I thought Superslam was the reintroduction of super rares to the game, but the rarity has been absent of late. Perhaps it made limited too swingy based on dumb luck in opening them? Or maybe super rares just don't work so well in a world with Silver Age, where you'd prefer to give some would-be super rares to Silver Age, so they are rares instead.

https://fabtcg.com/articles/scheduled-banned-and-restricted-announcement-28-05-26/

The people have spoken! Ira, Crimson Haze, Kano and Kayo are benched for Omens season and Chane is back.

Undoubtedly, Briar is positioned to be the boogeyman this season, and many advocated for a pre-emptive strike by benching her. It seems like the majority of people feel like benchings should stem from past performance, not future speculation. Surely Briar will earn a benching during this season, so in the long term it evens out anyway.

Obviously the devs would never bench Briar because of the upcoming preconstructed deck, and they probably decided against benching Oldhim since he might be one of the few heroes capable of holding Briar back. Apart from these I don't think there are many heroes in contention for benching, but I do wonder if Blaze and Oscilio could make big splashes. We shall see!

What do you folks think are the most exciting cards in Silver Age? When I think of exciting cards, I have in mind cards that you really want to put in decks not just because of efficient stats, but because they stand out from other cards, and evoke a positive feeling when you draw them because they do something cool or enable a cool play pattern that you enjoy.

Here are some of my candidates:

Sound the Alarm

Information is very powerful in this game, and Sound the Alarm gives you great information on what's coming from the other side of the table while still having good stats. A lot of generics with cool effects are sadly 2 blocks, but not this guy! Sometimes you also get to search for a D react, which is admittedly not always amazing in this format since we miss out on the best ones, but most heroes have some decent options they might want to run. I use it in my Pleiades deck where What Happens Next? can make it a 0 cost play, which is oh so satisfying. And I also love setting up Emboldened by the Crowd.

Loot the Hold

What can I say? This is such a power card for Gravy Bones, enabling the hero ability and providing a very scary on hit effect. Always a good time when you draw this.

Herald of Victoria

Modal cards are really cool, and this herald feels like it can fix any hand. It can pitch, it can attack and it has a special trick on either offence or defence. Would be amazing if it also went to soul, but that might be asking too much.

V of the Vanguard

This is one of the new playable non-equipment specializations in Silver Age, and is such a big card for Boltyn. V of the Canguard power turns are great! I wish more heroes had access to cool "pop off" cards like this. Specializations just feel kinda cool!

2 – 0 – 2 at armory this week with version 2.0

This time I think I'll let the games speak for themselves, since they were all captured on video. But I will say that I think this version of the deck is more consistent and feels quite powerful. I still think it lags behind hyper fatigue Guardian decks in terms of raw numbers, but I really like this play style and I think there are some matchups where we have some quite unique benefits. I'm really loving Sound the Alarm and Emboldened by the Crowd.

Isylander

Azalea

Viserai

Arakni, Solitary Confinement

I play Flesh and Blood "vanilla". I play with real cards in the flesh and blood in adherence with the official rules of the game and the formats hosted at armory. At the kitchen table among friends, we make some exceptions for playtesting, sure, but in general you could say I play the game as it was meant to be played.

I really think they were onto something when they named and designed this game. Digital entertainment plays too large of a role in our lives, and it's great to have amazing and novel in person experiences to draw us away from that. I think this is pretty much a universal, undeniable truth about the western world.

Unfortunately, the game is so good that people can't help themselves and want more of it all the time and have made a digital client anyway.

But there are other reasons than "screen bad, go touch grass" for why I think Talishar is a bad thing.

I don't play Talishar or in a testing team with playtest cards. That means that for me, at any given time, the current meta is very unlikely to be over and done. I don't play enough to reach that point. As of the time of writing this, close to the end of Compendium of Rathe season, I have yet to even play a single game against the current version of the top deck, Oscilio. I have one game against current Victor and Marionette, respectively. GEM pairing is random and there are only so many chances of actually facing any given deck, so for me there are many completely unexplored matchups and I am far from experiencing the many quirks and nuances this game has to offer when you play the same matchup a few times.

On the other side of the proverbial fence, you have the Talishar grinders. The kind of people who ask "list?" 30 seconds after major tournament results are out so that they can grind out all the top meta matchups on Talishar. Eventually they buy the cards and head out to claim victory at their armories, PQs, RTNs, nationals, skirmishes, battlegrounds, callings or pro tour (different people aim for different levels of tournaments, but the method is roughly the same). This is effectively mandatory to keep up competitively with others who are doing the same.

When you play the game like this, eventually there comes a point during a tournament season that things start to feel stale. There's only so many Oscilio vs. Marionette games you can actively enjoy. The novelty eventually wears off, and in particular when you are playing very sweatily you can focus too much on your mistakes and feel disappointed when you lose and content when you win, instead of feeling content when you lose and happy when you win.

