Welcome to Pichitumi Podcast, a show about the subjective past,
present, and potential future of flesh and blood design.
In today's episode, we discuss the Cleric class and provide
some different designs. You can find us across all
socials such as Blue Sky and Instagram at Pichitumi Podcast.
I'm Joel, I'm Fuzzy, and I'm Clark.
All right, everyone, we are recording this episode in early
March. It might be a while before it
gets to you because we wanted this to be one of our like,
backup episodes in case stuff's going on in our schedule.
We can still give you the best content that you could dream.
Of so hello from the past. So, a little bit of preamble.
The Cleric class. This comes from the idea that
there is going to be a clear class added to the game.
It was one of the professions listed in the original lore
book, so a lot of people have theorized that's going to be
added as a class one day, like Assassin was or Necromancer will
be already has been. I'm hoping it comes out in the
high seas. But what we like to do is that
each host takes a pitch and presents a different design that
they have designed away from the other host of how they might see
cleric. So you're going to get three
different ideas of sort of how the class might look like.
And we'll see if any of those end up showing up if and when
the class ever does get released.
In the meantime, this is going to be a pretty custom card heavy
show. And hopefully you like custom
cards. These are definitely really fun
to produce. And what's the show structure
like, Joel? So for today's episode, the
structure is going to be each of our hosts will come up with a
major slice, quote UN quote. Clark's going to start us off.
Joel will then take over the yellow pitch, and then Fuzzy
will round us out on blue pitch. And then we're going to come
together and sort of mash all the designs together to create
one super cleric and talk about what each of our designs would
look like in, in, you know, flesh and blood.
So for my red pitch is titled Religion is for suckers with AZ,
we're going 90s. I don't listen to my parents.
I'm going to the skate park. Take that mom.
So that's because I don't really like the idea of a cleric.
And I think that Prism as a light illusionist is just a
cleric. She looks like a cleric.
She acts like a cleric. I don't really think that they
can do cleric. I think necromancer has more
design space then cleric does right now in the game.
Wow, Why did we make you go first?
I don't know. Because it's out, I honestly
don't know. But I still think that if we do
some interesting top down designs where we start with an
interesting concept of building around religion, we can find
some unique and interesting mechanics that haven't been done
before. But I think it has to include
the soul. And I know that the soul has
remained as this thing that has been only for the light talent
and the light talent special little baby.
And I'm saying Nah, fuck that shit.
I think if you have a cleric, the cleric has to interact with
the soul in some way. And you can't have every single
cleric be a light cleric because I think that would be boring,
dull. Like why even make it a class at
that point? And you know you wouldn't be the
first one because Teclovosin the Macropotent also has the word
soul to describe all of those cards that are under him.
So it's not like this would be the first time a non light hero
has the soul. Typically they keep it to light
and shadow, but yes, very much so.
I think that the way that we are going to make it distinct from
light is that rather than focusing on cards entering and
leaving the soul, like with soul flare or removing it to make
spectral Shields, removing it to flip your figments instead.
The soul is going to be something that you build up over
time. So it's going to matter,
literally the cards that are inside of your soul.
It's not just going to be some empty card resource.
Their text is going to matter inside of the soul, because
clerics nurture the soul. Religion nurtures the soul.
Oh, OK. All right.
I see you, Clark. Yeah, that's pretty good.
I love this idea for design space because I feel like it's
inevitable that LSS is going to do some designs with it, you
know? It makes sense that they haven't
yet, but I imagine that like it's just a matter of time until
they do. So let's get into my first card
design. I call this Psalm of
Deliverance. It is a cleric non attack action
card with the prayer aura subtype.
It's a 0 cost yellow rare that says the first time you would
gain life on your turn you gain that much life plus one.
This effect is active while Psalm of Deliverance is in your
soul. And on the field, right, it's an
aura on the field buffing your life gain.
And if that aura is in your soul, it is doing the same exact
thing. It's also buffing your life
game. Yes, very much so.
Now this is not a good rate. It's a yellow 0 cost non tech
action card that gives you one value a turn.
And yeah, that's just not very, very good.
But the whole point is that you try to get it into Seoul so that
stays around for a longer amount of time.
But how does it get into your soul?
At the beginning of your end phase, if you have gained 4 or
more life, this turn put some of deliverance into your soul.
So each prayer will have this quest that you need to achieve
for it to get into your soul. And each prayer would have a
different thing to do. For me, this is harkening to how
religions have rituals. I come from a Catholic
background, so we have very structured ritualistic services,
right where you do the same thing, right?
Repeat Hail Mary 15 times, that kind of idea.
If you complete the quest, you get the blessing.
But you may have mentioned OK, one value every single turn if
that's on the field for the entire game, that's incredibly
broken, right? Don't worry at the beginning of
your turn, destroy this card if it's in the arena.
So you can only really get one value from this card unless you
end up gaining the four life to put it into your soul.
This does have Go Again so that you can perform other actions
that would gain you the four life to complete the quest.
All the prayers will have Go again.
It has no power and blocks for two because LSS loves two blocks
now and so do I. What do you guys think of the
prayer design? I really like this pattern,
having these auras that give you a little bit of value.
You do a little quest and you get that value indefinitely, and
I think that's a really cool, rewarding play pattern and I'm
excited to see where you iterate on it with.
As the resident soul enjoyer, I really like this design too,
mostly because like you mentioned earlier, a lot of your
cards, well specifically in Bolton, because you have to
charge from your hand, most of your cards are just yellow
fodder or charge fodder. And with Prism, all of your
cards are really good attacks. So you like be aggressive with
other than like, you know, like a Halo of illumination or or
some other Shannon against to get cards in your soul.
