With rumors that a new class is on the horizon, there’s buzz in the air about what a new class could represent to the game and what mechanics are yet to be explored in the game. Although FAB has brought out a lot of interesting mechanics already, there’s still lots to be considered when it comes to this amazing design space.
Card Play
Although the Channel keyword does currently ask you to pitch differently and in specific ways in Flesh and Blood, there’s still no class that currently deeply interacts with the cards you pitch directly.
Although the design space is tricky due to the direct ability to recur cards that are pitched right then and there, I’d love for a class to be built and balanced around the ability to play cards out of the pitch zone. A keyword similar to blood debt would be a great way to accomplish this, allowing set play out of the pitch zone for certain cards. This sort of ability would allow heroes within this class to create crazy lines of sequencing, while really leveraging each hand to its maximum to not waste any resources available. Personally, the Earth element comes to mind here, and I’d love to see a class of this sort use the recursive and damage pieces currently found in the Earth card pool to support unique and technical gameplay required of a class like the above .
Remaining Resources
As much as card gameplay is interesting, imagine a card pool and set of attack actions that got stronger the less resources you have floating in your resource pool?
That to me sounds like the ultimate deckbuilding and gameplay puzzle. Cards that would be under rate with two or more floating, on rate with one and over rate with zero. This would create a ramping effect on your wider turns, and equally allow you to have strong two-card hands where you use up all your resources in the meantime. If balanced well, this would be a deep and interactive class which could be designed to go quite wide or quite tall. Personally, adding the Lightning card pool to this hero and opening up great resource sink cards in that talent pool like Shock Charmers and Channel Thunder Steppe could help really add some extra complexity and depth to the hero while opening up these forgotten cards in that talent pool.
Similar to how a wild beast can become enraged when injured, I’d love to see a carefully designed hero that scales in power level depending on their life threshold. This could be performed as an incremental increase in power at each increment of 10 life lost in the game (40, 30, 20, 10) or simply a switch from a defensive ability when above 20 life to a powerful offensive ability once below that threshold.
Although the latter is especially tantalizing, the former seems more in line with the more conservative design philosophy of LSS. Scaling through the game makes it so that although you hit very weak in the early portions, heroes will have to be careful not to leak too much damage in fear of getting completely wiped off the board come late game. However, since your low life total is critical to unlocking this power, you need to be equally careful of heroes that can finish the game quickly as well. There’s a lot of tantalizing gameplay to think about on both ends if the arena.
Although the opposite style is also possible in FAB, I think there’s currently a bit too much power potential in that design space, especially with cards like Tome of Fyendal and Sigil of Solace running around. In addition, the possibility of a hero hitting hard on high life totals might mean they always choose to go second on the dice roll and from there, never look back as they snowball the game.
Design in FAB is extremely tight and interesting, which is what makes it so tantalizing when a hero break the rules in certain ways or another. In my view, both life total manipulation and pitch zone interaction are mechanics with deep design pools that yet have to be exploited in the game. If you want to chat more on these design concepts, or simply want to let me know about your own design ideas in FAB, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @a_dedanwala.
