many of turns of mine. But still, you know, like you said, other decks will just like completely, completely ignore it and will punish you for having said card because it doesn't block. At least it pitches, you know,

for for blue, right? Yeah, It also being an ice card, it also being a blue and especially with how much our ice heroes cared about blue ice cards, I think it just the fact that all of that was going for it gave it the ubiquitousness that I think could be concerned about. But also just the fact that it has the the counter play to it. You can pay to to ignore the effect.

I think that's good. I think LSS also just cares a little bit or they just see more value in being able to set up for something like I just a trend that I've noticed across cards is that they seem to highly value the ability to set up and then take back the tempo, while players don't like that as much because setting up doesn't affect the board state.

Going back to what we were saying with our acne, if I'm not impacting your hand, if I'm not pressuring your life total, making you want to block, making you want to use your equipment on defense, then I am not getting closer to winning, even if setting up could help me do that on a later turn. And I think that's where maybe there's a disconnect between what LSS is saying and what the community is feeling in our

games. We don't want to set up because setting up doesn't do anything that turn. We're thinking more turn by turn. And when we talk about how good Lexi was competitively, it was because Lexi was pumping out 1516 damage every single turn. And if you can do that every single turn, you're going to win the game. And I, I think Anthony also touched on it a little bit earlier.

He was saying, you know, this flushing butt is a very tempo centric game and setting up often means I'm going to give up a little bit of tempo to maybe steal it back later. But you're still giving your opponent a chance to open up the game completely and, and change its hide. And also with flushing butt, they really do like this setup mechanic or like this setup strategy in the in the form of

these like storage mechanics. But again, I think it's really counterintuitive because you're giving up a lot of tempo. And the more pushed card we get, the more that aggregates tools to like push the meta or mid range deck or control deck get like some sort of footing in the game. Then it kind of like, you know, befuddles everything you were trying to do with, you know, setting up this like power play

later. And yet we have seen archetypes succeed with it, most notably Kano and OTK Visserai with skeleton, right? Both of them being, oh, I'm just going to set up the entire game and then I'm going to have one turn where I deal 50 plus damage and I'm going to win. So that's when it's good for us. But we've also seen that be toxic gameplay. So I think that's going to have to be something else is going to have to solve for sure.

Yeah, I think like also mentioned that like the the weaker side of setting up to like all these guardian sort of non attack actions that say, hey, I'm going to play this and it ends my turn. But next year and I'm going to get +8 like 10 + 10 like towering Titan to my to my

whatever attack, right. Like Crippling Quest for 21 sounds really good in a vacuum, but you have to pitch 3 Blues the term before you're not hitting your opponent, and then you also have to have the Blues after to swing crippling crush and completely try to ignore what your opponent's trying to do in the middle stage of whatever's happening. Right. So any disruption? Yeah, it's like the CNC and it's. Yeah, the towering Titan pops and you go cool, cool, Arsenal.

Pass yeah, not only did you waste if the like the disruption, the disruption happens like you say, not only did you just waste one turn, you just wasted two turns Yeah, right. So there's definitely storage mechanics and kind of set up mechanics that definitely

backfire more often. But there's easier ones to do, like K&O with E pots and just like waiting for that opportune time when an opponent taps out, or Viscera with the old skeleton building up rune chance, sort of making this critical mass of damage that you can't block at all. Yeah. So I think there's definitely toxic ways to store like sort of like resources, but there's also really, really bad ways to store resources like guardians non

attack actions. For sure, and I think that's why, you know, Guardian has often strayed away from this game plan. Like they're very like focus on the math, focus on getting your, you know, a no, those swings to make sure that you're spending the least amount of cards in deck and then play towards your larger like disruptive terms with the correct amount of Blues to disrupt.

And yeah. So we we don't see a lot of like those non attacks unless it's like the very first turn to set up like something really disgusting once you have the the tempo again. And yet there are some really fascinating auras out there that provide you some really intense abilities, like plus one intellect or gaining lots of life for giving all of your equipment plus one block.

