Welcome to Rathe, Rotation Systems, and Old Hero Support

Welcome to Pitch It to Me podcast, a show about the subjective past, present, and potential future of Flesh of Blood design. Today's episode will be a smorgasbord episode where each of our hosts bring something different to the table. You can find us across all socials such as Blue Sky and Instagram at Pitch It to Me Podcast. I'm Clark.

I'm Joel. And I'm fuzzy. And welcome. Welcome back, everybody. We skipped a week of recording, but we're back, everybody. We're back and we're better than ever. You're right, Joel. Oh yeah. Right, Clark? That's right, Clark. Fuzzy, how about you? I don't feel better than. Oh no. We found the missing link or the weak link. I have got a pretty mean. Cold. Yeah, it's been, it's been sticking around. Yeah, that's why we didn't

record last week. But we couldn't skip two days just because Fuzzy has some rink eating cold. So I'm just going to be kind of keeping it easy this episode. I'm. I'm on the mend. Don't worry. Yeah, we. We did the equivalent of the sports injection to just like fill his knee with a bunch of cartilage, but in this case I guess it's like clearing out. I had no idea what you're talking about. Do you not know that they do that in sports if someone's like injured, but they're a star

player, they just like. You didn't inject me with anything. Chemicals. You didn't inject me with anything. Yeah, but you're taking a bunch of drugs to be here. Of your knowledge, you sound great through the hazmat suit I got you. All right, well, let's do a little bit of Turn 0. We've been gone for two weeks, so something's happened. Like nationals.

How was everybody's US Nats? My competitive part of Nats went pretty poorly, although I was also sick right before nationals and like kind of during nationals. So I didn't really have any time to prepare as much as I like to before big events. But I went into it knowing that and I was just working on salvaging my weekend, enjoying my time in Vegas, enjoying my time with my friends that I went don't get to see as often as I like to. So I had a really good weekend despite not doing well

competitively. I think I had a slightly better nationals experience than Joel did competitively. I went five and three, just losing my winning in for Day 2 at the calling. In fact, you know, Tell Him also went 5/3 and a fuzzy. Didn't you also go fight 3? Yep, it was a almost exceptional day for all three of us. Yeah, every single one of us lost our winning in, which is just so tragic. But we all got there, you know?

We all got to there and honestly like for first time playing gravy or like second time ever playing gravy, I felt really, really good about my run. I also pulled absolute gas. I pulled a Marvel Gravy bones in my first ever sealed pool, and I pulled the riches of Triple Donnie. God you're so annoying. To be fair, I bought like a case when I pulled that riches. So like I'm still Nim the negative, I think no, no. No, we don't think about the cost, we just think about what we pulled.

Yeah, I pulled the riches, so I am up tremendous. Absolutely fuzzy. What about you? How do you have any special memories about naps this year? I was just really enjoying doing some sightseeing with my friends. We went to go see Hell's Kitchen. Yeah, and some dinner. That was really fun. Joel had a fucking orgasmic. Bro that was everything I wanted it to be and more. He got a beef Wellington and he beef Wellington. I don't. Know No, that's exactly what happened. I beefed up all in there.

I scalloped in there too. It was everything. Nice. So yeah, I just had a really fun weekend. Awesome, yeah, I've heard it on a few other podcasts too, but everyone seems to really enjoy Nats specifically because it's just all the people you know from locals and then a lot of really cool people from outside the state. Oh we almost forgot we meant fucking old Barnacle from our discord. Old Barnacle. Shout out old Barnacle.

What's up dude? It was such a pleasure meeting you and I know we were like both dog tired by the time. We ended up seeing each other, but it was still really cool that you not only you came out but also took the time to, you know, meet each one of us. So that was really special. Yes. Actually a surprising amount of fans said hello to me. Yeah. Oh, didn't we meet Abby as well? Yeah.

Abigail, one of the first like non locals who really started listening to us and has remained A consistent listener. Yeah, I also had a gas game, like such a good fucking game against her in The Calling where we were both like 4 and 2 and it was just fighting to see who would go to the winning end. Yeah, such a good game. Yeah. Solid weekend. Oh yeah. Shout, shout out to everybody who who came up and said hello, said that they listened to just like 1 episode of ours.

I got a lot of that like, oh, I've heard an episode of yours recently. I'll check out the rest of your Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of that going on. Yeah, well before we get into the episode, be sure to let us know the comments, what you guys think about news Living Legend. It's not the topic for our episode, you know, spoiler alert, but we'll probably discuss it and or miss fail

sometime soon. Yeah, we're still not sure what we want to do with our Living Legend episodes, but we definitely don't want to just ignore it when a hero leaves the meta, right? Especially as one as impactful as new. Yeah, and it's the last miss fail hero. So yeah, maybe that all gets grouped up together. But Speaking of Fuzzy, what is today's episode going to be like?

Today, each of our hosts has brought a different topic to the table that we're going to mix all together into one big like potluck. Yeah, this is this is a potluck episode. Clark's going to be talking about how Welcome to Wrath is not the end all be all of good flesh and blood. Joel's going to talk about the rotation system a little bit, and I'll be talking about new expansions. And who are they for? Existing heroes or new heroes? Yeah, so some interesting

topics. I'm going to go ahead and just

steal the mic here and jump in on a red pit. So welcome grace isn't the end all be all guys. So this was a conversation that popped up recently in our discord and I had a great short little, very respectful conversation with Marcus about it. And honestly, I do want to say I don't think this is a common opinion held by a large section of the community, but I do think it is held by a certain population of the community in flesh and blood which. Opinion is that.

That welcome to Wraith is like this ideal that all other sets need to get measured against. And the game was good back when it was just welcome to Wraith, when that was the one set and it was like set constructed Welcome to Wraith. That was the best flesh and blood had ever been. And I I'm just not sure if that's true. And I think it is a very reductive point of view and I

kind of want to get into why. I think when I first started thinking about this was way back in one of Fuzzy's pitches. Fuzzy had a pitch way back when where he described how simple and basic the original 8 heroes were. Now in in Fuzzy's point, this had to do with not just the welcome to 8 heroes, but also the Arcane Rising heroes, the 8 untalented heroes in this sort of quote UN quote alpha version

of flesh and blood. Fuzzy, can you remind everyone sort of what was the thesis statement of that pitch? Yeah, basically that the first eight heroes in the game are meant to be a sort of foundation that you can lay on top of as we

go forward in the game. So as they release more classes and talents, there will always be this backlog of heroes that people are always going to be tied to, that they're always going to be appealing in some way and hopefully are going to show us like where the basics of the game are and will be relevant for the future. Yeah. And I think that was a very insightful comment on the game, especially as people who we weren't playing back then, right? We came in after the fact.