One could say that the Talishar grinders and me occupy different spaces, and that we can happily co-exist without them taking away from my experience. But it is not that simple. My local armory is thankfully not full of Talishar grinders, but I have heard tales from other places where people get so tired of the meta that towards the end of the season, nobody cares about playing the current CC decks anymore. Spoilers have begun and they yearn for something new and fresh and start bringing print outs of spoiled cards to playtest the future CC decks. To me this is evidence of Talishar's "future" format bleeding out into the real world, and I don't think this is the only way Talishar is bleeding out into the real world.

In my recent post about Silver Age, I talk about how when new game content comes out, there is a limited time window where things are wacky and exciting before the meta gets "solved" and becomes stale and predictable. This affects all players, not just the ones who over-indulge. I think Talishar is a very significant catalyst in this process.

I am glad that my local armory is not so Talishar-brained that we have to deal with this problem. We have a local meta that is very much driven by personal player preferences, so even those who chase the meta can find themselves ill-equipped to handle the oddities found here. (This is not really 100% true since the very best decks usually just beat lesser known decks by having vastly superiour levels of damage output/disruption/consistency.) So the same incentive to chase the top meta isn't really there. But there is a tipping point that could be reached, after which we would see more top meta chasers and an overall more predictable game experience that could make even non-grinders grow tired after only a few months.

What would a world without Talishar look like? I must admit I am not strictly saying that I think Talishar itself is the problem. Talishar is just the result of our contemporary gaming culture. If Talishar was removed, the aspects of gaming culture that lead to its creation would find other ways to make the game less exciting and joyful overall. Still, I think if LSS struck Talishar down, we would have a slightly healthier community, and perhaps most importantly, FaB would truly be a game that stands up for its values, defying the norm of hyper-online, binge-oriented gaming.

One thing I really like about Silver Age is that it brings back the T in Trading Card Game.

An issue with most contemporary TCGs is that actually trading cards with other people is often quite tedious since the market value of cards is so well known that people can't help but look them up to calculate fair trades. However, in Silver Age, basically every card (with a few exceptions such as Growl and Pouncing Paws) is worth less than 1 € and so it's totally fair to trade cards one for one. That way you are free to just trade cards based on what feels fair.

Another cool feature of Silver Age is that the results of the hero rotation vote are not known in advance, so there is an actual surprise waiting for us in the next season. In multiplayer games that receive periodic update it is a common phenomenon that when a brand new update has released (or the game itself has just released) the players are stumbling around figuring things out, which is a whimsical and exciting time to be playing the game. Over time, people figure out the best strategies and many copy those same strategies, and so things become more predictable and repetitive. Also known as the meta being "solved".

In TCGs spoilers are very common and in FaB in particular, digital playtesting with unreleased cards is so common that the solving of the future meta starts already during spoiler season for the next expansion. This makes it so that there is hardly a real window where people engage in whimsical, organic discovery of the new gameplay. However, in Silver Age the heroes rotating out are not yet known and cannot be so easily predicted as Living Legend can be. Thus we are in for an exciting time when the hero rotation occurs and everyone scrambles to figure out the best strategies into the new field.

Having some games under my belt, I am starting to feel like impatience is causing a lot of problems for me. Sending damage in the moment is not getting me to where I want, but sending disruption and damage at the right time is. Another problem is while there are many good 1-cost cards that we enjoy playing for free, we are not guaranteed to find our What Happens Next? early enough. So, is there a way to guarantee finding it every game? Well, yes, there is; by making the game go long. Snatch and Razor Reflex, being 2 blocks, are in my mind not the right tools for that job. They can force us to commit to an aggressive line even if the time is not right for it and are just liabilities if we want to block.

Blessing of Patience, however, is a card that is in line with this strategy. It blocks for 3, but it can also be played for free once we are "online" (or from a Slap-Happy). Sound the Alarm also hits the spot, being a similar 1-costed payoff card with a penchant for defence that blocks for 3 at worst. It feels like there is a coherent game plan coming together here.

1-2-1 Skirmish today

Dorinthea

Swapped Strike Gold for Staunch Response.
I went first and got a great setup with WHN and a red Edge of their Seats. That set me off to getting the lead, and I was eventually at 9 to their 1. Most of my armour was used. I fumbled it by choosing to apply pressure every turn, when I should have just taken a setup turn to have a big evasive attack. I had everything I needed on board, but stupidly chose to prematurely pop my buff instead of waiting for my confidence off of Superstar. Pretty bummed about this one, it was such an obvious misplay in retrospect.