Like there are some really strong auras out there, but because they don't quite fit the way that we think the hero should be played, we're like not using. And LSS, one thing I do like about this LSS play where they're like constantly looking at the underutilized cards, it means that when they print new things, they're thinking, does it bring these old cards into the spotlight in a way that might be toxic and unhealthy? And I think that that is very good. I am happy that LSS thinks about

that. There is a card in the game where I'm was really excited about. It's called Life of the party. As you know, one of my favorite cards of all time is crazy Brew and they printed this sort of card that interacts with crazy Brew where, you know, you get all these stats of crazy brew built into the cart. So I feel like that's just an example of, you know, Alice's looking at older cards and being like, hey, let's print out this thing that might, you know, affect this potion or this sort

of permanent or item. So I think it could be, you know, a sign that things might be headed that way, where something might interact with Potion of Ironhide, for example, say, say, yeah, a guardian might like, hey, if you have Potion of Ironhide out, you can fuse it with your shield and now you block with like +2 and on all your guardian attack action cards. So I mean, there's future design space that could be had with these potions, right?

They're all generic too. So that means that's a very important part in my opinion, because every hero can use them, right? Yeah. And I think that's why they're intentionally weak at the moment, because they kind of want to keep this design space open to be, you know, kind of applicable to multiple heroes down the line. Right. You want to savor it and spread it out over years of gameplay and not have like, and I feel that way about like the first two sets being Monarch in Tales of Aria.

I wonder how well they would perform if we had quicker releases or or less time in between sets so that these like, you know, decks interact with each other longer and maybe find like counter strategies across multiple different decks. Maybe starvote like doesn't do as well if it's like chain is like blowing them out, right, or vice versa or prism like deals with both of them pretty cleanly. And there's a strategy that deals like, you know, that that

stuff I would have liked to see. But again, they were just coming out of a pandemic. And like you said, Anthony, I think they're moving in a really good direction where the we're, we're getting more options and kind of revitalizing the old card pool so that when these 15 new heroes come out, not one of them are going to be like super oppressive that we don't have the tools to to deal with them. Yeah, I want to shift us into probably the last big topic that we're going to have for this

episode. What aspects of the game could we add to improve playing these lower tier heroes? What can we do structurally, maybe even like card wise? What can we do to make playing lower tier heroes more fun, more accessible, Help them win a little bit more without just straight handing them a zero for 10? But are we above that? I'm above that. I would never sign on to printing a zero for 10, even in our little crazy little custom card world. Never, Fucking never. I would not live with.

I could not How? About a six for a 13 Shannon, is that what Shannon? Yeah, Oath of the Ninth Blade or. Whatever. Yeah, Yeah. Isn't that a zero for 13? Yeah. No that. For nine times. Zero for 9 ninth blade. I should have done that, but actually not quite a zero for 10. My bad. Surely it's a nine for 9:00. True, Yeah, I think an interesting way to do it would be adding more games per match.

I know that classic constructor does take 55 minutes, sometimes even more and untimed matches in in Final cut, but sort of this best of three, best of X format where you kind of play an initial game to kind of feel out your opponent and then now you get to re hit the same, you know, deck with different sideboard strategies. I think that's a a very integral way of kind of introducing more counter play in terms of like deck building and just kind of sideboarding.

Like Riptide would probably benefit from that a little bit just because you don't know what version of the deck your opponent's playing. And after kind of sussing it out a little bit, kind of figuring it out, Oh, I figured out that they play a lot of buffs. So now inertia trap is good, buzz saw trap is good. These are definite cards that I'll run in my deck. I'll take out, you know, the non

relevant trap. So I think like in a way, we were able to add a best of X format without making matches take three hours. That would be a very good way to implement the game maybe. Yeah, I totally agree. There are heroes that seem to have a defensive like idea built in. Like take like Arachne for example, who like doesn't feel like he was designed to play a full 5 card hand. He was designed to have like some defensive components built in.

And like Riptide being a probably even a better example of this, where if you know what you're going up against, you know what you're sideboarding against, it really helps a lot if you're planning on playing defence. What D reacts are they bringing in? How many of them you know? Now, would this also come with an increased inventory? Space, it probably would like you would probably see a little bit more of a Cyborg strategy.