So I like that the quest to get it into your soul is harder and
the payoff is also much better. And you can sort of see just on
this card alone that the quest of like getting multiple of
these psalms into your or these prayers into your soul is going
to like really turn on the rest of your hero power, which we
haven't seen yet, but already I like this design.
And that's a great segue. Let's talk about the hero
design. I have named my hero Cantor, a
Sears Herald. It's the an adult cleric hero.
At the start of your turn, if you have less than three cards
in Seoul, you may discard A cleric card from your hand.
If you do, search your deck for a prayer and put it into your
hand. So this lets you sort of craft
the prayer that you need so that you could actually get cards
into your soul. The whole point is that you stay
card neutral, but you get to pick the prayer that you're
putting in. So you can pick it based on
match up or based on what cards you drew.
That's going to let you complete its quest.
It requires you to have a very intimate knowledge of your deck,
but we've seen how decks like Katsu already ask that of the
players to understand very quintessentially how a card in
hand might interact with a card in their deck.
This is very similar, right? You draw a Sigil of Solace.
OK, I really want Psalm of Deliverance, so I'm going to
discard some other prayer, get Psalm of Deliverance.
Then I can go Psalm of Deliverance, play sigil of
Solace. There's my four life.
It goes into my soul. This sounds like a really strong
hero power. It does, but that's because at
the beginning of your in phase, if you have not gained life this
turn, remove a random card from your soul.
So it comes with the downside. Yes, it comes with this inherent
downside of having cards occasionally have to leave your
soul, because otherwise you will just end up doing the
illusionist thing where you get a bunch of multiplicative value.
Your soul just gets bigger and bigger and then it overwhelms
all of your opponents. And that's not fun, right?
I think that's very bothersome to the game, and especially
because the soul is something that's really hard to interact
with, right? Only really shadow heroes have
the ability to like, remove cards from Seoul.
And I think it would actually be very bad for light heroes if
they turn that into a generic thing that they gave to a lot of
classes and talents. So instead, if you Simply put
enough pressure on your opponent, or if they draw
poorly, then they're going to start losing their soul.
And it's random too, so they're losing like random bits of their
hero. They're kind of like a hero
ability. Yeah.
I think some of this like the randomness or it, it's going to
depend on really a lot of testing.
One thing that we can't do for these designs is test them.
So we can't really fine tune it. I think there is some fine
tuning to maybe be done with how often and how quickly cards
leave Seoul. It all depends on how quickly
you can get cards into Seoul and and just how much value are they
really presenting. Also, I'm noticing that even if
you do like let's say you go first, do you?
You win the dice roll, you end up going first, You search for a
prayer, you still need to gain life.
Otherwise that prayer that you theoretically put into your soul
is going to get removed almost immediately.
So even though this is a a really powerful effect, you get
to search exactly for the car that you need or the car that
you want to start building your soul with, you still also need
to manage the life game portion of this mini game.
Otherwise this effect doesn't mean anything.
You're just thinning your deck out and getting closer to
fatigue essentially. Yeah, we're kind of used to
Lavia, where as long as I'm banishing to blood debt the
blood that's going away, but this hoop I need to jump through
is always there, even when I'm loading up my soul.
Now I do expect equipment that will help Cantor work around
those negatives of either being able to like, oh, I couldn't
complete this prayer. That's OK, You can like help it
stick around another turn. Maybe the weapon does that.
I'm expecting like a book, right?
The big, the big religious tome that they proselytize from or
and equipment that can as a one time sacrifice, give you some
life. So you can be like, I really
need to hold on to my soul in the early game.
I'm going to destroy this, gain some life, and that way I can, I
can keep going. Cool.
And I would be remiss if I didn't design A specialization
card so. True bestie.
So I've designed Exalted Revelation, a cleric non attack
action card. It's A2 cost yellow majestic
that is a legendary Cantor specialization.
Only one of these in your deck and it says deal damage to your
opponent equal to the amount of cards in Seoul.
Not even arcane, just damage. Yep, straight nuke of damage.
This is Cantor calling down the might of the A seer from the
heavens to smite his enemies. Yeah, he gets stronger the more
prayers that he has completed. This is very flavorful.
I love the pilgrimage and just like yeah, unleashing this fat
stack of damage after building up your soul, it could also just
be like a 0 for four. Like I need to make use of the
prayers because I think the game is going to end soon.
Or maybe destroy some ward? Yeah.
Direct damage just take out some ward.
Very, very doable. And I like how your hero ability
you described, where as long as you have less than three cards
in soul, it's really easy for you to find prayers, to find the
right prayer that you know you can sink in there.
And once you get past three, it's still very much possible,
but a lot harder, right? So this card has an expectation
that it'll be easy to deal three direct damage to my opponent. 4
still, and five is still possible, still very possible.
But when we think of like this direct damage, like reckless
swing, you don't go to two life against a brute.
You try not to go below like 4 because if they have two
reckless swings, you're down, right?
So for this class, it sounds like you really don't wanna go
down to three live. Yeah, and hopefully not close to
three, but. If you can pressure the cleric
so that they are losing the cards from their soul,
eventually they'll have less and less of that reach of the direct
damage. All right, that was my design
for the cleric, focusing on rituals and completing prayers
and the building of soul, very much sort of harkening to these
ideas of light, which could honestly maybe befuddle the
design, honestly. So I'm interested in seeing what
Joel has designed for the cleric, someone who is so
attached to light that there's no way he would design light
again. All right, so for my pitch, it's
titled Richer, Badder, and Holier Than Thou.
And I want to talk a little bit about like what I like about
Cleric and how I enjoy flesh and blood, because that like really
ties into this design. Specifically, a lot of people
compare flesh and blood to a fighting game, which I don't
think is incorrect, but I don't play fighting games to the
extent that a lot of other people do.
