Do Mathematicians Dream of Electric Sheep?

It's the summer of 2010. I’m in summer school for the second year in a row because I daydreamed during math class. It's not that I’m bad at math—it's just really, really, boring. Ironically enough, this is also the year I started to get back into trading card games because I thought the card art looked cool and I wanted to imagine myself as an anime protagonist or something. Fifteen years later, I’d won a FutureCard Buddyfight World Championship title, along with multiple top cuts and invites, $25K in the first ever Battle Spirits Saga release event, and I even got top 4 in a Battle Hardened once, before being smited by Alexander Vore on Kano. Would you believe me if I told you the secret wasn't math, but daydreaming?

Hold up: before you call me crazy, hear me out. Card design isn't made in a laboratory with science, but by a team with a vision. If this wasn't true, there would be no need to have cohesive themes and world building on cards. I like to spend time daydreaming about the ways game designers envision a new deck’s placement in the meta game by trying to see what kinds of stories these cards tell. I’ve used this tactic successfully to discover new ways of playing heroes during their early days, when there weren't any decklists to reference. First, I brought Prism, Awakener of Sol to a Top 8 finish at US Nationals in 2024. I placed in the top 16 with Gravy Bones at US Nationals 2025, the same weekend of the undead captain’s release.

Luckily for all you daydreamers out there, I'm willing to share some of my secrets. While I've had success with Dromai and Enigma, the big focus in this article will be my experience with Prism and how I was able to evolve my mindset and tackle Gravy deck building immediately on his release with ease. Before we get into that, let me tell you about how I discovered the relationship between game mechanics and card flavor. 

Another Board State Specialist, or Just a Guy Who Likes Full Art Cards?

Ally decks are by far my favorite way to express myself in Flesh and Blood. It started with the reveal of the almighty Dracona Optimai in the summer of 2022. I remember it like it was yesterday: driving in my car to meet with my friends for lunch and receiving an image of the newly announced Draconic talent from my usual card game play group. “Another attempt to bait me into playing this silly Flesh and Blood game,” I thought. At least, until I opened the image, revealing a ginormous dragon towering over a burning city as a volcano erupts in the background, all in its stunning full-art marvel glory. Yeah, you can bet LSS got me with that one.  No matter which other classes or heroes I try, I can't seem to escape the allure of the Illusionist and Necromancer heroes. Assembling a board of beautiful art always tickles my fancy. 

Eventually I fell in love with the gameplay of each board state hero: presenting the opponent with difficult decisions, gaining recurring value the longer my army sits on the board, and assembling avalanching effects when allies are placed alongside one another. If you have ever dabbled in an Illusionist or Necromancer, then you'd also know how difficult the decks are to learn and master. Math in Flesh and Blood is usually easy— evaluate the best value each hand can present and try to set up over-the-top turns with the arsenal. Allies complicate this. The longer they’re on board, the more value they can accrue. This is the first challenge I faced when starting my deck building journey with Dromai, but not something I fully understood until I was able to play with a hero of legend as she made her return in 2023: Prism, Awakener of Sol.

Auras, Angels, and Me

“Block six, play a dragon, block seven, play a dragon from hand. Block three, my turn? Yeah, I think I'll play three dragons this time.” 

As much as I loved Dromai, after a year of play, she started to get a bit stale. She offered a lot of complicated decision points involving blocking, knowing when to drop two dragons together (like Azvolai and Nekria)  for major synergy. But outside of that, I started to get bored and wanted to spice up my marriage to board state decks. Thankfully, LSS had just the thing, and in 2023 Prism returned to the scene with an entourage of Legendary Angels with wildly powerful effects that came at a steep cost. Stunning art work, access to some of the most powerful auras and game-breaking mechanics in Flesh and Blood, and card draw combined with deck tutoring? I knew I had to give her a try, especially since I wasn't able to play the original Prism before her ascent to Living Legend.

While Prism is seen as a dominant force in the metagame these days, she wasn't released as such, as she came back with an under-rate weapon that asked too much hand investment from the player. This was the first real hurdle I faced in deck building. The concept was there, but the actual play patterns were clunky. In theory, the math was great—pitch a blue, swing a red herald, pitch another blue to give it Go Again, tutor and flip a figment into an angel for free, and have 2 floating to end on the angel attack. 7 value from herald, 4 from the angel’s Ward, 4 from the angel attack, for a total 3 card 15. The mathematical value was there, but it wasn't that simple. The turn could easily be stopped if the first herald is blocked out or popped (due to Phantasm), and we lacked flexibility in these situations. Even more offensive, the weapon encouraged the player to exclude the Light Auras due to the lack of yellow pitch synergy. Early deck building from the community was just heralds, pumps, and the angels, while maybe running Arc Light Sentinel as the entire aura package (and some argued to remove even that if you can believe it). I thought to myself—“Prism without her auras, the cards that famously wrote her into the stars as the legend she is? That absolutely must be heresy.” I quickly threw Lu-mid-aris into the draft chaff where it belongs and switched to a real weapon: Iris of Reality. 