Maybe I like the the old blitz or is it yeah, the old Blitz idea where you had X amount of inventory that could be that could be like implemented in CC where you kind of, you know, have X amount of playable cards that you can play under your deck, but you can only have these many equipments.

So maybe we implement some sort of strategy there, say like a best of three CC where you have, you know, 80 cards or, you know, some arbitrary number of cards in your main deck and but you only can have like 10 equipment and that's it. And you can sideboard that however you'd like. And then now you're opening up so much, you know, card play and say like, I'm playing Riptide and you're not presenting a lot of go again. I take out all my frailty traps,

my my collapsing trap. I put in all my buff traps because you're playing a lot of nimble isms, minimalism, stuff like that. Yeah, And you know, something that I've read in a few of the LSS articles as well is that I think they're shifting the design space away from like fatigue as a hero design and more so as like specific

strategy against a hero. Like for instance, against dash, I'm if I can't out damage them, there's a good chance that I can probably fatigue them while they're trying to boost their their deck away. And so that might help with the like overall time of CC matches. Like maybe we see a world where it gets dumbed down to like, you know, 35 to 45 minutes per game.

And so that we can squeeze in these best of three matches and see more hero expression and get that second chance, like in case you get like blown out or like as a Leviah player, that sounds sick. Because now I'm rolling more dice per game. And the changes of me like when I'm forced to roll scabskin Leathers that I don't get absolutely boned and lose my only shot at, you know, winning the match. Even though like because I've lost many games where I'm fucking steamrolling, I'm making

these plays, I'm pitch stacking. I got 2 recklesses right? And I am forced to play, I'm forced to roll scabs in the Leathers because like, I don't know, I have to clear like an aura with Spectra or something and I hit that fucking one or I get no action points. I'm like, OK, whatever, I'll just like continue. But you know, things like that I think would help with a lot of the randomness and variance that is so present in TCGS and like more damning in Flesh and Blood

more so than other games. Yeah, I think also like it's a we we do talk about this best of three format, but I think Flesh and Blood is actually one of the lowest variance card games out there and actually feels pretty decent to play in this one best of one format because it feels like a such a fair game. Whereas in other games like Magic and Pokémon, it's best of three because these one V1 games don't feel very consistent. You draw different cards, you can hit your land, you don't hit

your energies. Whereas in Flesh and Blood it just feels like a consistent game because of the pitch system and the way the cards cycle through your deck faster and you can see more of your power cards. So it feels like best of 1 is a pretty, pretty good spot for this. But maybe we can introduce it in some sort of blitz format where blitz is kind of like faster game mode, 20 health. There's more variance because if you hit a power turn, you probably killing your opponent.

So maybe we introduce it in blitz where you play a best three of blitz, you get the sideboard in between matches as well, and it's just faster gameplay. So it doesn't feel so stale. Going back to the idea of like, you know, an unfair advantage in terms of deck building.

You can make these armies draft events and then draft events really help the game because everyone's kind of at this sort of level playing field where they have, you know, draft decks, you know, 40 cards, say for bright lights, for example, everyone has 40 cards full of MEC cards. And I really like bright lights because if you're new to deck building, it doesn't matter because you have 40 MEC cards. So it doesn't matter if your deck's bad or good, you're still

a MEC, you can still play a MEC. So I think that's cool, a really cool story. He is one of our locals at King Slayer. He came in playing Flesh and Blood for the first time ever, and he came to draft and he went 2-1 in his pod and he was really ecstatic about it. He's really happy. He's like, yeah, this game is really cool. Like he had a lot of magic experience, but he kind of like took all he knew about card games, put it into draft and like he was able to play.

Opponents of, you know, that have played Flesh and Blood longer than him, but now they're on the sort of equal playing field where, you know, everyone's drafting and playing the same sort of level deck instead of, you know, winning by just having C and CS. And then now he was able to apply his own knowledge and go to one in that Armory.

