Flesh and Blood released their brand new Mastery Pack product line, with the first iteration being Mastery Pack Guardian. As fans of the Crack, Shuffle, Play format ourselves, we were excited to get our hands on this product and tinker with the cards.
Here’s all you need to know about Mastery Pack Guardian.
Probably the main draw of Mastery Pack Guardian is the limited play experience, more specifically Crack, Shuffle, Play. Most of the mechanics in the set deal with interacting with other Guardians, and making sure the gameplay is interactive and engaging. This works well in Crack, Shuffle, Play, where you all play as Valda Brightaxe, but works doubly well in the upcoming Smash Palace product release, more on that in a moment. But what exactly is Crack, Shuffle, Play?
Crack, Shuffle, Play is as easy as it sounds. It starts with cracking open 3 booster packs, removing the back three cards of each pack, shuffling those packs together, and playing with those cards. Because of how the packs are designed, the back three cards include tokens needed to play the game, and equipment to use. Everyone will have access to the weapon High Riser, and importantly, everyone will be using Valda Brightaxe as their hero.
Valda Brightaxe has two key abilities on her hero, the first one being “Whenever an opponent draws 1 or more cards during an action phase, create that many Seismic Surge tokens.” Her second ability states “At the start of your turn, if you control 3 or more Seismic Surge tokens, cards you own with crush get dominate this turn. So, we’re already expecting a lot of crush cards as well as ways to generate Seismic Surge tokens, or perhaps force the opponent to draw cards.
Let’s start from the beginning with Guardian’s first exclusive mechanic. Making its debut all the way back in Welcome to Rathe, Crush is one of the main ways for Guardians to disrupt their opponents. Cards with Crush have devastating effects when they deal 4 or more damage to an opposing hero. Couple this with Valda’s ability to give cards with Crush Dominate and they are almost guaranteed to deal 4 or more damage. Because Valda relies so heavily on Crush, we see that there are 44 cards with Crush in the set, making sure that each Crack, Shuffle, Play deck has some firepower in them.
Of course, these crush cards only get dominate when there are Seismic Surge tokens in play. And how do we do that? The next big mechanic in Mastery Pack Guardian is Heave. Heave is an ability that some cards have that will trigger at the beginning of your end phase, and the ability is accompanied by a number. For this example, let’s look at Thunder Quake with the text Heave 3. Heave 3 says “While this is in your hand, at the beginning of your end phase, you may pay 3 resources and put this face-up into your arsenal. If you do, create 3 Seismic Surge tokens”. This is the perfect way to get 3 seismic surge tokens, and while Thunder Quake itself does not have Crush, you can choose to play another attack from hand with Crush, or find a way to put Thunder Quake back into your deck with another effect.
Seismic Stir is another great way to instantly get multiple surge tokens as well. We can also look at Overswing as a way to generate 2 Seismic Surge tokens as well as increasing the power of an attack on our following turn. Valda’s Specialization Put ‘em in Their Place synergises with her hero ability perfectly, forcing the opponent to discard their hand and draw that many cards when it crushes, generating more Seismic Surge tokens on the following turn.
Brought about in Heavy Hitters, the clash mechanic makes a return. Clash is the perfect mechanic for Guardians, a class known for throwing out towering behemoth sized attacks. Cards with clash will have specific conditions for when they cause heroes to clash. Pec Perfect, for example, will trigger a clash when it defends. When you clash, the clashing heroes both reveal the top card of their deck. The hero that reveals the card with the greatest power wins the clash.
Mastery Pack Guardian continues to promote limited play with the plethora of Guardian focused interactions and disruption options. We see a whole suit of Crush cards that focus on disrupting an opposing guardian you may face.
Annexation of All Things Known, Annexation of Grandeur, and Annexation of the Forge are all instrumental in gaining an edge in the Valda mirror match.
What we like more are the set of cards that depict the defeat of the Old Ones. Let’s take a look at Blinding of the Old Ones. It is a 6 cost red Guardian attack action card that hits for 10 and blocks for 3. It is of the same power as Macho Grande in its red form, a card that already sees some play in Classic Constructed as it provides a sizable dominated attack.