And so I think we got to see a little bit more of LS s s design as it kept going. And I want to be clear, that's because there is a lot more design. James White has said in interviews that Phi was the very first hero that he ever designed. Phi didn't come out until I started playing the game in Uprising that is. I mean fairly far away. I mean it was like the third talented set that we got right that post Tales of Arya, post Monarch.

Like there was a lot of design that had already come out before we get to essentially James White's first ever designed for flesh and blood. And from the beginning Assassin and Necromancer were established as classes that they were going

to make. Arakne Huntsman was supposed to be one of these 8 original heroes that just ended up not quite working in the limited set and had to get delayed until Dynasty. I mean I I think it should be very telling to everybody that this game is not designed in an extremely linear manner. Things are designed and held onto dropped chains, transformed, or sometimes literally just kept in the back pocket for years at a time until they find the right set, the right moment for them to enter

the game. And when we talk about Welcome to Wraith as sort of this origin point, I think people treat it very, very linearly as like this is the beginning of flesh and blood. And no, it's not. There was years of design before it, and much of that design did not come after Welcome to Wraith. I think another great example of this is that we're still waiting for the Cleric hero class to come out. Right in the Lord book, there's the professions page.

I don't know how many times I've mentioned this. I've mentioned this so much in my. Pigeons. But there is this page with the professions and it has all the classes on it, and I think we've seen just about every single profession listed there except for cleric. An alchemist. An alchemist, yes, thank you Fuzzy. Like there is still two classes that were considered foundational enough to be listed in the Lord book that we just haven't seen yet. To me, that's crazy.

It means that there are still designs from before the game, before Welcome to Wraith ever came out, that they're still waiting on to release. Welcome to Wraith is not the start of Flesh and Blood, but it is the start of when we all first started playing Flesh and Blood. Right. So this was the great counter argument that Marcus sort of put forward, which is a little bit

of a death of the author. If you guys don't know what depth of the author is, it is a sort of literary conversation where what matters more, the original intent of the author or how readers have interpreted their words. So I kind of want to open it up to you 2 What do you think is more important? James White's intended designs and his history with the game, or more of the external perception of the game coming from the fans and the players of

flesh and blood. I think with Flesh and Blood, James White has put so much time and energy into planning out not just the first five years of flesh and blood that we've lived through, but also the next 5, maybe 10-15 years. So knowing that James White has such a key impact on the future of the game and where it's going to be going, that makes sense to me that we would we want to look, you want to be looking really closely about what he's done in the past and how that

could affect the future. No, it it certainly is still extremely important, right, Joel, I think one of the things that you had mentioned, that is another reason why I think I'm stuck on this idea of power creep. Is it really power creep if it was always intended to go here anyway? Oh, that's interesting. Right. I mean like I guess it is still an upward slope of cards have more numbers on them now.

Yeah, right. Like I don't think A0 cost of blue I'd like would bonds have ever have been printed in Welcome to Wraith? No, but I don't think that's because Bonds breaks the game in such a way that it was unprintable then, but because it had a layer of complexity to it that wouldn't have been right for that era. I think what people might be missing is not the power level of Welcome to Raith, but the simplicity, Welcome to Ray.

And whenever they're asking to sort of like go back to that, or let's go back to when those those strategies were good, I think they're asking for a dumbing down of the game that is just never really going to happen because the games expanded. We have years of expansion and too much design and complexity now embroiled in the game to ever really return to that point unless we really start messing with some of the bigger systems like Living Legend rotation.

Like if we want every card to be eternal and to never rotate out, I don't know how we're ever going to reduce the complexity of the game back to that point where it was just welcome to rate constructed, you know? Yeah. Now in this pitch I've mentioned a lot about how James White designs so much of this game and how much of this game was already designed previously, right.

I don't want that to be making light of the impact of from people like Chris Gehring, Brian Gottlieb and the other fine members of the Devon design team. They've had a massive impact on the game, limited especially. I think anyone who used to play back in that time could tell you how rough limited was. Joel, do you want to comment or

fuzzy? And it's funny though, because Welcome to Wraith actually had a really kick ass limited format that like everyone kind of generally likes, but every set after that really like Arcane Rising is a stinker, you know, Monarch. Monarch is a fucking mess man. Monarch. Is so unbalanced 6 prisms, sure. Tales of Aria is not too bad, but Uprising is a little rough, you know? And then at that point, we're back to the Brian Gottlieb era, where the next one is Outsiders.

But like, they haven't all been too bad, necessarily. Like, Welcome to Rafe has been really nice, but yeah, limited sets have become a lot more standardized. I feel, you know, there's a little bit more like the hybrid cards being able to make it easier to draft. Yeah, whether it's hybrids or like the shared pirate pool, the shared Mystic pool, the shared draconic, you know, there's always something sort of binding the different points together. That definitely didn't used to be the case.

Classes definitely used to exist on an island and then it was like all right and generics. Also whenever the dev team like united as a force and stopped legendaries being draftable. Man, that was our the the best improvement to limited I think to. Like I was saying earlier, like James White has had a lot of time just to develop this game before he started releasing any of it.

But now we have a larger dev team and more ideas in the mix, making improvements and seeing these ideas to fruition. So it's kind of really interesting to see how we're moving from A1 author situation to a multi author situation. It's a much more developed product and I'm kind of really excited to see where the future of the game goes. I wonder what High Seas would have looked like if it was just James White, right? Oh great. Yeah, great point. I wonder what a solo James White

set would look like. But in the at the same time, I wonder what like a solo Brian Gottlieb set would look like. Or like let him cook. And, and we, I guess we do see a little bit of this with like the Armory decks where there is a lead designer from the Devon design team. It's never really James White per SE. It's always someone like Carol taking the lead. And I think that's really interesting too, because I think you get to see how their design skills flex a little bit.

