Flesh and Blood, an intense dueling experience that competes with trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Disney Lorcana, is making some big moves at your local game store. Later this month New Zealand-based publisher Legend Story Studios is bringing out an all-new hero in an all-new way. Today Polygon can exclusively reveal Jarl Vetreiđi and all of his punishing gear and abilities — including his signature weapon.
In Flesh and Blood (often shortened to FaB) players take on the role of a single skilled combatant in one-on-one battles to the death. Players will wield exotic weapons, wear unique armor, and cast powerful abilities in the ring, all represented by collectible cards. But until now, new heroes were only to be found in blind booster packs. Fans would have to hunt down the new hotness and all their kit in order to make a deck, and while that’s literally the point of TCGs, for some it’s not all that much fun.
Enter Armory Decks, Legend Story’s way of getting new players up to speed quickly. These preconstructed decks go for a premium — usually around $40 here in the United States, making them roughly comparable to most Commander decks for Magic.
(That’s roughly the price of two starter decks in Disney Lorcana, if you’re keeping score at home.)
But until now only older, more seasoned heroes were up for grabs in these decks.
Jarl Vetreiđi is the first hero to enter the FaB arena as a stand-alone Armory deck, and to hear lead developer and senior designer Bryan Gottlieb tell it, he’s one hell of a heavy hitter.
“Jarl is an Earth Ice Guardian,” Gottlieb explained to me during a recent interview. That means he can only play cards from the Guardian class (a type of fighter), and cards featuring the elements Earth and Ice.
“That’s a very big deal,” Gottlieb continued. Why? Well, instead of rotating out entire sets of cards like Magic does, FaB rotates out entire heroes. There has literally not been another Earth Ice Guardian in the game since the last one, Oldhim, was retired — or, in the game’s vernacular, moved to Living Legend status.
“When Jarl reenters, it will be the only hero with access to two different kinds of elements — Ice and Earth,” Gottlieb said. “The previous Ice Earth Guardian, Oldhim, […] was a huge scourge of the tournament scene. Just an absolutely top-tier deck that defined the metagame for a very long period of time. So it’s a big deal to have Earth, Ice, Guardian all under the same roof one more time.”
Jarl’s core mechanic lives on a card called Mangle, which destroys a piece of previously damaged equipment on his opponent. Every other card in the deck is built around applying that damage, then using Mangle to exploit it. And these, Gottlieb says, are the most important cards in the deck.
“Whenever you play an Ice card, you get to put a Frostbite token into an exposed zone an opponent controls,” said Gottlieb. “This is a new concept for us, this exposed [condition]. It essentially means you have no equipment in one of your equipment zones. So that could be through typical usage, or it could be because it was destroyed by using an effect like Mangle. […] Frostbites are an extremely detrimental status effect. They make all of the stuff you play when you control cost one more [resource to cast], and that can be really devastating to your turn cycle.”
“This is the first time we’ve included a Legendary card in an Armory deck,” Gottlieb said. “Legendary is one of our higher rarities. In a typical booster set, it would appear one in every four boxes or so. It’s also where some of our most powerful effects lie, particularly with equipment. [Using it correctly] means your Mangles hit more often, which means you put more minus one counters on your opponent’s equipment, which means you destroy more pieces of equipment from your opponent.”
“Summit the Unforgiven [is] introducing a new ability called Heavy,” Gottlieb said. “While this polearm is a one-handed weapon, you want to wield [Summit] two-handed because you do get this buff. It goes to six power, which for a weapon is near unheard of. It’s absolutely massive, but you have to have both of your weapons zones free. So in Jarl’s case, the expectation is he starts the game holding Summit in one hand and a shield in the other hand. He uses that shield to his benefit. The shield gets broken after the first few turns of the game, and then you’re left free to use both hands to hold Summit and really start to cause some damage.”
You’ll find the rest of Jarl’s most sought-after cards in the gallery below. The deck itself goes on sale beginning Nov. 30.