Draw against Arakni, Solitary Confinement

No sideboarding. Pretty crazy game. Turn 0 they really screwed me by having 3 reactions on their Double Trouble, so I leaked 9 damage. Still I clawed my way back into it and even survived their late game flicks thanks to Slap-Happy. It ended with a draw but I would have fatigued them if we had an extra turn cycle to work with.

Great game, lots of back and forth.

Bye

Kayo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1ulgSSotZQ

Swapped Strike Gold for Staunch Response and Civic Steps for the dominate boots. I was pretty exhausted at this point and didn't play super seriously. I did Snatch+ Razor reflex + hammer on turn 0 when I should have just played blue Act of Glory and arsenaled Snatch. I should have played mostly defence, holding Edge of their Seats in arsenal and waiting for Short Shrift. Eventually the life totals were kinda close, but I was behind on tempo. They got me with a pummel I should have seen coming, but respecting it would probably have resulted in dying anyway. I only saw one Oasis Respite and no Staunches, which felt pretty rough. The rest were in the bottom 5 cards of the deck.

Not getting to play at this week's Armory due to family visiting made me feel a bit out of my game, I guess. This is a difficult deck, but it feels like I have a good chance in every game I have played so far. But I miss playing a deck that plays itself at least some of the time

I went back to Helm of the Adored for now. Might consider having Helm of Isen's Peak in the sideboard.

3-1 at Armory yesterday with version 1.3

This time I have video!

Cindra: https://youtu.be/2Prs2u7Saf4
Cindra struggles really badly with covering on hits and doesn't threaten crazy amounts of on hits damage in return, so when I got decent hands and they stumbled a bit I soon came out on top. They didn't have the experience to optimise their play lines to use Garland of Spring effectively, also.

Riptide: https://youtu.be/IxQV9cswgHc
I set up the most board state I have ever had in Flesh and Blood in this one. Confidence Dominate Go Again for 20 FTW.

Dorinthea: https://youtu.be/irWaJvjeYU8

Here I made two clear mistakes: I should not have wasted my buff in the early game by not attacking. Just swinging hammer would probably have been better. Also, I probably should have played out my second Oasis Respite when they had their big 3 attack turn. I was a bit too hellbent on arsenalling it to play it later for free off of WHN, but the amount of damage I would have prevented by stopping them from hitting was probably the better play.
In general, it is hard to play against Dorinthea with this deck because I have so many 2 blocks. Overblocking for 3 just isn't really viable, and I frequently need to keep 3 card hands to sustain the blue suspense auras.

Pleiades (not recorded)

They ran a much more normal version with Thump, Boulder Drop, Comeback Kid, etc. Very tight came that came down to a TSIKM. I sided really badly, though. I should have only sided in two potions. The full four is too many and I ended up bricking my arsenal with a Potion of Strength. Also, the potions compete with Helm of Isen's Peak for my action point during full set up turns.

Very scary to take set up turns against Pleiades, since she can often convert full hands, but luckily it paid off a bit sometimes. Definitely should have kept in Oasis Respite since they use confidence. I had previously played against full fatigue Pleiades so my mind was in that place, even though I kinda knew this Pleiaes player was not full on fatigue.

In this game I think I would have preferred Helm of the Adored, but that might just be because of the potions.

Card choices

Flock of the Feather Walkers felt pretty decent, but I'm still not 100% sure what I think about it. The Quicken was sometimes wasted. Perhaps I would need more 4 cost blues so that I can more often do attack action card + hammer for 4 on my turns with go again. But that makes the reveal condition less reliable. Out of my 0 cost blues, Cheers! was the only one I was actively interested in playing, and only in certain matchups.

Strike Gold honestly feels pretty good, so I think I should go back to two copies. I'm also thinking maybe I was too harsh cutting Small Problem. It works so well with my overall game plan value wise (2 pitch, 3 block, 0 cost 4) and the crush effect can actually be very nice, such as against Dorinthea.

I'm also thinking about Sound the Alarm. It can be a decent 0 for 5 with a nice upside, but is also a 3 block. Info is always good, and I am also considering some red Staunch Response for the sideboard, which is useful against reaction heavy decks and evasive decks, so then we could have the Sound the Alarm combo up.

One thing I've noticed is that knowledgeable people seem to be posting guides on Metafy and monetising them, and then drip feed little tidbits of knowledge here and there in the discord. I don't expect the pros to reveal all their hard learned secrets for free, of course. It's just something to take into account. The guides we would see posted publicly here are probably not going to measure up to the monetised Metafy stuff, so trying to make long form guides a major thing here could potentially be a mistake.

We are all of course painfully aware that network effects make it very hard to get people to move from one social platform to another. I think we can all agree that the purple discord is the most lively international FaB online discussion space and that it is the obvious place to go if you want to talk about this game with other people. Getting people to use this forum is made even more difficult since the discord arguably has a forum inside of it already in the form of threads.