The last thing I want to mention in this set, and this is more kind of like a fun little thing. I think I talked maybe a little heavily, but I kind of want to say, hey, these Welcome to Earth heroes, they're kind of really broken, right? Like. They all have their strengths to them for sure. Yeah, well, like not just strengths, but like actually what I think are just straight up toxic designs like Rhinar's intimidate.

I think we can all pretty universally agree that getting quad intimidated by Rhinar and having to take 20 to the Dome fucking sucks and like is a really toxic play pattern. Like any deck that wants to block just like straight up can't do their game plan. And then you can devote all this time, energy and value into getting a quad intimidate off just for the opponent to be Syndra and be like OK, I wasn't

gonna block anyway buddy. Like it's so it's such a polarizing mechanic, Intimidate, especially once you start stacking intimidates. I think one in two intimidates has always been a fun and fair place for Reiner to exist. But like, as they want to print more cards that say Intimidate on them, and as they want to make it easier to discard sixes, I think it just gets more and more toxic in a way that's just

not healthy. In a similar way, imagine if Katsu could just like, reliably tutor every single turn. Oh wait, we've already seen this with Zen and it fucking hey, hey, hey. No, just kidding. To be fair, Zen had other things that were also going for him. Like he got a free Crouching Tiger every time he tutored. That was kind of big. Yeah for like Art of War synergies and everything at that time.

But like I think if Katsu could reliably activate his hero ability every single turn without having to worry about how the opponent blocked. Like if it just said discard A0 cost card go get whatever combo card you want. I I think Casa would be stupid broken. Sure, sure. And then like Dory, right? What if Dory just didn't have to worry about getting full blocked out? What if she could just stack counters endlessly whenever she wanted and you could never stop

the counters from Dawn Blade? That'd be insanely broken and she would steamroll like everybody. And sorry, I don't want to say broken because like you could run Runestack Florian where you have 4 four blocks in hand and you can like legitimately stop her from getting counters. But I think the meta would be toxic. I think the play pattern would be toxic. It'd be a really polarizing design.

A lot of these Welcome to rate designs, if they were just leaned into a little bit more, if they were just a little bit more powerful, if they had a little bit more of that synergy that we've come to expect from modern heroes, I feel like their designs would be pushed in such a way that it would make them toxic and not good for the game. I mean, I guess, yeah, if these heroes didn't have their control measures on them that made them interesting, they would be toxic.

I think at least with the Rinthia I'll speak to, there are already cards that she got printed with to make it so that if they play it correctly and or your opponent misplays, she can just rack up counters and you can do nothing about it. You know, she has one of her specialization singing steel

blade. She has access to like Ironton determination to give dominate like she already has things in her tool to make it that way and which she's able to run unencumbered by her opponent or like it doesn't matter what they do, she can just win every match up. Like she's scaled very well. And Katsu too, like Fuzzy and a few other local Katsus in our area were cooking with him way

before Zen was around. And when he did his double triple bonds, you know, even though it took some set up when the on hit was like a all but guarantee, it felt really oppressive. It's like those heroes already have the built in capabilities of doing what you're explaining Clark and the fact that there is so much restraint and like there's full power is locked behind either their specializations or just they need a lot of work to get their full power fantasy going off like it.

It's very like, it's very telling when they get talented versions and they kind of go explosive, like Zen, for instance. Yeah. But what do you think about Bravo Clark? Yeah, Bravo's in this set. Yeah, no, Bravo's fine. I can't really see Bravo being broken. I mean I guess if they started printing like 4 for 12 crush effects, but like that's not that's not the numbers so I don't think it's a problem. I don't know.

He's able to like, completely shut down your game plan in a way that many heroes are not able to. Yeah, like maybe if there was a chance that he could, like play a blue that could become like any red that he wanted. So he could just like, like, what if he had caught Sue's ability to tutor? I guess that that's kind of what Showtime is, right? Yeah. They all have tutors. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

But I think of all of these designs, Bravo's is the one that reads the least as being broken if complexity creep happened right. I think intimidate the counters, reliable tutoring with combo. I think all of those as designs are more inherently toxic than mana sync for some dominate. But I think this does lead us into Joel's pitch in an interesting way because now, eventually, these heroes are going to be gone. We've already seen Viscera leave. Azalea's gonna leave.

Might already be gone by the time that this episode comes out. Yeah, Dash is probably going to be gone very, very soon. I mean, it's almost like these old heroes are rotating out of the game. Yeah. I mean, a lot of them are at that threshold of like 5 to 800 points. And it's, you know, only a matter of time before we start seeing the new iterations of these heroes come out.

But for Yellow Pitch, I want to talk about the rotation system as a whole and not just like the heroes that are approaching their Living Legend ascension. And before we do that, I'm just going to give a little bit of background about Living Legend and why it made me think of a true rotation format like other TCDS have done in the past. But I'm not going to get into it like in depth like I have with other pitches.

Obviously, Living Legend has gone through many different changes, but a lot of them have been points focused. Like they've tweaked how many points are in a season, how many the larger tournaments grants when a hero wins those

tournaments. And just recently, they changed how much heroes themselves can earn, so that really powerful heroes cannot earn as much in their first year of legality and increasing the amount of points that older heroes do if they've been around the block for a little bit. And they want to like sort of get them moving along towards their ascension as well. And it sparked a lot of controversy. I think a lot of people had really mixed feelings about this change.

How do you guys feel personally? I mean, we've talked about on the pod before. I think I'm a big proponent of LSS doing whatever the fuck they want. And if they want to tinker with the system, like let's do it, let's see how it works, you know? Fuzzies just happened to be here man, so. True. Fuzzies. Like what's that? I'm losing Briar. OK man, I'll go play Katsu. Oh, Katsu's gone.

OK man, I'll go play some other. Well with this system I don't think I would have lost Briar any quicker and Katsu is not getting any LL points anytime soon. It's not gonna happen. If anything, Briar would have held on for even longer, right? Because she wouldn't have earned as many points back when she had ball lightning and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. I think ultimately, as a data person, where I want to constantly go to living Legend points as a way of sort of measuring hero success, I'm

frustrated by all the changes. And this frustrates it even more because now I want to, like, retroactively apply these things and be like, who would have allowed, Who would have stuck around? It's like, you know what? At a certain point, living legend points are just not a good way of measuring hero success.