So I think draft it might be a step in the right direction where, you know, you don't have to build a deck, you don't have to pay all this money to come play. You can just come pay for the packs and then just have a good time. Yeah, yeah. And this might be like a really like logistical nightmare, which is like my Forte. I love coming up with

complicated ideas. But if like Kingsler games also had like, you know, CC decks like for rent, like if you if you come in like maybe like a limit of like 8 or 16, right? And at the beginning you each get like a random CC deck. No legendary is like common equipment. Like maybe it's just commoner right? They pass out commoner decks, but CC more so than blitz, cuz I'm always going to say CC is a great tool to learn because you have more pivot turns and just longer times to make decisions

that impact the game. And, and not like blitz were like three turns and it's over, right. Yeah. So if there's something like that where you could like, you know, either rent a deck or just pass out random deck. So like there's no like onus on the player to like, you know, attack for the like Armory killers or there's no like pressure on the new player to like make a heavy investment. They can just come here, play.

And Kingslayer actually was my very first store that I played at and I actually went to a draft to welcome to race draft. And I that was like one of the best experiences I had, you know, starting out with flash and blood. And I think that's what kept me playing for a long time. Like I remember I was playing the worst Darinthia deck I've ever drafted but was still having fun cuz everyone there was really nice. They were teaching me how to

play things like that. So exposing that side of the LGS and the Armory experience is gonna make this game explode for capital players. And I do, I do like that suggestion of like the decks for rent. I actually think that'd be a pretty cool thing for LG s s to do. But then it's still on the LG s s to put those decks together and put them out. And you know, there's going to be that one guy that's like, Oh yeah, I know that you're playing the drone my deck.

So I'm so like, I specifically brought Phi to like beat you so I could at least get a pack back. And it's like, dude, why are you? Why are you being a killer to the guy who just joined? But I that it, that's all great doesn't help me. I want to bring my fancy little brews, my shitty little decks that I'm designing and I want to bring those to tournaments and possibly do well. And maybe that's just me asking for too much. I would.

I would like to be able to play my B tier and C tier heroes and still possibly when in Armory and just having an event where we're like, hey, don't bring your killer decks. I think that would still be nice to have in the way that Friday Night Magic is like, yeah, you don't bring your Tier 1 stuff, man. This is just for us to get together and hang out. Sweet, yeah I agree. Like I think a casual night would be very fun. Kind of like a night where only X amount of heroes are allowed.

That would be pretty cool. Going back to your idea, Joe, I know it's not technically announced yet, but we are working on some sort of system to kind of, we realized in Magic, one of our best selling Magic products is precons because it's super easy. Commander precons especially people come in and say, hey, my friend told me about commander. I played it one time with his deck. I want to make my own. I want to, you know, buy my own.

So commander precons are cool because it lists like, you know, the commander on top and then all they do and then kind of like you can look up the deck list and stuff like that. So we realized the success it has in Magic. So we're kind of starting. To curate products from our own bulk in terms of constructed classic constructed precons. Oh wow. That aren't blitz because it's hard to kind of, at least in Socal. This is totally a Socal problem. Say like hey you want to get

into the game? Buy one of these blitz precons that no one will ever host events for because all we care about here is classic constructed and sometimes draft when skirmishes come around and sometimes blitz. You know those decks are also so bad. My first experience playing this game was the Bolton precon deck and I remember going OK I play this card and then I charge OK and then it has go again. No, it only has go again if I block with an attack action card.

Oh OK, so take three. Yeah, present 12. And it's like, what the fuck am I doing? How do I win this game? Yeah, and it is like, you know, they're super like beginner friendly, but I feel like I also made some pre cons in the store for Blitz just so that people can kind of feel what get a taste of what it feels like to play a more higher power game. So I made Dromi and Phi with

more rares in the deck. So more Dragons for for Dromi, right, And more like go again, cards that have lava bursts in there, salt the wound in there. So those cards, I, I always recommend those to like players that are kind of more competitive because they want to kind of feel like the power levels of, you know, flesh and blood back and forth. Right, right. It also helps them play against the people at the store who have the established decks.