I usually describe it to new players as like playing your
favorite D&D characters as like a commander, so to speak, like
like Magic the Gathering. So when I had my first like
Pathfinder or D&D experience, it's sort of like strengthened
my belief in this like comparison to flesh and blood.
And another reason why I really like Cleric is it's one of the
first conversations, like even before we thought of Pitch It to
Me podcast being the name of our podcast, we talked for like 3-4
hours about how a cleric would exist in in flesh and blood.
And it just it's always something that I've like really
been looking forward to talking about.
And to Clark's point, he, you know, presents a really good
arguments about how light heroes already like, cannibalize the
identity that Cleric could. Have Yeah, they're entirely
based around the religion of Solana.
Right. And I think leaning into that
identity is what make is what would, and I think leaning into
that identity is what would make cleric really interesting,
specifically through the use of domains.
So I'm not like the most seasoned D&D player, so if you
hear some inconsistencies, I apologize.
I'm not, you know, that's not really my expertise.
But I think the use of domains can change how a cleric would
present itself in flesh and blood, and that's what would
make it interesting to me. Kind of like talents, right?
Exactly. Yeah, like, sort of like a
subset of talents, because, you know, a cleric plays very
differently from other ones based on like what deity they
want to support or whatever. But first I'm going to talk
about what the generic cleric cards would be and like where
the design is rooted in. And so for the first car that I
developed, it's called Channel Divinity.
You might have heard it from like DND or Pathfinder.
It's it's a real ability, yeah. Yeah, and and you're going to
see that across the rest of my cards too.
Like these are rooted in stuff that I've seen in Pathfinder and
DND. So channel divinity says or it's
a yellow majestic surprise surprise, it's a cleric non
attack action that costs zero blocks for three and has go
again. And similar to the other channel
cards in flesh and blood, this one would have the same
mechanics as like channel mount heroic for instance.
So that means at the beginning of your end phase, put a flow
counter on Channel Divinity, then destroy it, unless you put
a clerk card from your pitch zone to the bottom of your deck
for each flow counter on it. And it says when this enters and
at the start of your turn, put 2 divinity counters on your hero.
I like the channel cards and I think channel divinity as a
concept of like a cleric channeling the divinity.
It's flavorful. It's right in line of what I
expect the class to be doing, and dealing with divinity
counters is a lot different than dealing with cards in Seoul, so
I like it. Yep.
I'm really excited to see what these divinity counters do.
If this Channel Divinity is just giving us these divinity
counters, hopefully it'd be pretty cool.
So for context, this card would get you a total of 2 divinity
counters when it enters, and then on the if you keep it
around for at least one turn, you'll get 4 Divinity counters.
So keep that in mind as I talk about the rest of the designs.
So now I'm going to get into the hero.
For a little bit of context, this is a light cleric, so I'm
still playing with the light identity.
No, you did go back to light. Yeah, I lied earlier, but this
cleric is specifically a light domain or domain of lights.
So that's again harkening to the D&D mechanic and that's how I'm
going to frame the rest of like these light cleric cars
specifically. And the hero I came up with,
well, name is a work in progress.
I just named him Jim the Cleric because I didn't know what what
cool name I wanted. To that is so D&D coded though
as Adm. It's like, what's this guy's
name? Fucking Jim?
I don't know man, just fucking move on.
Yeah, this is your question. It's like the 14th PC that
doesn't matter. Please move on.
So Jim, the cleric has four intellect and 38 health.
Because we're going to be playing with life totals.
And so I think when you play with life totals or prevention,
you should have lower life. Yeah.
If the if the hero's built around gaining life, they should
have less life. Absolutely.
So his ability reads as a once per turn action and additional
cost of banishing 3 spells from your graveyard.
Remove a divinity counter from your hero and create an
eloquence token and gain one life.
Eloquence tokens are so good, dude.
Like he's a cleric. What is like the one thing that
like priests and clerics are known for?
It's being really good speakers. Eloquent.
Why didn't I put that in my design?
I also think Eloquence, and I think this is something you've
mentioned to Clark, Eloquence tokens are just criminally under
populated in the rest of the the rest of flesh and blood really.
So I wanted to find a way to incorporate them without making
them broken. So I hope you'll pay attention
to the rest of the designs and see how valuable the Divinity
counters and the Eloquence tokens are.
So we can remove a Divinity counter once we've gotten enough
cards in our graveyard to make this Eloquence and Game of Life
correct. So that's one of the big outlets
for these Divinity counters, and it's why we get so many on
Channel Divinity. Exactly.
So for my next design, I've created magic weapon, which is a
common place that says you're going to find it in red, yellow
and blue. It's a cleric non a tech action
spell. So this is the first spell which
is something that you can banish to your hero ability.
This spell cost 0 resources is a three block with no go again
specifically because of your eloquence token.
So basically you're going to be cashing in your spells for
eloquence tokens so that you can play more of these spells and
get effects from them as you play them.
Because this one reads and tell the end of your next turn your
tax gain. When this hits deal 3-2 or one
arcane damage, similar to rolling like AD 4 for the
additional like radiant damage. But I didn't want to use
radiant, I just chose arcane damage.
And that's like if it's a red, yellow or blue copy.
Yeah, exactly. So the red would be dealing 3
arcane damage for every hit, and then the blue would be dealing
1. So without go again, this only
gives you one turn of having the buff because it has no go again,
your turn ends. So only on your next turn will
your attacks have this effect. Correct.
But if you can use that eloquent token cash in that the vanity,
then you can get two turns of this effect.
Being active? Yep.