Yeah. And I'm so glad you brought that up because, you know, I'm referencing the card guys again with their chart of each of the heroes that and their points they would have had with this change if they had had it, you know, from the start. And it's just sort of like makes me think about what other alternatives there could be to this system. Because even though I do personally like the living Ledger system, I think it's very

cool. It's definitely in the most unique rotation system out of any CCG I've played. But it has its flaws, as any new system would. It is a system. Where LSS has more control over what rotates, then I think other games have control over what rotates. Right? When Magic says standard rotates every two years, you know when a newsat comes out you will have those cards for two years. Sure cards can get banned and unbanned, but they will always exist in the legal format for two years.

And they can't change that, you know, on a whim. It feels like LSS can. Yeah, that's a really good point, because whenever a hero is especially problematic in a meta, we look to LSS be like, hey, I know you're doing a lot of stuff over there. Ban this hero, you know, just delete them. Or, you know, more seriously, like we need to deal with this card because it's, you know, contributing to a lot of polarizing matchups or whatever.

And that's a weird pressure that they put themselves by having this system in place because like you said, Clark, they have all the control, even though there is like a kind of a system where it's supposed to work out on its own. And so I wanted to think about some potential rotation systems that don't have to worry about any points or any intervention from LSS that is still unique to Flesh and blood.

And when I refer to rotation, I'm not talking about like the MTG version of rotation because flesh and Blood's release schedule is just way too slow. It would be a little crazy if like each of the powerful heroes would be around for three years instead of like a year or a year and a half that they would be with like the point system of of living Legend. Like I don't think anyone would want to be playing living the living Legend format for a long amount of time as as a

competitive player. That sounds like the worst experience. Yeah, it it definitely isn't the right thing to do. A time based rotation system in Flesh and blood. We definitely don't release sets quick enough. I mean, we can always extend it, right? Like what if it was four years? No, I think that's I think that is bad. Like, imagine if Miss Vale was legal for four years. I would personally be happy, but I know a lot of people would not

be happy. Like, I think it would be really, really frustrating for sets and heroes that felt too powerful to drag on for that long. I think it's one of the reasons why after two years they've incorporated that 1.5 points, right? It's to help those heroes kind of move along so they can update things. Right. I think what would be really interesting is to have rotation systems based on either theming, balancing issues or some other third thing. I love this. Sell me on it buddy. I will.

So the first thing on my docket is region based. Let's say for instance, in 2026, only cards from Volcor and metrics are legal and there will be Evergreen sets that are will always be legal. Like for instance, A supplemental sets that were printed like Everfest and Dynasty. And you'd also have like, welcome to Raytheon Arcane because those are like the baseline of the game. And that way you kind of curate a specific conflict or development of the world of race. For.

A year? That sounds pretty cool. You know what I loved about old Magic the Gathering? What's that? Was that they would almost spend a whole year on a plane? Yeah, they'd be like, here's mirrored in, and then here's like the introduction of the Phyrexian corruption and then New Phyrexia, and you're like, what the fuck happened to my play? And you watch this story play out over time, right? One thing I really criticize LSS for is like, their storytelling

is just not there. Yeah, because we're jumping all over the place meeting new people and, like, nothing's happening. Yeah. It could also be a decent opportunity to reprint product and I'm not I'm not necessarily saying this is like the best move LSS has ever done, but once they said that the draft season for that Nat season was going to be Monarch that we'd be going back to Monarch for competitive draft for a season. When they reprinted Dusk Till Dawn.

Sorry, when they initially released Dusk Till Dawn and they relaunched Monarch, reprinting it, which also drove the value of the product into the ground. So I don't know if this would be something they need to do all the time. But now it's a lot easier for people to get a hold of Monarch cards, and it made sense that they wanted that because they were printing Dust Hold On, which was like an expansion to Monarch. Yeah.

That's a really good point. Also, like, I'm not sure how much people actually know the story of Volcor. Going from uprising or actually uprising into dynasty felt cool and flavorful. Yeah. Yeah. Because we were an uprising. And then immediately after we got dynasty with like, Arachne killing the emperor. And there's that great story where Dromaya kind of like walks in and sees the throne room in this turmoil and then turns around. It's like, I'm about to be a bad bitch up in here.

And we were like, OK, Dromaya, go off. Let's see where you go from here. And now we're sort of waiting on the new Drove My Hero card to come out and really show us what did she do after that, how she's been trying to move up the political ladder in Volcor. And maybe if we put all these sets a little bit closer together, it would hit a little bit harder and like the cards could be a little bit more connected.

I do think there is a flaw on this though, which is getting certain classes and talents in there from what people really really like. This game is so siloed that spending a whole set in Volcor, what do the ice players do? You know, a whole. Year without them seeing any new

ice cards. One of the things we've really loved LSS doing with expansion slots is keeping the game fresh, and if we were to do rotations in this way by like staying really focused in one area or another, I think it would hurt the wider player. Base I do agree agree with that.

I think my gut reaction would be that there would be a hopefully under the system, there'd be enough support either in generics or in the expansion slot of each of these sets under this new system where they could exist or could give extra support to classes outside of the, you know, 3 or 4 main ones

in the in the core set. And in that way, even though it's a rotation system and you have like overarchingly powerful cards that are exempt from the set, you still have interesting gameplay from like brutes in a like assassin ninja Ranger meta or whatever, you know, but definitely valid. But you do bring up a good point because what do ice players do in the full core and metric set? And that's why I was also thinking about like talent based rotation systems.

And I sort of had this title in mind, like year of the Bleak Storm, like similar to the Chinese Zodiac. I came up with the name year of the Bleak Storm. And my idea behind this one was like, only elements of like ice and lightning were legal for this set. And it would sort of be like, you know, the control versus the aggro. And obviously there's you have more than just ice and lightning, but out of the talents, those are what would be the main focus for that year.

So that if there's other rotations involved, like with either region or class or whatever, you also have talent so that you create very specific metas in this way too. Because like, talents influence so much of the rest of the game because they just have more flavor than the traditional classes. Yeah, God, that'd be cool. If, like, we could rotate talent specifically. Of course, then it's like, what do you mean I can't play Levi? Levi's not even good. What are you doing?

