Gravy Bones sails into the metagame and has quickly risen into Flesh and Blood popularity. We’ve seen standout performances from the United States National Championship to the recent Calling and Battle Hardened in Bologna. Now we’re here to help players who want to ride the wave of one of Flesh and Blood’s newest and most unique heroes. Here is how to get started playing Gravy Bones, Shipwrecked Looter.
This is by far one of the best new player products that Legend Story Studios has released yet. Along with the full ready to play deck, it comes with a paper copy of a learn to play guide as well as two information cards that detail both the Blitz and Classic Constructed deck lists.
I recently picked up a copy of the deck to introduce the game to my brother, and while the learning curve was quite steep, we had a lot of fun and thoroughly enjoyed discovering the power of the newest Pirate Necromancer hero.
Before diving into what the cards do and breaking down just what makes Gravy Bones tick. There is a baseline level of information that’s needed to understand the complex hero. Let’s breakdown what a typical Ally card looks like by analysing Sawbones, Dock Hand.
The first notable difference here is that Gravy Bones utilises a more unique type of card, Ally cards. Unlike the standard attack action and non-attack action cards most classes utilise in Flesh and Blood, Gravy Bones summons a horde of undead allies to join him in the fight. Whereas most actions go to the Graveyard immediately or when the combat chain closes, these Ally cards stay in the arena until they are destroyed.
The Ally cards are denoted by two key identifying features. Looking at the bottom of Sawbones, we see it is a Pirate Necromancer Action – Ally. Additionally, where a card’s block value would usually be denoted in the bottom right, we have a unit’s life total instead. Sawbones in this case has a life stat of 2. Upon taking two damage, the ally is put into the graveyard and that is when Watery Grave comes into play.
The next new mechanic is Watery Grave. Watery Grave says “When this is put into your Gravyard from the arena, turn it facedown”. This is relevant because, while a card is facedown, it cannot be interacted with and Gravy Bones cannot play the facedown card from Gravyard despite his hero’s ability to play cards with Watery Grave from the Gravyard.
The last thing to note about Ally cards is that many of them have this black and white circular symbol resembling an arrow or a wave. This is the “Tap” symbol. To tap a card you simply rotate the card 90 degrees to denote it as being tapped. In most cases, tapping the card is part of the cost for activating an ability. In this case, Saw Bones can tap to activate its instant ability or to attack if you have paid one resource.
Being tapped is a binary state, a card is either tapped or untapped. You cannot tap a card multiple times a turn without untapping it first. At the end of your turn, all cards you control untap.
Gravy Bones is a deck with quite a few moving parts. While you definitely are able to play allies directly from your hand, this is not the effective way to utilise their strength. Just like other action cards, allies require an action point to play them. The most effective way to summon your undead legion is to call them from the grave. This is due to Gravy Bones’ iconic off-hand equipment, the Compass of Sunken Depths.
Compass of Sunken Depths has two distinct and powerful abilities. First, its activated ability allows you to look at the top card of your deck. Quite a few effects in the Armory Deck allow you to destroy the top card of your deck for added bonuses. Destroying the right cards, such as those with Watery Grave, turn on your decks synergies while simultaneously putting Ally cards into your graveyard. Additionally, Gravy Bones is a hero that cycles through his deck quite quickly – and knowing what’s coming can shape your turns to be as optimal as possible.
The second ability is perhaps the more essential of the two. It states “The first card with watery grave you play from your graveyard each turn gets go again”. This effect is key in developing your boardstate while simultaneously putting on some offensive pressure. Spending your entire turn to simply play an ally and do nothing with it only for it to get removed on your next turn is a huge tempo loss for Gravy Bones.
So, how do we set up these high-value Gravy Bones turns?
It’s best to look at the average Gravy Bones gameplan as a checklist with things you need to accomplish. First, we need to get our allies into the graveyard. We can’t just block with them because they simply are not able to be used to defend from hand. We need to get creative.
Cards like Portside Exchange, Jittery Bones, and our all-star Golden Tipple are amazing at getting allies into the graveyard while still extracting value. While these cards are blue, they also have the added bonus of filling the second checkmark off the list, getting a blue card into the graveyard.
The second requirement for Gravy Bones to operate is that he needs blue cards to enter the graveyard. For the uninitiated, blue cards are cards that when pitched, generate 3 resources. This is also denoted by the thin colour strip at the top of each card. Similar to blue cards, red and yellow cards also generate resources when pitched:
Blue: 3 resources
Yellow: 2 resources
Red: 1 resource
But why do we need blue cards in the graveyard?
This leads us into Gravy Bone’s passive ability that reads “If a blue card has been put into your graveyard this turn, you may play cards with watery grave from your graveyard”. You are still required to pay their costs and obey proper timing restrictions. This is how you get your allies from the grave onto the field. You can utilise Gravy Bones’ other ability, which lets you tap him and destroy a Gold you control to draw and discard card.