Iris of Reality basically turns all your Auras into 4-power allies. The stained glass artwork is inspiring and the synergy when you line up Light Illusionist Auras together was unparalleled, even to this day. This introduced my second hurdle: the math on these cards makes no sense. If each card in Flesh and Blood represents 3 value at baseline, then I'm pitching 2 cards (6 value) to play an Aura (3 value) that gets blown up by a Phoenix Flame? As cool as the art on the cards are, a 3 card 1 isn't exactly where we want to be. I had to reach down to my roots, ignore everything about the numbers that Flesh and Blood and Dromai taught me, and ask myself—what are Prism and the Light Illusionist class trying to be thematically?

Enter the Library

The Illusionist class harnesses the concept of creating figments of illusions, tricking the opponent at every corner with instant speed fake-outs or presenting monstrously sized attacks that require huge strength to swat away (i.e., Phantasm). The Light Illusionist blends these together perfectly, abusing the Spectra mechanic on instant speed auras to make it difficult to remove them from the board. This allows you to combine the Auras’ effects for tricky combos that can reap you card advantage or smite your opponent with a machine gun assault of Spectral Shield arcane damage. Phantasm attacks can be used to blast through the opponent’s defense (requiring 6+ power attacks to stop) and can also be played in conjunction with Light’s arsenal of power debuffs. The newest addition at the time was Light Angel allies that were no longer Illusionist and weren't restricted by Phantasm like the Draconic allies before them, but instead would give up their life to protect the people of Solana and Prism at all costs. 

The flavor was there, the power was there, but the cost to play these Auras was just too high. I was going to need more knowledge if I wanted to flood the field with these shimmering Spectra Auras, and so it was time to hit the books and head to the library of Solana. The final piece of the puzzle: Vestige of Sol alongside Tome of Divinity, spamming card draw alongside the Archangel of Erudition, Suraya. The end result was beautiful. A deck that used all three elements of the Illusionist toolbox to bully all Guardian players opposing me. Unfortunately, the Iris deck couldn't really deal with the aggression of Lexi, and, against Dromai, it was difficult for Iris to keep a board state while simultaneously pressuring their board state. The deck was relegated to meme status. 

Decklist, Decklist, in Response at Your End Phase: Another Decklist (copy)(copy)(copy)

Like any great deckbuilder, I opened Fabrary and started clicking good cards. Heralds? Check. Angels? Check. Miraging Metamorph used to be good, I clicked it. United we Stand makes a spectral shield at my end phase after I block so I can swing Iris, clearly I was ahead of my time, so I added that too. Let's travel back to the year 2023 and unveil my first monstrosity: Prism.

• Iris and Auras as a “side” plan (ironically what modern day Prism does)
• 2 Arc Light Sentinels because I believed the lies about it not being good enough
• Tried to commit too hard to both Heralds and Auras, while also running bad tech cards like Miraging (unnecessary because it was only good into guardian which Iris won at the time) and United (bad)

This list was quickly discarded within hours, Prism 2 was created and it didn't really work well. I took a much needed mental break and came back to the deck with a different mindset. It didn't need to beat everything, I just wanted it to be good enough to beat something. Iris became the main leader of my Angelic army, and this led to the decklist that would spawn (copy) after (copy). It was time to go even further beyond: Prism 3

• The first serious change was that I made the red Heralds the sideboard plan, and swapped Vestige + Tome + Iris to the main focus. I accepted that winning the bad matchups was impossible and wanted to focus on the good ones. 
• I experimented with various red herald numbers, between 6 red heralds and the classic 9 you see today depending on how much I liked Celestial Cataclysm that day.
• I trimmed the fat and removed the jank cards, added more blues and went almost exclusively Light. I wanted maximum Tome of Divinity consistency.
• No Pierce Reality because I didn't want to swing heralds often and didn't have space, but in later (copy)(copy) versions, cards such as Warmongers and Tidemaw found themselves homeless in place of Pierce. I just loved the idea of having a mystical dragon aura on my side that would be better suited for other illusionists. 
• Speaking of allies I tried to make work, Invoke Suraya had to eventually leave the deck, despite the fact that she's always lurking in the maybe board, calling my name like the green goblin mask. 