That's true. Let me suck on my. Hero and then I feel like a year would be like one year on to like 3 or 4 years off. It's kind of a lot of time to go between not being able to play the class or talent that I want, you know, if only certain ones are allowed. Yeah, yeah, I I think talents are small enough to where it would be weird where like if you don't have enough of them in a in a given meta, then it would just be like really feels bad. You could even say 2/3 on, 1/3 off.

Yeah, I was gonna say it might be interesting to see this, these other rotation ideas in a world where I don't feel like we're still adding things to the game, right. I still feel like we're in a period of flesh and blood in in terms of it's like overall history as a game. I'm trying to think very holistically, take a big step back. I still think we're at a very early portion where a lot of new shits getting introduced.

Oh, absolutely. And like if we imagine the game in a maybe a more static way where there is a set amount of talents, a set amount of classes, a rotation system based on these ideas start to make a little bit more sense because you can't expect a class to come back around again or talent to come back around again. Oh, you're a Briar player, but lightning is banned? Well, then you can play Florian, right? You have your earth room blade

right there. And then in another one, maybe Earth is banned, but lightning is legal, so you play Aurora instead. And then when both are legal, you can play Briar again. And if there is like a Zodiac, like a very clear linear progression that is laid out ahead of time and is kept to by Legend Stories Studios, then people can plan around it and they can be like, wow, none of the classes I want to play are available or none of the talents

I want to play are available. But I still have this base class where I can then go play Vissarai or some other base room blade. And as we get more heroes that can fill those gaps, and we have less reliance on a single hero holding space, the moment that those areas start getting a little bit more cluttered, I think this becomes a lot more viable. We may see a rotation system like this 10-15 years down the line.

Maybe we're going to be crazy prophetic by saying this, but I don't think it is viable anytime soon. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I think the game is actually really quite young. Like any business that is like three to five years is still considered a young business by a lot of men. Let's still start up, baby. Oh, absolutely. Small indie company Gober and there are a like like you said, there's a lot of stuff I think that still needs to be introduced.

Like we don't even have Clarikit question mark. And it would be a lot easier to not only plan around as a player, but LSS can do a lot of communication in this way too. Because they can say, OK, for this year, we're going to do like, or we're going to add Ice Draconic and you know, let's do fucking light for for example, even if you haven't had a set in a while with Draconic or Ice, you know that from this announcement you will get Draconic and ice this year.

And so they can like sort of plan releases that way too, which I think would be interesting. I think the one thing that all these are missing that I would really like to see incorporated with the current system is that every single player cares about the Living Election system. Maybe not every single one, but like when I say like 90 to 95% of people who play Flesh and Blood care in some way about the Living Legend system and what happens with it.

Because everybody's tuning in, everybody's looking at that leaderboard and it impacts everyone's play. I'd like to see something like that incorporated, right? Like maybe the classes can all have like a tally and the class that gets the most points on the tally for the year is going to be rotated out and get to revisit it later. Or like the top performing and the bottom performing are both rotated out or something, I don't know.

I actually like that a lot. So still some performance based rotation element to it. Basically this is me saying the Living Legend system has this magic component to it that I think works really well and I like what it's doing and I would like any changes that we make. I think I want to keep that because it's both part of what makes flesh and blood special. That makes sense, and I think a lot of people would agree.

Similarly, if you and the audience have heard something in tonight's pitch that you think would be a really good chain for flesh and blood, a really bad chain for flesh and blood, or maybe you have something that we haven't heard yet that you'd like to talk about, let us know the comments, come to the Discord and let us know. But with that being said, I'm going to pass it off to Fuzzy for Blue Pitch. What do you have for us? All right, in Blue Pitch, I'm

going to be talking about new sets and who they're for. Is it for existing heroes or is it a chance for LSS to add new heroes to the game and print support for them? And. It's for new new things. He wants you to say. Old, old. It's for old. We're at arms. We are. We are creating fake conflicts on the pause. We are. We are trying to give voice to the audience. Settle down, YouTube, because really, it's both right? Expansions, new expansion sets are a chance for us to see new

heroes added to the game. But we usually hope that the heroes that we've been playing and falling in love with already are also going to get new support. Like when they say, hey, in the new set, it's going to be a Ranger set and we're like, oh boy, a Ranger set. Well, I love Azalea slash Riptide, so maybe then Azalea, my Azalea slash Riptide deck is going to get some new jazz for that. I can like put into my new deck some new cards to sleeve up and like, where does this come from?

Why do we think that LSS like owes us new cards for our class and hero whenever like it gets printed? I've suffered, that's why. I have an answer. I have an answer. I just. It's because in most trading card games, that's kind of how it works. Yeah, you always get shit to play with. Yeah, like most, many trading card games have like a color system where you can put in like one or two colors to work together to make a deck. You know, Lorcana does that. Magic the Gathering does that

very fluidly and dynamically. Pokémon kind of does that a little bit like, right, new expansions are a chance for your deck to get new cards. But Legend Story Studios, they do things a little bit differently. Now. If I play like Katsu, I might get an expansion slot card if there's if I know there's not going to be any like ninja support in the set, maybe a cool generic card that could slot in my list. But that's for anybody, right? Right.

Anybody can use a generic. So I don't want generic cards. I want cards specifically for me. How reasonable is it for my hero to get support in any future set? Because I think when they said things like, oh, Rosetta is going to have Wizards and Rune Blades, Earth and Lightning heroes, it's kind of reasonable for you to be like, oh, I'm a Kano player, surely I'm going to get some Kano support, right? They did. They did. Yeah, they.

Got open the floodgates. They got one card that you can play at Rainbow and maybe some other options. But The thing is a lot of those options for Wizard were very based on these sigils. Yeah. So I want to play these new cards to any good effect I have to play these sigils that comes with it, or I can just play open the floodgates and just put that into my deck. Or. And there were some cool rune blade cards that got like the other room blades got like Deadwood Dirge. It's pretty good.

Malefic Incantations. Malefic Incantation is also a very good card. Those are. Very good room blades got real support in Rosetta. They sure did. Bass purgatory was really good, like lots of room blades were in that card. Kurt, so good. But is that like what? That kind of gives us a barometer for what we can expect, right? Sometimes heroes and ideas they are so siloed in the new sets that they are only willing to explore that one idea to its completion rather than explore

old ideas. Like if we went and got Brute in a new set, what would you necessarily expect out of that set? Discards. Yellow 6 three block. Dice rolling like they could return to dice rolling or intimidate. Or they could do none of that shit. A completely new idea. And all of the Brute cards are going to be very focused on exploring and fleshing out this new idea. Let's think about the haunted.