However, the easiest way to fulfil these requirements is to simply play a blue card. We love cards like Avast Ye!, Loot the Hold, and Loot the Arsenal because they provide powerful effects to your allies that otherwise simply present vanilla damage. And remember, only the first card with watery grave you play from your graveyard has go again, so timing and sequencing is key.
Blue cards offer additional functionality in Gravy Bones as well. Several cards in the set contain the High Tide keyword. High Tide abilities are additional effects granted to cards when there are 2 or more blue cards in your pitch zone. What’s important to note here is that you are not able to pitch cards whenever you like, you can only pitch cards when you are paying for a cost.
Cards like Battalion Barque or Conqueror of the High Seas, the latter of which is not in the armory deck, conveniently cost four. This allows you to pitch two blue cards at once. However, cards like Swiftwater Sloop need some tinkering to get full value.
Gravy Bones is versatile enough that he can chart a course to victory through many means. While Gravy Bones has no weapon, he holds the power to win through a battle of attrition with the constant recurring of allies and card advantage. Forcing your opponents to spend cards on blocking attacks from allies while then devoting more cards to removing those allies is a sure fire way to make sure they run out of threats faster than you do. Similarly to how the Enigma, Dromai, and Prism play on their alternative axes of value, Gravy can extract so much value off of a single ally, utilising both their offensive and defensive capabilities.
The second way Gravy can win games is through effectively blocking and grinding out games with ally attacks throughout the game. Oysten, Heart of Gold and Barnacle from the base Armory deck don’t require resources to attack with, effectively giving you a free weapon attack should your opponent decide to consistently attack you instead of clearing your board.
However, my favourite road to riches is playing Gravy Bones as a pseudo combo-deck. Out of the box, we have access to Limpit, Hop-a-long. And once we touch upon upgrades, we also have some really big and impressive allies. But what makes Limpit so strong is that she is the only ally Gravy Bones has access to currently that naturally has go again on her attacks.
Being able to play Limpit along with another ally allows you to put on extra pressure while developing two bodies onto the board. Your opponents are then faced with a tough decision: Do they attack you and take damage from two allies on their next turn? Or do they spend their turns clearing your allies and leave you with a full hand?
What makes the Armory Deck product line so good is that these decks are ready to play out of the box, and a well practiced player can begin to do well at armories without touching anything in the box. However, for many the allure of even greater treasure draws them to seeking even greater power.
So how do you upgrade your Gravy Bones deck?
Upgrading Gravy Bones starts off fairly straight forward: take most of his cards from the newly released High Seas set.
Starting off with the basics, we really want to get a third copy of Avast Ye! And Murderous Rabble. And while we’re at it, we really enjoy the 3 blue Golden Tipples in the deck, so much so we might as well add 3 red ones as well.
The armory deck does a good job of showcasing the versatility of cards that go to graveyard, with cards like Back Alley Breakline and Fiddler’s Green. However, we’ve found that Fiddler’s Green often just doesn’t make the cut, not applying enough pressure and not preventing a lot of on-hit effects.
Additionally, the red Restless Bones and Jittery Bones, while providing good sources of damage, can often clog your hand if you can’t give them go again. Furthermore, these cards aren’t blue and don’t turn on Gravy’s ability to play out of the graveyard, so these are contenders to be removed from the deck. The same can be said for Scar for a Scar – so that too is on the chopping block should we need to make more room.
To round out the suit of blues, we love Flying High in its blue variation as well as Saltwater Swell to more easily turn on those High Tide cards.
Before we mentioned easy quick upgrades you can get from trading with friends after Sealed or Draft events, or random packs you may open on occasion. But what if you wanted to go even further, really add some hitting power to your deck? And who better to add power than Wailer Humperdinck himself. He is quite a big threat with quite a hefty cost, and will require some careful planning, or some luck on your end, to get him out and swinging. Wailer Humperdinck being quite expensive means we also really want ways to turn on Gravy Bones’ ability while simultaneously paying for his cost.
Chart the High Seas and Give No Quarter are both amazing inclusions in the deck.
Setting up these big turns needs some protection, and where would a captain be without his first mate. Chum, Friendly First Mate is a welcome inclusion in any Gravy Bones deck, excellent at taking off the pressure and being able to attack for free. Dead Threads and Gold-Baited Hook generate a lot of resources and Gold to help keep your engine online and pay for those big allies. And of course, how can we forget the amazing new “Sea’n’Sea”. Conqueror of the High Seas finds Gravy at the helm of the ship, plundering any who would cross its path.
The Gravy Bones Armor Deck is everything a new player could want from a preconstructed deck. It is a flavor win when it comes to showcasing Flesh and Blood’s very first necromancer, and it blends the themes of the undead and the high seas perfectly. It’s a great starting point for any player with room to grow. As we enter nationals season, we can’t wait to see just how far Gravy can rise, again and again.
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