And since this requires at least a card for your weapon swing, or
two cards for like an attack on the turn you play magic weapon
or the turn after you play magic weapon, I feel like getting 6
value from this card is pretty hard.
So that's why I've decided to do 3 arcane damage on him.
Yeah, plus. Opponents can just block.
Yeah, I could see this being really strong if you have lots
of go against, you know, scar for a scar ravenous rabble.
But it also kind of depends on how many you have in kit, right?
I also feel like this design feels a lot like an aura, you
know, where if something's going to give me a static effect for
my next turn. Like, think of like the guardian
auras. The guardian auras don't say,
hey, on your next turn, your first attack gets blank.
They sit around and then they destroy themselves.
And I think part of the reason for that is for memory so that
the players can really easily remember that this is an effect
they're going to get. Yeah.
Although notably, your hero, your hero ability wants to
banish spells from your graveyard.
So putting more spells in your graveyard faster is probably a
good reason why you'd want to make this a simple non attack
action instead of an aura. Right.
Like it would be a little bit awkward if I had to wait for the
following turn after magic weapon goes away to then banish
it to my hero ability in order to, you know, do the rest of my
stuff. Yeah, but you're starting to see
the synergy. Like I want to banish my spells
to empower the rest of my spells with like go again on my non
attack actions and then obviously magic Weapon buffing
the rest of my attacks. My last card that I want to talk
about is Mass Restoration. This is a yellow majestic light
cleric non attack action and it's a spell as well.
So already you're seeing that most of cleric cards will
probably be some combination of spells.
And this is also a three block and the text reads each hero
gains 2 life each hero, each hero.
Yeah, so UPF playable, baby UPF and also Pve playable whenever
that comes. Yeah.
And then it says when you play this card, you may remove one
divinity counter from your hero to increase your healing by two.
OK, so another use for the divinity counters.
We can remove the divinity counters to break parity with
our opponent, right? And make it so that we gain 4.
They gain 2. So I was heavily inspired by
Coax of the Commotion because that also says when this hits
each year against one life. And I've used that card in
effect to raise my own life threshold because I'm the
aggressor. But I want A to be out of an
opponent's kill range for a certain turn.
So each year gaining 2 life might not be super impactful,
but as you scale up your divinity counters, you will be
gaining 4 life for the cost of two, which is similar to Count
Your blessings. But I'm going to get into why
you might want to cast this spell over Count Your Blessings.
I've also added this new keyword Upcast, which says you may
search your deck and banish any number of cards named Mass
Restoration if you do copy this card.
So what this allows you to do is much like you would in D&D, you
can cast this card at a higher spell level or use a higher
spell slot to make this card more powerful.
However, when you copy this card, you still need to.
Remove divinity counters. So you need at least three
divinity counters if you want to get the Max value of this card
for a total of 12 healing. I really like this effect
because it seems like such an interesting choice.
Sometimes you just want to cast this card when you have access
to it, and sometimes you want to wait till you have more divinity
counters so that you can upcast it.
If you're worried about, hey, how often am I going to get
channel Divandi to put Divandi counters on my hero right?
Then I need to be concerned about upcasting and burning
through all my Divandi counters and then what?
I have two 3-4 turns without Divandi counters?
Yep. So maybe you only want to upcast
by one extra copy. Yeah, where the flavor really
meets like good design here is similar to like AD and D game.
If you're getting fucked by this particular enemy, you can just
and expend a really powerful spell to sort of save yourself
or your your your allies. In a similar vein in flesh and
blood, if you're getting farmed by this aggro deck that you're
playing against and you're like, OK, I have 3 divinity counters.
I don't know when I'll be able to find enough room to disrupt
them and gain parity back. So I'm just going to upcast it
and gain 12 life and hopefully that'll give me enough time to
get back into the game. But it's still at action speed,
so it's not like you're immune to disruption and you can still
be like Arsenal disrupted if I park this card for a future
turn. So this is what I would think
would be a really balanced way of including life gain into not
only hero power, but the main core cards of a hero.
Because you're you're already on this quest to not only find
Channel Divinity, but keep it around for multiple turns so you
can build up Divinity counters and cash them in for eloquence
tokens and all of that. I think to gain 12 life as
compared to Count Your Blessings where you just need to cast each
card and pay 2, it seems like there's enough going on to make
it balanced. I just had a thought off of this
card, Joel. Like literally while we're
recording. I didn't have this thought
during our notes, but we were going over designs.
New thoughts. New thought.
I think it would be really interesting if Cleric appeared
as a support only class for Pve. Oh.
Sort of like how Bard and merchant are young only or like
UPF only right? It'd be really interesting to
see Cleric as a Pve only support class.
I could see that mostly because I think the offense for cleric
would be a little hard to figure out and make it different from
other heroes. I think magic weapons is a good
like step in the right direction, but I also really
like the idea of just making it a Pve support class.
Yeah. I totally see it.
Yeah, for new thoughts. Yeah, but yeah, that's my cleric
idea. Very heavily inspired on
innovating on the light design and moving away from the sole
mechanic, as well as finding a way to incorporate D&D spells
and balanced life gain. So I hope you guys like it and
feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions or what you
think LSS would do to improve upon this design.
But I think we have one more host who has a slice they
haven't talked about yet. Yeah, this is if I did red pitch
and you did yellow pitch, then that must mean talents going.
Right, so it's fuzzy. Fuzzy Oh my God, I can't believe
I am so happy. Fuzzy, what's your blue pitch?
All right, so I've titled my blue pitch Pure for Holy men,
which I think only about 5% of our listener base is going to
understand as a reference to something that already exists in
the world, and that's OK. God knows I don't.
Yeah, what the hell is this? My cleric design is all based on
the idea of purity sanctity, because if you're a man of God,
a man of religion, you need to have a very devout life that you
lead. And I wanted to reflect that
purity mechanically with cards that do not have any abilities.