So in the Haunted, it was Ninja, Assassin, and Warrior, and we had some new ideas to freshen up each of those different classes, right? Specifically daggers. We're doing daggers for everybody. Warriors have had some dagger support in the past, but then you look at the the ninja cards in the set and there's isn't a single one that doesn't ask you to make it draconic. They're all fake draconic. Yeah, yeah.

But there were lots of hybrid cards that were very usable for Ninja, specifically all these ones that recur daggers to the point where LSS had to ban Zephyr Needle. That's how good these cards were. I. Forgot that happened. They got so much support that they had to immediately ban the card that makes all the support good. Buffing Zephyr Needle is just so fucking good.

So if you're a player that's playing Katsu and Zen and you're looking at all the Haunted cards, you're like, this doesn't actually do a lot for me because I didn't really want to swing my daggers that much. I wasn't like looking to go into a dagger plan. And there aren't any new combo cards. But Ira did get a lot of support from the Haunted. So not all ninjas got support in the Haunted, but one or two of them did. Yeah, and even then, how many cards was it really?

I think one thing that is actually very interesting to look at is how many new cards get printed for each archetype. And because of Flesh and Bloods rainbow system where cards will come in lots of different colors, they actually end up with a lot less designs than other card games in their sets. Yep. Like yes, we have 200 and what like 60 slots in each set, but how many of those are taken up by tokens or by repeat card designs just at different colors? Yeah, yeah.

And then how many of those actually end up being playable, OK, like showing up in, let's just say, top 64 deck lists, let's say. Yeah, I I think it would be a much smaller number than most people would think. I think it's under 10. Like 10%. 10 cards. Oh. Yeah, I mean, hold on, are you including different colors of cards? No, I'm counting them as like what card? OK, OK, OK. Yeah, like 10 unique cards, I

should say. Yeah. Well, because I do think that new heroes would throw this math off because they can use the full rainbow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And I do like to see how LSS will expand the design of these classes with these ideas. And then they focus so hard on them, on these expansions. That seems to kind of be the design trend that I'm seeing, right? Like what if we did sigils and

auras? And that's like Rosetta, and it's cool, but it's so siloed because all the cards in Rosetta care about fucking sigils and auras, you know? So this is still all in pursuit to me trying to answer this question. How reasonable is it for me to expect my hero that shares a class with a hero in the new set? How reasonable is it for me to expect my hero to get some measure of support from the new

set? In the case of the haunted, it would be like it would kind of depend on which ninja I was planning on playing. Katsu and Zen don't get a lot, but I read does, right? And part of that is because Katsu is a very siloed hero himself. He really just cares about combo cards, you know? So I probably shouldn't be expecting Katsu to get a lot of support, but I was kind of hoping to see a new weapon that Katsu might want to pick up rather than Katachi's. And that quite didn't quite happen.

If anything, that banned one of the weapons that he was thinking about playing in high seas. We have two other case studies, Ranger and Mech. I'm going to talk about Mech first because most in high seas for mechanologist care about cogs in some way, whether it's golden cogs or just having a cog. So if I want to run any of these cards in my constructed deck, I kind of need cogs in order to

get the full use out of them. There might be some of these that just kind of have a nice rate that I might be able to cheese in without the cogs. Maybe like cogworks dovetails A1 for five, so maybe I don't that blocks for three, Maybe I don't need any cogs to make that card runnable, but I don't know. I kind of feel like it needs text in order to be runnable in

my MEC deck. Yeah some people have mentioned how like if you want an anti fatigable boost MEC you can run like a single copy of cog in the machine in DIO so that you can pay one, get 2 action points and two items for 2 loads on your. On your gun. And then shoot twice with those. And by tapping the COG that you make 'cause you don't care about other cogs, you can just put cog in the machine back to the bottom so that later you have again A1 resource, 2 action

points, 2 pistol shots. That's actually really smart. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Again, I can totally see there being instances like that of parts that because that's the fun thing about flesh and blood is they print a bunch of stuff and then sometimes the stat lines on these cards, which is good enough that you can run them without the quote UN quote

like Max synergy. I, I know that I've tripped in a lot this pitch fuzzy and so I guess cut this if you guys want to. But one thing I do want to mention is that I was having a great conversation at an Armory just yesterday where we were saying like what could be flesh and bloods like commander. And I'm like, I don't think we can have a commander yet because like weird wacky off meta builds aren't a thing right now. You know, there is no dagger katsu. Why can't there be dagger katsu?

Because you'd be ignoring his hero ability. Yeah, but like what if like there was just a little something to like make it a little bit more viable. But because I I just don't think we get those weird wacky builds as much in flesh and blood as you can get in other games. Partially because of how competitive we are as a community, but partially because I think because it we are such

an eternal format. Like the standard format is an eternal format that they're not going to try to print a bunch of cards for old heroes and like you're going to have to reach to find these wackier builds and they're just not going to be as viable. They're not going to be as fun or interesting. And so they don't get built.

You know, this does kind of relate to what I'm talking about on my pitch, because I think if they want to explore new ideas for class identity, they do it through a new hero. Yeah. They're not going to make dagger katsu a thing. They're going to make a new ninja that focuses on daggers and print support for that hero. You know, it might even be talented to really like, silo it off, you know? Exactly what they did with Sandra. Yeah, so.

Yeah, like why another draconic ninja if we already have Phi? Because they want one to be dagger oriented. They could have just put Phi in here and been like, OK, now you can have a Phi bill, but like Phi can't get those daggers back, doesn't have that free retrieve. It's a phoenix flame synergy. So like, do they start building a bunch of Phoenix flames into the set? No, because it's a dagger set, not a Phoenix flame set.

And. That's kind of what we're seeing with Mechinologist in High Seas. We knew that they were tired of doing boost mech. Oh yeah. So here's their chance to really expand the design space of Mechinologist to have some hero that does not give a shit about boosting. If they want a boost they can, but they really don't have to, and none of the support in this set has anything to do do with boosting. Well, I wanted to also talk about Ranger and High Seas.