I think this forum really needs something that makes it stand out as a useful tool for communication. I think casual chit chat cannot be its focus, since that is covered so well by discord. I don't have any experience with forum management, but I think it could be a good idea to try to look at other successful forums and try to see what it is that makes them work. Competitions? Plugins and tools? Integrations with relevant data sources (RSS feeds, live streams, etc)? Interesting community leaders being present? Gamification (things like karma points or other made up incentives for active contribution to the forum)?

I suspect longer, in-depth guides and discussion is the thing that can really set the forum media apart from things like discord, so one thing to figure out would be how the forum's structure can best encourage that kind of engagement.

Discord and Reddit are slowly enshittifying, but it's not bad enough yet to push large numbers of people away, so we can't rely on that alone.

Screw it. I'm going for the 0 cost attack plan, except I'll throw in some 1 costs which benefit from WHN and Slap-Happy.

Recent innovation: Flock of the Feather Walkers. I was skeptical at first but I goldfished a bit and it's pretty awesome, actually. Arsenal management is key with this latest build. Arsenal should be reserved for the 1 cost cards and Short Shrift (since it's the best attack in the deck and should never be blocked with). We strongly prefer to have a clear arsenal when we play Snatch or Flock. I don't own Smash Up, but I suspect it's a good one. I would like to try to fit yellow Tension in the Air, since it's a good card to have if WHN hasn't arrived yet. It plays sort of efficiently with our 1 cost cards.

In my most recent iteration I've taken out Razor Reflex and Snatch and put in Thump, Oasis Respite and some more suspense auras and 3 cost blues. Less spicy and explosive, but I am still very much playing to abuse WHN and Slap-Happy, which I think separates us from the more block oriented builds. I so wish we had access to the reviled guardian 0 cost attacks...

I will look into having more 3 cost blues. Getting 4 value from a blue is a good follow up to Razor Reflex and is of course is solid when taking an off turn, too.

I think I will try to keep Razor Reflex for now, but cut yellow Snatch and Small Problem. Short Shrift and Razor Reflex is such a potent combo.

The Razor Reflex strategy is a lot more viable in Elly's CC deck due to Enlightened Strike and the tower attacks, I feel. I could keep trying to make it work by going back to Strike Gold, though, and maybe adding Scar for a Scar. Still I feel like we are way too dependent on getting a sort of lucky turn 0 and seeing Short Shrift early for that to work.

This armory was a bit tough! Was on verison 1.1

Drew against Dash - new player who had to learn the game
Won against fatigue Pleiades - great matchup for me
Lost to Kayo - welp
Lost to Kayo - welp

Aggro is hard. I really need a good turn 0 setup and see Short Shrift early to be able to win, since I can't sustain good value turn by turn the way a well built aggro deck can, and unlike other guardians I don't have the defensive tools to draw it out and fatigue them (too many 2 blocks). The anti fatigue tech that I put in was great. I feel very confident about fatigue matchup. But to keep up with aggro I think I need more disruption to reliably have it up. More 3 blocks would be handy, to have the option of doing more midrangey things. That kinda goes hand in hand with running more suspense auras to absolutely ensure that we get to steal value turn 0.

When I get my hands on magmatic carapace that will probably come in, and maybe also civic steps.

I will tinker with these ideas for a bit. I feel like the Snatch and Razor Reflex package, while really cool, is a tad unreliable. It doesn't steal value turn 0 and it is a struggle to build the deck so that we can use that card drawn. Thump seems like it could be good, leveraging Slap-Happy, Magmatic Carapace and What Happens Next?

Still unsure about Embolden. It has similar problems to Snatch in that we don't know if the card drawn will be usable. But if we pivot towards using more Guardian attacks like Thump and maybe even Concuss it seems like a plausible card.

I'm tempted to test one copy of Energy of the Audience and Emboldened by the Crowd which seems like ways to maybe keep up in the value game against aggro. It's not at all hard to make it a 2 card 8 and on a really good turn it could be even more. Blocking with Helm of the Adored and playing a free 0 for 6 seems pretty alright.

Oasis Respite is another consideration, which is quite awesome if we have What Happens Next? in play and are facing aggro. It's easy to side it out when we are up against fatigue.

My counter fatigue strategy is now more item-focused so that I can set up for a truly monstrous turn where I get to deny Defense reactions.

Excited for my next Silver Age armory tomorrow! I made some changes, in particular adding yellow Snatch and making sure the blues are worth arsenalling. I also put in Comeback Kicks and a singular Heroic Pose, which essentially means I get a third copy of Razor Reflex, just not at reaction speed.