Looking back, it's amazing how similar a lot of card slots line up to modern Prism lists. I even managed to get a Pro Quest Top 4 with this list during the Iyslander era, which might not seem like a lot to some but, for me, felt like a huge leap and self acknowledgement that the deck was in the right place. It felt like a major flavor win as well, a call back to old Prism terrorizing her enemies with Spectra and building a holy army of Angels while the auras distract and buff my allies, eventually becoming allies on the battlefield themselves after checkmating my opponent with dangerous formations like Genesis and Arc Light Sentinel, or Merciful Retribution and Ode to Wrath. 

Eventually the timeline meets the story we know today: Prism gets a new weapon (Luminaris, Angel’s Glow) and her Iris build begins to merge with her aggressive Herald onslaught style, catapulting her from the jaws of memedom and into the sun. I’ve always felt proud that the Iris version of Prism became fully realized with the new weapon, because I adopted it early and never gave up. While she may not swing the Auras as additional allies, she still uses them to trick the opponent and create illusions to accumulate advantage in her favor. While she's nearing Living Legend for a second time, Prism taught me that LSS leaves players a few secrets to discover in their cards. I’ve alluded to these secrets throughout my story with Prism, but it's time to crack this story wide open and see what secrets lie at the bottom of this sea of cards.

The Treasure of Game Mechanics

It's clear that a certain level of care was put into the initial design process of each class to make it feel like you're really emulating what it means to be that class when you play a card. James and the team at LSS love leaving crumbs for the players to follow to understand deck or hero design, such as Call to the Grave leading up to the release of the Necromancer class, or the way Guardian cards mysteriously began to feature dwarves when Lyath Goldmane was on the horizon. If you keep your nose to the ground, you can figure out what's coming to Rathe before the average player. Let your mind run wild and you, too, may spike your upcoming Nationals on a hero’s release weekend.

Some of my favorite examples of strong class identity are Warrior and Assassin. Both are classes that use the Attack Reaction step, but in different flavors. When an Assassin uses a reaction, they’re trying to catch an unassuming opponent off guard by punishing them for not blocking (or in some instances, blocking too much) and connecting with on-hits that will dampen their prey’s next turn. This reminds me of an Assassin or thief class in an RPG—a stealthy character who sneaks up on opponents, dealing critical damage and possibly some type of poison or weakening status effect. When you play an Assassin in Flesh and Blood, you embody a similarly shady character who is trying to outmaneuver an opponent and assassinate a specific target, which is why a lot of Assassin cards banish or destroy specific cards when you hit an opposing hero.

Warriors, on the other hand, are typically more honorable and want to fight an opponent face to face, sword to sword. You swing a sword at the opponent, they decide to block the attack–and that's when you flourish with a counter swing that takes the opponent by surprise and punishes them for blocking via the Reprise mechanic. If the opponent chooses not to block you, you can either taunt them into blocks (e.g., Provoke) or just give them a good ol’ fashion beatdown until they can’t ignore your blade any longer. Of course, the Warrior class has been a part of Flesh and Blood for a lot longer than Assassin and is open to a lot more interpretation, allowing you to be a loyalist in an empire or an outcast of the imperium that’s bent on raising an army of their own.

This is where talents play their own part to help expand on hero identity. A Light hero, like Boltyn, focuses on soul and yellow pitch cards that represent Solana. While she’s not Light-talented, a lot of Dorinthia’s specializations’ yellow pitch strip allude to her Solana heritage. Next, I point to the burning loyalty of Draconic heroes who channel their power through red cards and fealty to their emperor, like Fang. Kassai is not technically Draconic, but she is the daughter of a (once) high ranking and powerful Volcor General, and now looks to strike back at the empire that slighted her and her father with an army of mercenaries. Kassai still represents her Draconic heritage because her ability banishes red cards for her effect, along with yellow cards for the connection to her new family, the Cintari Sellswords who desire gold. Occasionally, we even see established heroes gaining a talent, showing their dormant abilities.  Bravo became the Star of the Show and unlocked his “Captain Planet” elemental lottery ability. Teklovossen turns into a Shadow Mechanologist after transforming with Singularity, indicating that perhaps he was experimenting with a forbidden power to unlock the energy needed for his scheme to escape the deathly illness calling his name.

The New Kid on the Block: Mr. Bones

The King of the Sea, the man of myth and legends, Gravy Bones arrives alongside a new class: Necromancer. Similar to Illusionists, Necromancers are board state heroes that require technical play and will amass an army of the undead. However, unlike their illusionist counterparts, these are “real” undead we’re dealing with here, no smoke and mirrors. Because of that, there's a fair trade-off in the design of these new allies. No Phantasm or Ward but all are non-blocks in the hand, leaving defenses a bit lacking, similar to Prism but without the Ward keyword to buffer your life total. 