Although I think Ranger did a little bit of a better job of printing support for the existing Rangers because you see a couple just like clutch majestics like Return Fire seems like relatively easy to slot into old Ranger decks. There's cool arrows like Barbed Barrage which gives them play against allies. Or like Swift Shot.

Yeah, I was. Definitely about to mention like Swift shot is just this really solid 0 for four go again arrow that's really easy for Rangers to play with, or like even dry powder shot just being a 0 for five arrow. Like I could see a lot of these options being explored by Rangers outside of the ones we just saw in the set. But just a couple key pieces, right? Like one thing that you would that I think Rangers were expecting is seeing like a new quiver.

But there is no quivers printed at all in the set. There's just like the two that we've been working with since Outsiders, plus like the Enchanted one, I guess from Rosetta. And their legendary is a little bit harder to work if you compare that to like face purgatory for room blades. OK, both of them are the class based legendary in this sort of kind of siloed design inside the set, but Face Purgatory was much more playable in other room Blades than Sealy Sarong is in other Rangers.

So that's the tension that I'm really trying to bring up here. Is our expansions solely primarily to create new heroes and put new heroes and new strategies into the game, or are expansions meant to give support to existing strategies and existing heroes? Because I think most people would say both, but do you think LSS has been managed, has been doing both well in the last couple sets? What do you guys think? I think no, but it's hard to do it correctly. I don't think they can do it

correctly. Yeah, it would be really tough. I think it's I think it's also like, hey, do you want the new heroes to be strong or weak? Yeah. And it's like when the new heroes are strong, it's like, Oh my God, I can't believe they're power creeping this game again. Yep. And then when the new heroes are weak, it's like, well, I guess they just don't care about our class. Yep. That's. And it's like, whatever choice they do, someone's going to be upset. Absolutely. Every single time.

Yeah. It it is a tough position to be in because like you know, if we go back to the Hun, an example, I think every warrior player was like why the fuck are they doing daggers? Sword is like. Oh, I heard that at least eight times at a single Armory. Probably a lot for me too, but you. Were at least two of them. That that's part for the course. Look, here's like kind of to to recontextualize it at the risk of throwing us all off on a whole other conversation.

Oh yeah, of course. There are three brutes in the game right now, Reinar, Levaya, and Kayo, and if they told us we're going to the Savage Lands and there's going to be a Brute set, a set with Brute in it, those 3 heroes are not equally likely to get actual good support that we would see in the

next deck, right? I think like KO would be the most likely, Levayo would probably be the least likely, but even Ryan are like, would they be printing necessarily like intimidate support in the set? It seemed. I'd be skeptical of that. Yeah, no, I agree with that 100%. So it could be that like, KO is the only hero that feels like he can pick up new cards, and wouldn't that feel like a little bit weird? I don't know. Good call, but. Yeah, that's what I've been

thinking about lately. Thank you for smorgasboarding with me. Are you guys ready to go on to our Arsenal zone? Let's go to the Arsenal zone.

And for those of you who have never listened to Pop before, the Arsenal Zone is a part of the show where we pick a card and it could be a carpet that we like, our card that we hate, our card that we like to hate. By the way, we're going to each give our own. But first, we're going to start off with a Patreon subscription. That's right. If you subscribe to our Patreon for $5, you yes, you get to suggest a card for us to shout out here at the beginning of our

Arsenal zone. Every single time we record we we pick a patron and a card that they suggested. We also keep it forever, so you don't have to give a new one every single week. We hold on to it, and this week our winner is. Dash one, always. Old Barnacle shout out the beginning and the end of an episode. Man, Yeah, he's our favorite. He's pretty goaded today. And fun fact, I'm pretty sure he just subscribed very recently because this is his first submission. What?

And we are getting out of the way immediately. Yeah. So Old Barnacle has put forward Back Alley Brake Line. Back Alley Brake Line is a generic attack action card at red. It costs one, comes in for five and blocks for two and it says when this enters a different zone from your deck you gain 1 action point. It was originally printed and I want to say Arcane Rising or outsiders Arcane Rising. Arcane Rising as a way for Azalea to get some nice action

points. You find it on top, you use her ability, you get some, go again, and then with your floating resources you can load off of that dealer, throw another arrow. And he had this to say about it. A card I've been happy to see more is Back Alley Brake Line. The effect used to just be something you can take advantage of if it got milled or banished during your own turn, and not

many effects helped you do that. Then we got Called to the grave which could be an on demand action point which I've seen Levia decks use sometimes but was still a little lacking. Now though we have things like Chart the High Seas and Salt Water Swell that pitch it from the top of your deck which satisfies the conditions and can net you 3 resources and an

action point. Very fun with gravy when it lines up, and if they continue this pitch trend in the future it could be a very powerful addition to other decks. Well said. I've had a really fun time playing with this card and my gravy bones deck. I've been kind of sick so I haven't had a lot of time to practice. But like being able to pitch it with salt water Swell or chart the high seas is like that new synergy that we just have not been able to play with.

Like you would think that effect has been in the game already, being able to pitch off the top of your deck, but no, it's not a thing. Yeah, I mean it is easily one of the most powerful abilities I think, especially for saltwater swell. You know the ability to get 3 free resources off the top Wacky. I had an action point if it's back LA brake line, yeah. It's. Crazy.

So it's actually been crazy. I knew about it from Call to the Grave because like Old Barnacle said, you can use it in Levia. Yeah, there was some weird leviolis, but I didn't, I didn't know you could do it with saltwater as well until right now. That's pretty insane. Actually. Or chart the high seas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If anything, I think it's a really nice budget option for anyone not trying to buy that fucking amulet just to run an extra copy of back alley brake line. What amulet?

The action point amulet. It's like a 50 diamond amulet. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy how much do not buy that card. No, no, no. My back alley brake line. Yeah here's here's a 2 cent comment from Arcane Rising. You're gonna get your. Action Point. So thank you Old Barnacle for the suggestion and for the subscription. We would really appreciate having you and I think he's been a long time fan like probably when we were before like 100 subscribers or.