Yeah, which is super good. The Tulare Community College YouTube channel, the professor has talked about this in Magic forever and he lauded the magic product of the pioneer deck because he goes you're putting full play sets of good mythic rares. That is so important for the

game. And when he collaborated with LSS, they came out with around the table and people are going, whoa, full play sets of good rares and majestics and people love that product and they ended up and they bought a bunch. So hopefully that's a big lesson for LSS and that they start to produce beginner. Products at a much higher power level than what we've seen so far. Yeah, I love that and that that's really exciting about, you know, Kingsley doing the pre cons.

I think a lot of people have been bringing new players to Kingsley recently. So this like new attempt to get people a taste of like the CC power, the blitz power is really exciting. And I think I would even go just to like, you know, like Clark said, just to play with something different that's not completely worried about about

the meta. Yeah, and that's pretty cool too, because it opens avenues to like maybe you know, with the sealed blitz deck events, maybe we do just like a Class A pre con CC deck where you can only use our decks. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that'd be fun. Yeah, and then you can only use like these lower power level decks, but everyone's on the same playing field. So maybe you're not having these crazy 30 damage turns, but you know, you're all on the same level playing field.

You're kind of having equal amounts of power, so it might be a little bit more fair than the guy that doesn't have the money for 3E strikes 3 CNCS yet. For sure, for sure. You know those those preconstructed decks offered by LGS is another incredible thing about them is I swear this isn't an ad for King Slayer games. King Slayer games is great. I love the shop, but just I'm legitimately just thinking of why that would be an awesome product for me.

I don't really like eviscerate right now in the meta. I haven't really put together a Max deck, and so I haven't really been going to Armories. If there's a deck for me to play at the shop that I could rent for just an extra 5-10 bucks, whatever the cost is, I would totally be going to more Armory. Fuck yeah. Because, oh, there's a deck I can play. And because I don't have one for myself right now that would always be there. It would always be an option. That is, that is a killer idea.

We got a link up, man. Get some marketing going. Yeah, I'll put. The name in there. We're about ready to move on to our Arsenal zone. Yeah, you want to introduce it, Fuzzy? Sure. Our Arsenal Zone is the section of our podcast where we just each shout out a card that we've been thinking about lately for a positive or negative reasons. Whatever has got our mind running, you know? And with my Arsenal Zone, I always like to hand sign a copy of the card and give it each of my fellow hosts.

Since we have a guest here today, Anthony, you're going to get a copy too. I brought one for each of y'all. So I was looking through like my collection, like what do I want to talk about today? And I saw the perfect card. Right when I tell you this card is legendary, it's a legendary specialization card you know I'm bringing up. The big guns, right? Only one of. Wow, this it's the one copy I'm going to put in the deck. I've basically given you a playset of this legendary

specialization, right? Wow, that's right, I'm talking about Regis side. I actually needed a regicide. The perfect thing for for Crown, Crown Dominion, dromine. It's you're right. It's even good right now. So with with Regicide, I feel like this card gets a lot of Flack for being bad, but it's really kind of a groundbreaking card. This is the first card to ever introduce an alternate win condition to the game where when it hits a hero, if they are royal, they lose, period, full

stop. This is the first time we've ever seen an effect like that in Flesh and Blood and I've always loved those effects in Magic the Gathering. Just like the idea of like, oh how can I do that? How can I make my my game plan around this single card? The drawback is really high here. When the combat chain closes with regicide, assuming you did not kill them before the combat chain ended, you lose the game. So it also gives your opponent an alternate win con as well.

Just block the regicide, just stop the damage. It also like can't be defended by cards with the same name as cards in the defending heroes bandage zone, so it has a little bit of evasion tacked onto it. It's also a blue block 3, so that's your floor. You don't have to play this card and it can still contribute to your deck in a couple of different ways. I feel like this card is a big old meme. Yeah, Everybody's always, like,

loving to laugh at this card. But also occasionally you'll see it pop up in tournaments and actually do well. And part of the reason it works is because it doesn't work. That's the paradoxical nature of a lot of the bottom tier stuff that we've been talking about today. So I have a copy for each of you. Thank you. Just to bring up a little theoretical, you know, part of this game. Yeah, a theoretical part of regicide too. I think it has a decent place in a Droma.