That's right, pure flesh and blood, baby.
Wait, is this raging onslaught tribal?
Basically, yeah, I'm forming my design around why you might want
to put cards in your deck that have no abilities or potentially
take abilities away from cards in order to get a benefit.
I'm going to start with my hero card.
I've called him Christophe, Purifier of Hearts.
He's a cleric hero and he has the text when an attack action
card you control deals 2 or more damage.
If it has no abilities, you gain to life.
And I'd like to remind everyone off the bat, Go Again is an
ability. I don't think there's a lot of
rules, official rules right now that very clearly outlined, at
least when I was reading through them, what is an ability and
what's like not an ability, even if it affects at a card.
So some of it's going to be me taking a little bit of artistic
liberty with what I consider inability to be go again is an
ability. If an A card has if a card has
go again and no other effects, it would still have an ability
and not be able to trigger Kristoff's effects.
Well, typically it's like if there's something in the text
box, right? I think that's everything in the
text box. Is an ability.
If you could say the text box is blank, then it has no abilities.
That's a good way to think about it.
Other than like flavoured text, I think this would be yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this would be a really
good design for like not only really sick full arts, but also
like really good flavor texts, flavor texts of like the events
of Wraith. Because if you're a Holy Spirit
or a holy man traveling through the world of Wraith, you
probably are an observer of other people.
Yeah, yeah, I totally love that. Now I want it even more.
Also, sorry, one more thing, I like how your hero ability is
basically half of Crush, so I'm yeah, I'm gonna name it Smush
smush. Well, the thing I like about
Crush is it like is an on hit, but a little bit more balanced.
It's a little bit of control as to how much damage you're able
to deal, right? If you're leaking one damage,
that's not quite enough. We want to have a more solid hit
in order to give this benefit. And interesting play about how
we block, right? So it's interesting on both
sides. Exactly.
Our breakpoints change, Yeah. And I really wanted this cleric,
like if he's going to be gaining life, which I think is important
to cleric, I wanted him to do it proactively, which is why I
turned it into this on hit. You know, like that's Clark has
said it before on the podcast that if a cleric is about
gaining life, what's stopping someone from just gaining life
and just playing defensively and driving everyone crazy?
And this is my response to that design issue that could be
inherent in cleric. Yeah, I mean, we Joel was just
saying hard to always find the aggression.
I didn't put I, I, you know, mine was a single finishing
spell, Joel. Yours was an aura that had to
augment other attacks. Let's see what cleric attacks
look like. Yeah, I gave this Christophe
cleric for intellect and 38 health.
So you can kind of think of it like the first time I gain life
off my hero ability, I'm at the same life total as most heroes.
It's everyone after that where you actually feel like you're
profiting off your hero ability. I really like these designs
because I love the fundamentals of flesh and blood, and I'm so
excited to get to play so close to what makes a good flesh and
blood card. The first card I want to talk
about is called Sheer Power of Will.
It's a cleric attack action card with no abilities.
Empty text boxes, baby. That's what we're talking about.
Which means it can proc my hero power.
It costs five. It's a common and that red,
yellow, blue, it swings for 987. Holy damage.
So we already have cards in the game at generic that are 0 for
four, blocking for 3/1 for five, blocking for 3/2 for 6/3 for
seven. I'm imagining there'd be a four
for 8 and A5 for 9. This is the five for 9:00.
The Guardians get the four for eight.
Yeah, yeah. Clarify for nine.
Yeah, I like that a lot. And like I said, this blocks for
three, so it costing 5 does give you a little bit of challenge as
to like what you're going to use with that extra resource.
There might be some cool equipment or offhand effects or
other cards that I'll get into in a second.
It also comes in for 9:00. So as far as break points go,
we've already know that like the break points are a little bit
different because you could block for 8 and not proc beyond
hit. What do you guys think about
this card? One note simple thing is that
there is no way to give 2 cards to prevent the on hit of
Christoff's hero ability. Well, if you had two D reacts
maybe like sync blue into sync below.
Specifically 2D reacts which is really hard to come across.
But if you throw 2 cards in front of this, blocking for six,
I'm still going to get to gain life, and I'll still have a
point differential of like 5, right?
Dealing three damage, gaining 2 life.
Yeah. Throwing a huge ass attack is a
really good way to have a card with no abilities still provide
a really interesting challenge for your opponent.
I also see this being as like there you might have like 1 red
but the blue seem really valuable.
Those are easier to block, but just having a 5 for seven, like
that's a really good popper for like president, for example,
that's just like competitive please plus.
Nude loves this. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, take the blue ones out against you for sure.
Yeah, yeah, Kristoff isn't getting printed until Nu LL. 0
for seven. The next card I want to show off
is Proselytize. It's a cleric attack action that
costs one. It's another common and this one
does have an ability. It says your attacks, this
combat chain without abilities have plus one power and it it of
itself is also an attack that swings for three, two or one if
it's red, yellow or blue, and it has go again and blocks for two.
So if this hero is really focused on having one big
attack, I'm imagining it's going to want some sort of like pumps
to go with it. But I also wanted this cleric to
be a little bit more melee focused, you know, I guess a
little bit more of a knocky heads sort of cleric.
So this attack pumps your future cards with no abilities, but it
also has a little bit of an attack of itself.
So it throws a little bit of damage and it makes it a little
bit harder for your next attack action with no effects to be
blocked. And with that rate, if you only
get one attack without abilities, this is basically a
one for four go again, which I think is pretty fair.