Anything was one of the ones that Talon brought in because Talon had the whole Riptide discord. Yeah, I think half of our initial subscribers were. Riptide enjoy locals and Riptide enjoy. Yeah, yeah. Very, very telling of our fan base, but we appreciate having you on and thank you again for your submission. And for those of you who submitted a cool card but didn't hear about it in today's podcast, keep submitting or don't. We're going to get to your name eventually, and we'll talk about

your card at some point. Yeah, who wants to go next? Card fuzzy. I'll go first. My card is Avast Yi Avast CRG this is a blue block 3 rare from high seas cost 0 and it says your next ally attacked this turn gets go again and when it hits a hero create a gold token and it's a pirate necromancer non attack action. That's fucking crazy. Yep, you could just this gives your attacks go again. It's nice.

And because it's a blue starter, you can play an ally and then immediately like that could be your your go again ally. So you could like play this and then pitch a blue to play like saw bones or rigor mortis and then swing with it for six. It could be A2 card 6. With an on hit. That gold is pretty nice because once you've made a gold through any of your other on hits then you can tap your hook to threaten another one for free basically. Yeah, super good card, just fucking solid.

And there's a whole cycle of them, right? There's a lot of different starters. This is the one that gives go again to an attack. Yeah, it's definitely considered one of the best ones. Gotcha. Because go again is so important in gravy bones, right? It's. Pretty good. Fight for all his action points. And then of course, they gave him eight ways of getting action points. It's almost like we've seen that somewhere. Before. And I brought a copy to sign for each of you. Wow. Thank you.

Fuzzy. Well, I think I'll go next. All right, go for it. The card that I am talking about is Battalion Bark. Talking about this card for two reasons. But first let me tell you the text on the card. All right, Battalion Bark is a Pirate Attack Action card. It is. It costs 4 and that red attacks for seven and blocks for three, but it has a new keyword ability High Tide, where if you have two Blues in your pitch zone it gains plus two power. Wow. Which is pretty cool, and it

also has on its text box. Oh, some flavor text reason. Number one, I'm talking about this. Card, Captain Vanegold I there be a sea dog whose bark be worse than his bite? Swillers. Salt Beard. It's a pun. It's a, it's a pun, but also I really like this one. I like that it has a little bit of the humor that LSS is sort of becoming known for and they're cards. I think that is a good thing to have in a card game. I loved the humorous flavour text in Imagine the Gathering.

Yeah, like every time they have a counter spell they have to print some cheeky retort like on it. Yeah, it's really, really cute. And so I don't mind it when they do little puns like this here in flavor. Text and not, say the hero's name question. Mark very different, very different gravy bones you gross. Patui Battalion bark with some flavor text and bark worse than bite. Oh yeah, love that shit. And also, this is the first in a series of cards throughout the

set that tell a story. And I know that you just got done with us pitching our Patreon once, but I think I'm going to be writing an article either this month in June or next month in July where I talk about storytelling in flesh and blood. And I'm going to be mentioning this line of cards. If you can figure it out, tell me in the comments and I'll let you know if you're right or not. Do not miss that Clark special, yeah?

The reason to why I'm talking about this card is because I really love High Tide flavour Flea again, sort of like this storytelling, this flavour in cards. It's really, really important to make people build an emotional connection with these Commons and rares. For me, that's a very important thing in the TCG and High Tide. Have you guys noticed the pattern with High Tide? Dude, Not just two blue one. That's great, right? Very pirate, very ocean themed, right?

You get these Blues and you augment the card. But what is the card that augments? It's a boat. It's always a boat, every single card with high tide and there are no other cards where the boat is the main focus of the card. There's the gold hunter or the gold like hunter light sail, gold hunter, marauder, gold hunter catch where yes, boats are a big part of the art, but they aren't the focus of the art. They aren't the the subject of

the piece. In the same way, the only cards where the boat is the subject of the art, they have high tide on it. And that is excellent flavor, great job elements. Specifically a boat, not a ship. Yeah. Because there's the Palantir aero knot. That's not a high tide cart, that's a ship. That's not a boat. Not a boat, it's in the sky. Doesn't count. Fuck that noise. Boats on the ocean get augmented by high tide. That's pretty fucking cool.

It's. Pretty fucking cool, and Flesh and Blood isn't the kind of community where people pay attention to that. I feel like that would have been whoa, this is a magic set. But I want to shout it out because I think it's cool and I've spent too long talking about this so now my section is done. Cool, I'm gonna go next then for my card. I wanted to talk about channel Lightning Valley, not a warrior

card. It's a lightning instant aura yellow pitch 0 cost, and it says the first time you deal damage to an opposing hero each turn draw a card and then the same channel mechanics for every channel card. And the reason why I want to talk about this card is because I was thinking about it while I was doing the notes for my rotation section. And this just seems like a card that was at the forefront of a lot of people calling for its ban when Aurora was running around doing her thing.

Definitely. And it is a powerful card, Very, very flashy and it can turn games around if you know, she draws AD react with it or find some way to deal damage to you

on your offensive turn. And it just makes me think like if there were a rotation system where there are certain metas where this is legal, maybe in a rotation where there's lots of aura hate or lots of instant hate or like in for instance, like with high seas, I felt like there's a lot of ways to stop people from drawing cards or punish people people for drawing cards. And then we're getting involved eventually. Who would really punish our

people drawing cards? And if there is a way to just like control X onto Aurora and then paste her back into a meta where they can deal with her appropriately. Because I feel like she had lacked a lot of counters when Vista, right left the meta and anybody left the meta, it would just be a little bit different of a landscape. Maybe people wouldn't be focusing on this card as much. So that's my card. That's what I was thinking about. Obviously, very, very powerful

lightning card. And I'm excited for the next time that Prior can use it, if at all. Cool. Yeah. All right. I think that's the end of today's episode. All right, well, thank you all for joining us. And boys, thank you for parting with me. Thank you for parting with me, Clark. Oh yeah, brother. Introduction, guys. Bye.

So long bye. Picture to Me podcast is hosted by Joel Racinos, Clark Moore and Fuzzy Delp. Our executive producer is Talent Stradley, our logistics coordinator is John Farkas, Music is produced by Dylan Hulse, logo is designed by Han V and our sound mixing is done by Christopher Moore. Last but not least, thank you the listener for taking the time to listen to our podcast. Be sure to give us a follow on your favorite social media platform at Pigitini Podcast.