When Gravy first arrived on the scene, players raced to discover how the Necromancer worked, not only because of the hype a new class brought, but because US 2025 Nationals was on the horizon and a new board state deck was sure to bring a dynamic element to the metagame. Using what I've learned from Prism, I looked at the few cards we had and thought about what the team at LSS was trying to present to us in regards to Pirates and Necromancers. Necromancers were a bit more obvious: like any undead theme in a card game, graveyard toolboxing was a must. After all, who wouldn't want to bring the entire crew for a journey along the high seas? But what about Pirates? What did Pirates want to do and what kind of story was LSS trying to tell with these cards?

Early on, only Gravy Bones’ effect was revealed to us so we knew that we would use Gold to discard Allies and that blues summoned them from the watery depths of our graveyard. We also were able to see one ally, which was Riggermortis, a yellow color-stripped ally instead of a red or a blue. This told me that the blue strips represented the theme of sailing on the sea, while yellow would also be important to Gravy to represent Gold, as it's done in the past with Kassai and Victor. With allies being non-blocks and likely requiring a great deal of them, I realized that LSS’s intended vision of Gravy was likely leaning more towards Prism’s style: aggressive combo-based gameplay that could occasionally block out when necessary. 

As the weeks went by and I eagerly awaited more spoilers, I daydreamed about the Pirate Necromancer leading his army, his ship rising from the depths of the sea alongside his trusty crew. Early theorycrafting of the deck utilized Timesnap Potion, blue Flying High, and even blue Ravenous Rabble for its Go Again, as I imagine a Pirate Necromancer would lead his crew a bit more recklessly. Be it luck, coincidence, or excellent foresight, all my early theory crafting found better replacements as spoilers began to trickle in–Diamond Amulet, Avast Ye, and Murderous Rabble. Regardless of divine intervention or living in the walls of the LSS design room, I knew I was on the right track with my theory. Now it was time to confront my greatest nemesis—red Generic staples.

Let me shut down the allegations now: math and I are not mortal enemies. I don't have a relentless hatred for math because I had to take summer school classes. We're actually really good friends. When I design decks, I still consider math.  How much value can card combinations grant me? Are certain cards worth the slots or are they poor rate and just shiny cracked baubles? While I will occasionally run a less optimal card choice like Dracona Optimai in my Dromai decks or Invoke Suraya in Prism, when it's time to get serious, I'll lean towards better card choices. However, I’ve always been a hater of Generic cards, despite many being staples. I try to avoid shoving them into every deck I build. Sink Below and Command and Conquer may offer excellent deck building opportunities, but I don't think they're always necessary, especially as Flesh and Blood’s design philosophy becomes more intricate over time and asks the player to build new heroes in unique ways, such as Prism, Gravy, Oscilio, or even Fang, Tuffnut, and Lyath.

So reds were out of the picture. The only red allowed in Gravy's army is his trusty ship and the occasional Necromancer Defense reaction. While there may be blood in the water on the battlefield, yellows and blues were more important to the Shipwrecked Looter to enact his gameplan and chart his course on the high seas. Early theorycrafting allowed me to navigate new cards as they were slowly announced; I knew immediately which were gold and which were draft chaff. My theorycrafting proved fruitful and I was able to see major success with him at Nationals later that month, despite having limited time to playtest him. These days, modern Gravy lists closely resemble my Nationals list, even with cute tech such as Prismatic Leylines making the cut as a powerful 0 for 5 glue card. While my deck may have not been the inspiration for Gravy players around the world (as better players than myself have piloted this hero to great success), I'm proud I was able to get ahead of the pack and find out what makes Gravy tick in such a short amount of time with unconventional methods. 

The Method Behind the Madness

Don't let my lofty words and colorful depictions fool you, an extensive amount of playtesting is needed to refine any deck. Much like sharpening a blade against iron, it's important to throw your theory into the battlefield and see what works or what doesn't. Sometimes we may get overzealous in our deck brewing, adding a bit too much spice into the recipe. Below is the history of my Gravy Bones deck leading up to nationals, showcasing many of the mistakes I made and how I fine-tuned the build over time.

• When I say rough draft, I really mean rough draft. This was just forming the vision, I wanted a huge pirate crew that used a lot of blues so I could have flexibility on the high seas
• I never actually playtested this list, but just used it as a concept building exercise. After all was said and done, it was obvious I had too many no blocks, so back to the drawing board I went.