This is like a draft shaft common that I think you could
still slot into your actual constructive decks if you wanted
to. So paired together with sheer
power of will, we are looking at pitching 2 Blues to come in for
three and then 10, and if they do not block 9 on the 10 powered
card you also gain 2 life for a total of 15 value.
Damn 4 card 15 with no disruption.
I think that's pretty balanced, you know, because as soon as
they, I mean. It's pretty aggro, which I don't
think people were thinking of when they thought.
Cleric here. Yeah, this is definitely a
reverse of what Clark and I were thinking about, but I don't
think that's a bad thing. I think it's really cool
actually. Yeah, it's really different from
the other designs we've seen. It's flesh and blood.
You got to play attacks in flesh and blood.
You can sit there and play a caster, I guess, like we have
wizard. But you know, I imagine the
cleric is like almost, almost 1/2 caster depending on how you
want to like roll them up. You know why?
Spell when bunk. Yeah, next I have an instant.
I call it power word silence. That's so cool.
Yeah, I definitely like a similarly inspired, but usual I
feel like all of the cleric things that I've seen in RPGs
that have this like power word effect like in Hearthstone,
right? Yeah, this is a rare one.
Cost yellow color locked at yellow, and it costs one less if
it targets an attack you control.
OK, kind of like, was it blinding beam?
Yes. Yeah, yeah, Blinding Beam cost 1
less if it targets a Shadow card.
Yeah, so you can either target an opponents attack for one or
your own attack for zero and that attack loses all abilities
and its controller gains an action point.
OK. I think like targeting an
opponent's card and having it lose, go again, like Blizzard is
a really strong effect and I wanted to respect that strength
by giving the opponent the action point back.
I'm not trying to scam go again from my opponent's cards.
I'm trying to remove on hits right If I'm targeting my
opponent's cards. Now this could give something
like C&C go again essentially by giving the opponent.
An action point. Yeah, but then you're able to
play D reacts after you play this instant or it's no longer
wiping your arsenal. I think that's worth giving a
card for in circumstances, probably specific circumstances
where there's a particular on hit you're really worried about.
I also want to note there's a really, really cool thing here.
Let's say someone tries to CNC pummel you, right?
And you read the CNC pummel and you respond with this card.
You would take away the pummel effect, yeah, of giving the
attack. When this hits a hero, they
discard a card, but you would not remove the plus four power
that it would be given. Yes.
Is that right? Yes.
At least again, we're getting into like the nitty gritty of
like what's in effect and what's not.
For my cleric design, I was imagining that anything that
buffs power is not an ability. So you can buff the power of
something and it would still work with Kristoff's your
ability and this card would not take away that buff of power.
Because it doesn't say give this card the text of has plus four
power. It just says give it plus four
power. Very cool, I like that.
You could also use it on your own cards to make give them like
pseudo go again so you can swing vanilla card into vanilla card.
Or if you just really need that life game.
Yeah, you can like remove your own effects.
And I also just love the idea of playing this card with something
like, I don't know, like gore belching where you remove the
downside from it. And so you play this part with
gore belching and then it says 0 for seven.
Or ravaged rabble. Yeah, yeah, although ravenous
rabble you're taking away go again again.
So it's just a 0 for five. Well, you get an action.
Point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you do.
But it's a little bit less on rate than say, like gore
belching. Actually be a 0 for seven if it
hits. Yeah, if it hits, yeah, yeah.
That's pretty good. You're spending an entire card
just to do this instant to remove abilities.
Well, I guess that is like A2 card seven.
Yeah, I mean, some classes take that all day.
Yeah, 100%. So this is the kind of thing
where I think it's fun not just to play vanilla cards, but maybe
cards that have negatives about them.
And you're using your cleric abilities, your magic, in order
to remove the downsides, Purge the downsides from cards and go
back to that pure state. That is the single most
interesting thing about Magic the Gathering to me.
So the fact that you just said that makes me really excited
about about this design in particular.
I'm partially inspired by an archetype from Yu-gi-oh called
Skill Drain. Where there you play these like
cards that have like alternate and casting costs, but they're
worse. And then you play skill drain
and they go back to their original like, like a stat
curve. Yeah.
So you get to play like fat creatures for cheap.
It's kind of fun. So that's my those are my
designs. Now what I think we're going to
do is we're going to take a little bit of a break and come
back to the table with some new designs that we designed only
after we heard each other's. And we're going to try to merge
some of them and see what we come up with.
Yeah. So we'll catch you guys in a
second. All right, we're back.
For you it was only a second, but for us that was like 45
minutes of doing some hard brewing.
Yeah, I'm very happy with what we came up with.
But before we get into that, we have a Patreon submission that
we need to mention for you guys, yes?
If you join at the five or $10 tier, you can suggest a card for
us to shout out at the Arsenal Zone like we normally do.
We're not doing it this time, but we do do it.
Our Arsenal Zone is where we talk about a card we love, a
card we hate, a card we love to hate, and we are going to select
one of our Patreon subscribers. At random.
So if you'll please touch real noise, it is Josh Befield with
Channel the Millennium Tree. Thank you so much for your
submission. Channel the Millennium tree
Fuzzy. What do you call this card?
It's broccoli. I didn't come up with that name,
but it's it's the truth that that tree lives.
Yep, that tree is indeed broccoli.
And Josh eats his broccoli. Yep.
And for the folks at home channel the Millennium Tree is a
three cost earth action aura that's three block and is a red
pitch. And it says when this enters the
arena and at the beginning of your action phase Amp 3 and it
has the regular channel earth effect, so that you need at
least one earth card in your pitch son for each flow counter
on this card. Here's what Josh had to say
about the card. I've been playing a very
different Florian list on Talishar and this card is so
nice to have if I haven't hit my threshold of rune chance or I
haven't. He says room chance.
