With my time writing for Card Gamer coming to a close, I want to take the opportunity to take a look at all the little things that I love about my main card game, Flesh and Blood. And believe you me, there are a lot. But first: some history. 

How I Fell In Love With Flesh and Blood

I came to FaB as a disillusioned, old-school Magic: The Gathering nerd. I had been playing Magic off and on, in the mythical Kitchen Table Format for close to ten years before I found Commander through my circle of university friends and I instantly fell in love. The whole thing just clicked for me. The deckbuilding opportunities of having an additional card in your opening hand, sort of, guaranteed for every game were massively addictive to my deck brewing brain. 

So i spent another half decade happily playing Commander before I started to notice a shift: More and more products seemed to be coming out that were designed exclusively for Commander, and even standard releases were increasingly geared towards my favorite format. What could go wrong, right? 

Well, lots, as it turns out. More Commander products being released meant more homogenization. Most decks were faced with a growing number of staples that felt like they needed to be included. And Commander stopped feeling like a janky, casual deckbuilding format and felt more and more like a different flavor of Standard. 

This is where FaB hooked me. I learned of the game via a video by Tolarian Community College, outlining how to play the game, and two things immediately grabbed me – and they are still my main reasons for loving the game intensely years after the fact.

A Different Flavor of Commander

I love the fact that FaB takes the retrofitted idea of Commander from Magic and makes it the centerpiece of its game design. You are your hero. Your hero isn’t a creature you summon that leads your forces, they are you. And every card that you play is something that they do.

While Flesh and Blood gets (rightly) praised for being a very competently designed game engine for competitive play, this aspect of the game is often overlooked. The whole thing is so much more concrete and flavorful, even down to some individual moves. While it’s perhaps easier to imagine someone attacking you with a Surging Strike than with a Cadaverous Contraband, the whole game feels like a fight between two people, even forgoing illustrations, card names and flavor texts.

A Wholly Unique Game Engine

The other thing I loved about FaB the minute I saw the game play out in The Professors YouTube video was its main game engine: The way that a turn plays out, the resource system, the fact that both players are constantly engaged, the relative lack of a continuous board state and the actual value of your life total. These were all total departures from how Magic, and consequently most other TCGs, do things. It’s a very bold design with its own set of strengths and weaknesses, but due to its sheer uniqueness it’s very easy to fall in love with as a person that appreciates game design.

What sealed the deal for me though, was how easy it was to pick up – and how addictive the gameplay was. Games were quick and constantly engaging, a very different kind of fun from a four-way Commander night where half the time, you could be expected to sort of tune out of the game and chat. 

A Competitive Players Dream

I learned to appreciate a game for its competitive element with Flesh and Blood. Before starting to play Flesh and Blood, I never so much as thought about going to a game tournament. People who played those, I previously thought, were sweaty, no-fun, probably rude and most certainly to blame for sucking all the fun out of gaming.

Well, as it turned out, my extremely uninformed opinions that I never thought to challenge were misguided. With how competitively engaging FaB was, due to the relatively low variance and it rewarding efficient decision-making, I soon found myself engaging with content for competitive players – and eventually played some minor tournaments myself, something I continue to do today, not just in the TCG space but also in my other hobby of tabletop wargaming. And to think that it all started here. I owe a lot to Flesh and Blood.

And So Much More…

It would be very easy to just keep listing things here. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I love the goofy humor that LSS displays at every opportunity. Sure, names like Gravy Bones, Shipwrecked Looter or Arakni, 5L!p3d 7hRu 7h3 cR4X are kind of a chore at times, but I simultaneously love that LSS is willing to be weird and potentially off-putting. The whole game is such a labor of love, and it really shines through everywhere.

I love the fact that heroes are very strictly siloed off from each other. It makes it so much more manageable to engage with the game on a very casual level, where you only collect one hero, class or combination of class and talent, which allows you to step away from the game when sets showcase other classes.

I love the fact that sets only come out every couple of months, rather than constantly. It keeps spoiler season fresh and exciting and makes the game much more stable between releases, while also being much easier on the old wallet.

And finally, I love that LSS seems to be a company made up of people passionate for their game and their community. Every decision LSS has made, from individual bannings to product and game design, seems to genuinely have the health of the game and the community at heart. And it makes me glad to have been a part of the games history for a (relatively) long time and (sort of) near the start of the whole thing.

I’m excited to see where Flesh and Blood goes next. And to see what new ways it will find along the way, to make me fall in love with the game all over again. Even as I’m not sure if I will have a platform to write about it when I do. But if I do, you will for sure find me singing the praises of this brilliant game there. Thank you all from the bottom of my nerdy heart for a couple of really good years and every minute you might have spent reading my content. Take care, everybody!