• This is where the real journey began, I trimmed the crew and ran as many good value blues and Tipples as I could.
• The deck swapped between 6 and 9 tipples, reds turned into CnCs and back into tipples. While the value of a tipple into CnC felt great, pressuring back-to-back on-hits with Hook and arsenal disruption as a follow up, a lot of the crew would find themselves resting at the bottom of my graveyard in these scenarios unless I kept a 4-5 card hand
• This made me explore other avenues that would allow my allies to be the star focus as, I figured, Legend Story Studios intended

• The gang’s all here, but instead of letting them all clog up my deck and send me overboard, I started opting for 1-ofs of specialized crew members. After playtesting I realized what a great toolbox the graveyard can be, this let me have access to a bunch of different allies while being a fantastic flavor win
• I finally removed the CnCs in favor of a few more blues, CnCs demanded too many linear plays and I decided I’d rather end my attack on an ally. This is a great example of how powerful generics aren't always the right answer
• I also started to experiment with Leylines for aggressive match ups, while I did like it the card was occasionally awkward with Tipples which affected my deck building going forward. This also pushed my Allies more into the spotlight 

• Finally we come to my Nationals list. I skipped a few stages of the deck building process here or there, but those were usually 2 or 3 game matches where I tested one card before adding another new card to test
• The Ally spread was still my favorite to this day, where I was able to include almost every ally that had a useful purpose in specific match ups. Shelly was good when needing to block into Nuu, Moray as an alternative win condition and pressure into Florian, Chowder for dominate match ups like Azalea, etc
• Unfortunately I ran out of time to playtest and needed to make a choice, so I chose to cut back on Tipples for more Leylines. Was it the right call? After the Tipple ban, decks started to come a lot closer to my nationals list so I felt justified, but perhaps there was a world where both could be run together. It just felt difficult when Leylines and Tipples would line up together without a blue resource card to pitch and a blue to attack with.
• Only one Riggermortis. This came down to playtesting bias because he kept exploding vs Oscilio and that felt bad. Looking back, he should've been higher in numbers, but also faced a last minute cut to run a few more one-ofs. This shows some of the downsides of building decks with themes in mind, and is something to be cautious of so you don't allow it to skew results but, instead, allow it to springboard inspiration

Applying Daydreaming to Theorycrafting

Year after year, the team at LSS continues to refine their craft in the design of new heroes in Flesh and Blood, and as the game becomes more complex, I believe they'll continue to use the class identity tools at their disposal. The theming of each hero will become more and more important. Being able to quickly pick up on what a hero's identity is, who they are flavor-wise and what cards they represent, can give you an edge in deck building new heroes. 

Recent sets like Super Slam are mostly perfect representations of this. RKO likes to bully when ahead and fake out the opponent with weak attacks that can suddenly become uppercuts. Talk about playing dirty. Speaking of dirty, Lyath will intimidate the opponent’s cards after using his intellect to stack power damage bonuses. This shows that he’s more than just his pint-sized stature, as he benefits from using small attacks that grow into towers, with powerful on-hits that rival even the mighty Bravo. Both get access to cheat cards and underhanded tricks as well, such as Concealed Object, Fix the Match, Gang Robbery, and Overturn the Results. I really adore the Reviled talent and it oozes with flavor in every corner of its card design. 

Revered, on the other hand, is less explored but is starting to make headlines. Tuffnut is a kindhearted hero who doesn't run many reds and opts for yellows and blues so he can keep slamming his big Rok around the field. Pleiades has recently become more of a fatigue deck, but, honestly, that's on brand for the Revered talent. It's a talent that is supposed to outlast the opponent until they can stage a comeback, so I'm not even upset. Tuffnut similarly also tends to draw the game out as long as possible until he can gain enough advantage from swinging Rok. Both heroes will valiantly continue to clash until they can score a win, never backing down and showing that even the underdog has a chance to win. 

Flavor wins like these have been common in the past few years. We even saw it with things such as the revamped Lightning talent and Fang pledging his loyalty to the empire. LSS decided to bless us with the insanity that is the Chaos talent and gave us a few new cards in Compendium of Rathe, showing off just how crazy and mind boggling these cards can be as they occasionally give the opponent extra cards or give their player disadvantages, making it feel like you’re the type of player who wants to watch the world burn when choosing to slot these into your deck. Such flavor wins are the proof in the pudding, so to speak, that LSS will continue to introduce new heroes with complex mechanics that reflect their lore and background into the cards, and if you can start to understand who a hero is in James White’s eyes, then perhaps the cards will easily fall into place when building your next deck for a brand new hero.