I think he did it on purpose. So I'm going to say that if I
haven't hit my threshold of room chance or if I haven't turned on
Florian, it's a great earth block 3.
And when I do pop off it feels nice to have that on the board.
Even in the more mid range Florian list.
It's a great card either to decompose with or to have on the
field to pump your rune chance. This is actually the inspiration
a little bit for Channel Divandy.
We went through a couple different ones and we actually
looked at how this card worked as a way of inspiring how that
card worked. We love channeling on this
podcast. Yeah, now if I remember
correctly, someone somewhere got boomed by a particular.
Broccoli Fuzzy Fuzzy played Jail the Millennium Tree.
He gets me and kind of fucked me up with it.
It's a really strong card. I played Florina, their last
Armory. I beat Clark with it and like it
was my first time actually playing with channeled on the
name tree. I got to borrow copies from our
friend Luke. He's on our discord 2 his prime
frog, he's a homie. And I also had a game, the only
game I lost that whole Armory. I felt like if I had played
against my played, if I had played around my broccoli
better, I probably would have won that game.
Yeah, the it's really, really cool because it's like Channel
Mount Heroic in terms of its math or kind of what it's
expected math is. Breyer obviously broke that
math, but by changing the wording of like when this enters
and at the start of your turn you get to amp three.
I really like that because it prevents that ability of
breaking it by throwing a bunch of arcane effects like the rune
chance for Florian. And I what I really like about
this card too is like at face value amping really is like a
wizard keyword. Like you wanna amp your spell so
that you hit your surge threshold but Florian uses it to
really good effect because when you are turned on as Florian and
like your grasp is generating 2 rune chants.
If you have the channel the Millennium tree you with just a
blue you can create a rune chant, have one rune chant come
in for four and then the second one come in for that fifth point
of damage and then swing with reaping blade making that A1
card. What is that 8?
That's insane. Yeah, yeah, really, really
strong. Plus, when you're Rune Blade,
people like bringing AB one into you and then you just get to go
one source of four. I've been even toying around
with an Aurora build that plays Harness lightning so with high
voltage so I can go amp one for arcane, I win the game.
Oh, that's actually pretty. Cool, Very very silly, but it
goes to show like just how powerful like AMP is and taller
arcane numbers are when people are expecting typically lower
arcane numbers. Yeah, it's a really good way to
like break the fatigue too. Like I I've as then I've played
against many Florians who they will just play tree and just
chunk me for big points of damage because like you said
Clark, I only have the one AB and that stacks up over time,
especially with all the other arcane you're dealing with like
stacking a ruin chance. So it's just a really good card
to like, give yourself as the Earth hero some finality to your
game. And so I'm, I'm really happy
with like how both Earth heroes are using it in CC.
Yeah. Love the shout.
Yeah, thank you so much for your submitting.
And don't worry if you didn't hear your card for this episode.
Keep submitting because we do this every time we record an
episode. And sooner or later, we're going
to say your name and your car that you're thinking of.
Yeah, so. Now we're going to get on to the
rest of our inventory where we're going to talk about these
new designs that they came up with after listening to each
other's interesting cleric designs.
Yeah. So this is the inventory section
different from our Arsenal zone and that it's going to be a
little bit longer and we want to sort of try to find the common
ground or ways of incorporating multiple of our ideas together.
So, Fuzzy, do you want to go over the first one here?
Sure. This one is called Hymn of Hope.
It's inspired by my cards that care about like playing attacks
with no abilities and Clark's prayer design where you have
these little auras that give you passive effects in their if
you're in their soul, but you have to go through some quest to
get it into your soul to get the repeated value.
Hymn of Hope is a 0 cost red majestic.
It says the first time you attack with a card that doesn't
have any abilities, give that card plus one power.
This effect is active while Hymn of Hope is in your soul.
To get it into your soul you have to hit with a card with no
abilities and at the start of your turn it destroys itself.
It has go again and blocks for two.
Yeah, very. This is really just like the
mashup of the two designs, right?
The plus one effect is nice because it doesn't get in the
way of the card having no abilities.
The ability is provided by the prayers, and that's the sort of
synergy that I enjoyed between our two designs, right?
The prayers can give us all the cumulative value that you
normally expect from having abilities, and then the ability
list cards can still do what they're good at, which is being
very highly rated. Like I can see playing this card
in my hero because it's giving all of my cards with no
abilities plus one power, right? And I could see it in your hero
that just wants to get extra prayers in there.
Yeah, it's a good prayer and also just like prayer into
wounding blow for five. That's a great card.
Yeah, why not? Also, this isn't like a mash up
of my design at all, but what I do like about it is it feels
sort of like a transcend card in a way.
It gives one point of value, and if you're able to convert that
point of value, not that any of the transcend cards require on
hits, but just. That other card guaranteeing the
on hit you get this bonus effect that now persists for the rest
of your turns with that plus one power.
If we're also just talking about like melding the two hero
abilities, Fuzzy, your hero ability of gaining life going
really well with my hero ability with the wounding blow that I
suggested right? A 0 for four now goes to five,
meaning you have to give 2 cards because if you only give one
three block, 5 power is 2 over gain 2 life.
Now I'm keeping my prayer too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like how that turned out. Nice job guys.
I'm going to go ahead and jump in on the next design.
This was sort of trying to meld what me and Joel had going on.
Now, we did have some difficulty with this.
Yeah, because both of our designs played around individual
mini games that did not play well.
It's not that they didn't play well together, it's that you
want to avoid a bloat by not having too many mini games,
right? Yeah.
You kind of want to just focus on one.
But we found common ground in what we were missing.
So in can't weapon is the name of the card.
It's a cleric non attack action spell aura.