I mean Droma, if she resolves any burn in the malls, she can. She's vanishing. Parts from a graveyard into her vantage zone. So when you finally play this registration, she might not have a hand that can even block because all those cards are already in the Vantage zone. I do want to also note though, when the combat chain closes you lose the game. You can just die by playing this card. That's what I said.

Don't play it turn 0 if you have a bunch I. Just want to what if you mention that if you're like Aiden Owen the calling, right, and you're like, I need to eat. Just play this card. Looks at you with three sigils. Shit. You don't need to play a card in order to lose like. You can just lose. The fastest I can see you can just conceive. Pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch conceit. Thank you Fuzzy for the card. Yeah, thank you, Fuzzy.

I'll go ahead and go next. The card that I've been thinking about is Moon Shot. So I mentioned I've been brewing a lot with Max recently and you know, someone popped into the Max Shot and they're like, hey, what does Max Blitz look like? And it's like Nitromechanoid is like the best version of Max. And you can't really do that in Blitz because it takes too long to get your 3 hyper drivers a transform. And they're like oh OK. And I was like, well what could

we do in Blitz? Moon Shot, Like Moon Shot is not a very good cart in CC, but I think it can provide a really interesting niche in Blitz by simply being a consistent big finisher that you are adding next to your Max of velocity. And simply by adding two more big damage finishers, you can take mechanologists just that little step further. And so like I'm thinking you know with with a red GW you only need to destroy 1 hyper driver with moon shot to get to 10 power for the. Overpowering.

That's not a lot of hyper drivers. There's not a lot of hyper drivers you can do that very early on into the game. You could also like if you have a penetration script out, you only need to destroy 2 hyper drivers. If you break your Goliath gauntlet you only need 2 hyper drivers. And all that makes it so much easier to do the moon shot thing. And because that's so much easier. It has its IT has a place. Is it good? I have no idea, but I think it is the testing that we should be.

Doing for blitz Max I'll go next cuz I kind of want to save the best for last. I didn't really have a card yet, but I was kind of thinking about I, I, I can't believe I didn't bring this up earlier, but I think the card I was thinking about the most recently is Blasphemite. Levi consumed and Levi redeemed. Yeah, just because, I mean, we've already talked about it a little bit before.

We did a whole episode on that. We did a whole episode and not only in this episode, like how it was supposed to fix Levi and it technically did, but her power level really didn't change. I think this is like one of the coolest cards in in the game like it first revealed this new card type Demi hero before tek Levasan kind of over shouted it pretty pissed off about that, but it has one of the sickest marvels I've ever seen and I still think it's one of the best

marvels. Better marvel than the tek Levasan one. It is a better marvel, I'm not going to lie, than than Tek Levasan. And it just like as I've been like trying to figure out if I should keep going with Levi and my competitive fab career. I just like keep looking back at this card like man, what is what else does this card unlock? Like how much does it really do for Leviah? Or am I just like overestimating how much this card really gives us?

So that's just the card I've been thinking about just because like Levi is just so near and dear to my heart, even though I have like 0 like results with this hero. But we'll, we'll see what what what, what the future holds. Yeah. Yeah, I think Levi consume, like I think I said it before, I think that card is like kind of LS s s. Hey, we recognize Rat Levi has a problem. Here's a very, very good possible solution. You guys got to figure it out though. I think it's a really strong

card too. So I think it's a step in the right direction and it shows that LSS cares about, you know, people that are specialists and one tricks of these bad quote, UN quote, bad heroes. Right. For sure. Sweet, awesome. I guess I'll go onto my card. Yeah, so I'm a man of theoretical value. That's why every card I enjoy starts with if this so my there's a lot of cards I really like crazy brew cooks commotion. But the one I want to talk about

today is a promise of plenty. So I've played this card a lot. I actually used to run it in my Briar deck, my channel, my heroic Briar deck, and it is a card of theoretical value. It states that it gets go again if you play it from Arsenal, it swings for three blocks for two cost 0. If it hits each person that each hero that has an empty arsenal zone gets to put the top card of their deck into their arsenal.