In Valda, having Crush can often mean having dominate as well, and in the case of Blinding of the Old Ones, it’s as simple as utilizing a card like Tectonic Plating to generate a Seismic Surge token, and then Heaving this card at the end of turn. Suddenly, next turn you have access to a 3 cost attack that is 10 power and has dominate at worst, and against a guardian, have the added bonus of having an effect should the attack deal 4 or more damage. While it may not be as versatile as other Crush effects, it’s a solid option for players to fit into decks, and stands out especially in limited play.
We can’t talk about Mastery Pack Guardian without at least touching on Smash Palace just a bit. Smash Palace is a standalone product that looks to showcase not only Flesh and Blood in general, but also the multi-player Ultimate Pit Fight format. It comes stockpiled with unique heroes, special tokens, a large two-player playmat, and a special event deck.
Smash Palace also comes with 12 Mastery Pack Guardian booster packs to allow for up to four people to instantly Crack, Shuffle, Play or use those decks in Ultimate Pit Fight as well.
Now you are also able to use any of the other Guardian heroes. What makes it interesting is that all you need to do after your initial games is either reseal the original packs and mix and match them for endless replay value. You can even simply go down to your local game store and pick up some new Mastery Pack Guardian boosters and use those.
Probably one of the best features of Mastery Pack Guardian is how easy it is for new players to find cards they want for a class they find interesting. One of the biggest hurdles for new players can often be simply knowing which sets they should buy to build their favourite hero. It’s an all too familiar story where stores and more experienced players would direct new players to purchase packs from 3-4 different sets for their favourite hero. Just the Guardian class for example, had players buying packs from Welcome to Rathe, Crucible of War, Tales of Aria, Everfest, Heavy Hitters, and more. Now if a player wants to get into the Guardian class, it’s as simple as directing them to Mastery Pack Guardian.
Of course, as this is meant to be an onboarding point for new players, just how good is Mastery Pack Guardian for building a deck? We tried our hand at creating a versatile Valda, Seismic Impact classic constructed deck using cards exclusively from Mastery Pack Guardian. What we’ve created we feel is a decent enough starting point, and could certainly clash with the Armory Decks we’ve seen recently.
The deck offers a great set of blues that block well, yet also generate value in terms of creating Seismic Surge tokens or disrupting the more aggressive classes. Solid Ground is a great example of a defence reaction that can block for 5 and often for free, while also being a blue card to pitch if needed. Thunder Quake and Macho Grande offer great punching power in their blue versions while also blocking very efficiently. Against other Guardians, Seismic Shelter and even Stonewall Confidence in the inventory help deal with powerful dominated attacks.
As when constructing many Guardian decks, we have a few standard red attacks that we feel are great in most any matchups, and have a great selection of attacks in the Inventory to bring in depending on the opposing hero. Chokeslam and Disable both provide great disruption, and mitigate damage you may receive on your turn. Of course, you can’t have a Valda deck and not run Put ‘em in Their Place. And in the inventory we see Crush the Weak to deal with the classic go wide strategy of ninjas and some runeblades. We also see Blinding of the Old Ones and Smelting of the Old Ones for some Guardian-focused interaction.
If you want to give the deck a try yourself, you can find the full deck list here! The deck consists of 6 arena/equipment cards and a main deck of 49 cards. There is an inventory of 25 cards to pick and choose from to bring your main deck up to 60 cards, with room to tune it to the hero you happen to be facing.
Overall, we’re pretty excited about Mastery Pack Guardian and the potential it brings to Flesh and Blood as a whole. Smash Palace looks like it will be a fun limited experience as well, and we can’t wait to get our hands on it when it releases. With Mastery Pack Guardian released, we’re also really looking forward to the numerous Crack, Shuffle, Play events. We’ve already seen Skirmish season feature Crack, Shuffle, Play, and we’re looking forward to the host of side events featuring the format. Look out for the Crack, Shuffle, Play events at Calling Copenhagen and Calling Hamburg, as we’re sure players will want to Clash head to head with their opponents using these exciting new Mastery Pack Guardian cards.
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