So this is a spell from Joel's designs is A1 cost red rare that
equips a spiritual weapon token into your off hand.
It can block 3. So what's a spiritual weapon
token? Well, we acknowledge that both
of our heroes probably aren't attacking very much.
They're very focused on their non attack action cards.
Also note this doesn't have go again, so you probably want to
give a go again with an eloquence token.
A lot of focus on Joel's designs there.
Where does mine come in? The spiritual weapon is a cleric
weapon and once returned action you can pay 2 resources to
attack with go again. It attacks for three and it says
at the beginning of your in phase destroy this if you do not
have three or more prayers in your soul.
So we were trying to harken back to that idea of the spiritual
weapon spell in D&D that requires you to hold on to
concentration that's represented in these prayers staying in your
soul. And it also has the line, the
text of this card can be equipped in your off hand if you
control a book. So maybe there is a build of
Joel's hero that has its own weapon, right?
Mace or a hammer or something, right?
But if you're going for the more spell cast the wizard, this
could be a way of giving yourself that weapon that then
allows you to fight the fatigue battle, provided you actually
keep up your prayers and your spells.
One thing that this design reminds me of is it says, like,
you have to really, like, pray in order to warm it up.
And then D&D, like, that's the thing you do when you wake up
from your long rest. You have to prepare your spells,
you know? Yeah.
And that preparation, like, to make sure that your spiritual
weapon is all ready to go for your fight.
I feel like it's on theme. Yeah, another thing that I like
about this fusion of our designs, Clark, is that not only
does the weapon have Go Again by, by pitching a yellow, you
can more easily keep Channel Divinity around for for a
subsequent turn. This is exactly what I was
missing too because I basically only had the one spell that
costed anything that I could actually keep my channel around.
And by keeping more divinity counters flowing in, I create
more eloquence tokens which gives my spiritual or my which
gives my incant weapon non attack actions go again.
So that I yeah, it just fits really well.
And I'm also gaining life with my hero abilities.
So I think this flows perfectly with what I was missing as well.
Also, Joel, I'm not sure if you noticed all of the cards that we
designed were yellow. Yeah, I think you were.
No, you had the 1 red in the magic weapon.
That was rainbow. Yeah, yeah.
We had a lot of yellow in our design.
Yeah, I think you're a light believer as well.
You just didn't want to accept it on camera.
And for our last card that we came up fuzzy and I had this
cool collab called Earthly Bounce.
It's a cleric attack action that costs zero is a red, yellow, and
blue at rare. And it says when this attacks,
if you control an eloquence token, this attack loses all
abilities. Which is going to be relevant
because the following line says when this attack hits, its
controller loses 2 life. You're the control, and it comes
in at 6-5 and four. That blocks for 3, so it's a
pretty overstated attack. 0 for six is not anything to scoff at,
especially with Fuzzy's hero ability saying smush.
If you deal two or more damage, you gain 2 health, which is also
negated by the fact that you're going to lose 2 health if you
hit with the ability still intact.
I also think this card is probably a little bit pushed
because it has to hit in order for it to have any downside by
default, so if they're at a really lowlife total, it's just
a 0. Block with it anyway, yeah.
But still, like I really love exploring this design,
especially because an eloquence token is something that doesn't
interact with attacks. So giving my attacks a benefit
just for having the eloquence token out, I think is actually
like really cool as a way of checking to see if I can turn on
my other abilities. I really like that I that part
of it. Yeah, the idea of both needing
to meet a condition to turn off abilities and the abilities
being negative things is a really cool idea.
I don't think it's something that LSS will do for a while,
Yeah. Then again, I don't know if
Cleric is something that they're going to do for a while.
Yeah. So this is definitely something
I could see them, you know, approaching with similar ideas.
I also think like the fact that you have to have an eloquence of
token when this attacks sort of implies like you have to play
inefficiently to get the beneficial effect of gaining 2
life on hits and like being able to give some of your more
powerful non attack actions go again.
I also like how this card is playable on its own.
It works well with the hero ability that I wrote.
But all three of us had different hero abilities that we
wrote, you know? Yeah.
And I could kind of see this one being played in your hero design
drool, where it's just the eloquence tokens that you're
able to make off hero ability make it really easy to lose this
effect. And then it's just a 0 for six,
and that's good. Because if it's a 0 for six that
loses you to life, It's kind of like it's a 0 for 4, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the the the same math that
binds all of flesh and bloods fundamentals is still present.
It's just like a little bit different than other cards.
Kind of like kiss of death, right?
Yeah, 0 for three, the on hit deals one.
But we all know. We all know.
We we know what's going on. We we know what's.
I know what you are. Yeah.
That ends our inventory section. We tried to meld our three ideas
together and I think we're just really excited about the idea of
new classes and how much design space that opens up the new
thematic ideas or the new mechanical ideas that they come
from. If you guys have any thoughts
about our designs or have any designs of your own, we'd love
to hear about it in the comments below or jump into our Discord.
Let us know in there. We have a whole section on
custom cards where people have a lot of great conversation about
different designs and ideas for stuff that they have.
Hell yeah. With all that being said, I
think that is the end of our episode.
Yeah, thank you guys so much for joining us.
As always, feel free to join our Patreon where we're going to be
talking about our Crucible format.
And also it's the best way for you guys to send us your
Arsenal's own suggestions that we can shout out to Cardi.
They've been thinking about and you really want your favorite
host to talk about. But Intel Mexican guys, I think
that's about it. Bye.
Digit to Me podcast is hosted by Fuzzy Dope, Bark Moore and Joel
Racinos. Our executive producer is Talon
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Hulse, logo by Han V and sound mixing by Christopher Moore.
Last but not least, we'd like to thank you, the listener.
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