And I've, I've specifically built Riptide to kind of work around this card because I, I think he's the, he's technically the only hero currently that can play it with go again without any added effects from the turn that he draws it because he can

load it off his hero ability. So I wanted to play around with that and I wanted to build a Redliner deck because I wanted to play towards the theoretical value of the top part of my deck on average or most of the time will be better than the top part of your deck, right. And he also has these cool little niche things where like if you play a Lace with inertia or a Lace with frailty, it'll buff the arrow that you play, but it won't buff Promise of plenty.

So you can play that load promise of plenty and then play the promise for three. And it presents this weird kind of conundrum for the opponent. Like, do I block this promise of Plenty and not give them a card? Or do I save my blocks for the arrow that's going to destroy me later on, Right. And then with Redliner, if they'd end up blocking the Promise of plenty, you can use the Redliner just to load the arrow for free without pitching anything.

So there's like some gameplay aspect to promise of plenty. My personal favorite story ever was me playing on Briar. I was playing against Andrew Rooney in a tournament and he let it hit 'cause he's like screw it, I'll get an arsenal too. And he had 0 cards and sold his prism and his arsenal card was Celestial Cataclysm. So. Did not have an arsenal for the rest of the game and I was able to win that game. IP locked himself. Essentially so funny. Yeah. And it's, it's just a really fun

card. It it's a lot of Crucible cards like that. It's super cool and it's personal is one of my personal favorite combos of the card of all time. I can talk endless days about this is a not legal card called shitty Xmas gift. So if you if that card was able to be used, what you could do is you could play rune blade present promise of plenty from

wherever. Say the opponent doesn't block, you can instant speed in shitty Xmas gift to put a cracked bottle on the top of their deck and then now it's and then they put. A cracked bottle in the. Arsenal for the rest of the game. That's so funny so. That's one of my. Favorite can play that UPS yeah so. That's one of my favorite combos of all time. Unfortunately it's not legal in any format that I've tried out

yet. I've yet to try UPF but yeah, it's just endless possibilities with the Arsenal targets. Limitless power. Yeah, man, I'm into it. Yeah. All right. I think that's all we got for today guys. Anthony, do you have any like socials or handles that you want to shout out if people want to get a hold of you or? Yeah, well, I work at King so. So if you're in the soul calc community, feel free to stop by one of our shops. We have 3 shops open so feel free to stop by.

I work at the Fountain Valley one, but all of them are awesome, so stop by. We welcome you if you play flesh and blood, magic, whatever you want to play. And then also I have a Twitter handle if you want to follow me. It's real fox main. I post a lot of memes, a lot of dreams, and hopefully one day I can post a winning Riptide list. Yeah. I'm so excited for that day. I can smell it all right. Anthony, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. Yeah.

Thank you so much man. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in. We appreciate you. Goodbye. Bye Eaters. Pitch It to Me podcast is hosted by Fuzzy Delp, Clark Moore, Angel Rosinos. Our executive producer is Talon Stradley, logistics coordinator John Farkas, music by Dylan Holtz, logo by Han V and sound mixing by Christopher Moore. Last but not least, we'd like to thank you, the listener.

Thank you for tuning in. Please give us a follow on your favorite social media platform at Pitch It to Me Podcast. Stay tuned for Smile Tennis. Completely agree, I think saying LSX come fix my hero is entirely the wrong attitude. Waiting for the card. You're right there, fuzzy that. Is a funny voice. I felt like your complainer was gay. I don't know. I'm like why is the guy whining about Ellis? That's like fixing his hero. Like why does he have gay?

You want to take 2. I like it just the way it is. How is he playing too late? It's not your fault. We're attuned to it. There are natural predators. And are non in in Fuzzy's garage man too. I think next year we're definitely getting Tales of Arya 2 Electric boogaloo. Well, hopefully Electric Earth ice boogaloo. You were waiting your whole life for that dude I. Set up that pun months ago. That's funny. Dude, Ricochet. That'd be a great name for a card that deals with allies.

Because the attack. Just ricochet. Boom, yeah, I would play the. Fuck out of a ricochet. The next warrior is going to be a boomerang warrior. It'll be fine because then you better like deal. With Warrior the spear Warrior. Fuck that shit boomerang. Freaking Crocodile Dundee, that's so funny.