Balancing Your Blues in the Age of Nuu

During Part the Mistveil's preview season, I was inspired to reevaluate my perspective on blue cards in Flesh and Blood, and it's lead to a greater appreciation for these inefficient workhorses. In my preview article, I wrote a little bit about incorporating blues that perform in the second cycle. It was a great reminder to myself that, as the game progresses, 3-cost becomes significantly less of a liability.

Which is true, unless you're squaring up against the Mystic Assassin Nuu.

It's remarkable how much another hero can influence something as mechanical as your pitch curve. We only recently came through the other side of the Ice Age, where decks had to add cushions to their resource base in order to account for the taxing effects of Frostbite. Now we've got an entire set built to encourage deeper blues... and then there's Nuu, ready to use those blues against you. Suddenly, the benefit of 'having a little extra' needs to be balanced against the risk of 'providing the Assassin endgame with more fuel'.

For a deck like Bravo, there's really no choice: the blues must be there, and in copious amounts. And on the other end, there's little reason for Death Dealer Azalea to consider blues when her core strategy is already sufficiently fueled by yellows. But for all the decks in between, finding the right balance for your blues is more important than ever.

Before I get too deep into deckbuilding, I like to get a sense of what my ideal turns and playlines are going to look like, which is something you can pick up relatively quickly from YouTube videos, learn to read from decklists, or (for some) even perceive from a card pool. 

Kassai, for example, calls out reds and yellows in her hero text; but we also know she wants to swing her swords twice, which cost 1 each (unless she's drawn a card). An ideal turn for her is going to include 2 weapon swings and a buff (either ahead of the swords or as reaction); and if I have an extra resource once that's done, I can send it forward with Grains of Bloodspill. From this, I can intuit that the deck is going to have to be fairly prismatic - but that I'm going to want to keep my blue count as low as I can afford to, because I'm already including the less efficient yellows and I want to make the most of those as resource cards. Building Kassai with a heavy blue count wouldn't play to her strengths, and I'd stand a good chance of losing out on card exchanges on the math alone; the blues I do choose to run will either be powerful cards in their own right (Glint the Quicksilver) or especially efficient in the endgame (Overpower).

Less obvious: Dash I/O. From her hero power, we can see that yellows will be required to maximize her options for playing items off the top of the deck. But beyond that, Mechanologists' resource needs are fairly complex to assess. Their attacks range in cost from 0 to 3, and many of them have boost (an optional go again), so we can often play multiple attacks and will have to account for those costs. This would seem to suggest a fairly blue-heavy deck - except that Mechanologists also generate resources from many of their cards. What's more, because Dash I/O burns through her deck both by boosting and playing items off the top, the second cycle is extremely relevant!

So we'll focus a little more concretely on that hypothetical 'ideal' turn here. If I can make two attacks, boosting each one, I should be able to see 3 cards on the top of my deck. From there, the odds are pretty good one of them is an item, and I'll want 1-2 resources to play that out. Playing an item will give me a steam counter on my Symbiosis Shot, so I'll be able to attack with that as well. I might be able to do all of that with a blue, but it might actually take more than that (the uncertainty here illustrates why Teklo Foundry Heart is so important to the deck); if I only have a yellow to work with, it's likely I'll have to compromise on part of that.

With this in mind, I'm going to definitely want a considerable density of blues in my resource curve - some of my turns can be fairly expensive - but as I'm likely to have to play them too, I want to focus on finding blues that make an impact when I have to play them later in the game. 

That pivots nicely into the next level of analysis. If the primary consideration is simply, "what does it cost to play my cards?" then the next step needs to be, "which cards should I run at blue?"

Sometimes this doesn't feel like much of a question. Overpower aside, the examples listed above only come in blue; if we want that card's effect in our deck, they'll organically contribute to our blue count (though if it's also a card we intend to play whenever we draw it, that blue stripe isn't going to act as a resource very often).

But often, we'll be choosing to run blues from among a full color cycle of the card. This means we're running a less effective version of the card's effect - usually by 2 stat points - and fully committing to its primary role being as fuel for the other cards in our hand.

The nature of the pitch system is that any card used for resources gets pushed into your endgame; and if a game goes long enough, you'll find yourself with hands full of these cards you packed for pitching. Because of this, it's good to plan ways of closing out the game, even as you're drawing all your non-optimized blues. In some decks, this is accomplished by interspersing a few reds among your blues, sometimes even resorting to inefficient pitching to ensure your second cycle has power cards. In other decks, the blues themselves are power cards, only playable now with a sea of blues to back them up.

When deciding what your hero in particular is looking to accomplish in the late game, it helps to consider everything they could do in a turn if resources weren't limited. The best sources for draining a blue hand are your hero power, your weapon, and any equipment that don't get destroyed as the game progresses.

Azalea has few options for spending extra resources. Late in the game, her equipment suite is likely to be reduced to Skullbone Crosswrap and Fyendal's Spring Tunic, neither of which provides an outlet for resources. Her hero power is also free. Add to that the need for an arrow to really be effective, and Azalea is clearly a hero who does not want a blue-heavy late game. The blues in your deck need to be effective in their own right, worthy of being played out in the late game (or at least blocking for 3); and you'll definitely want to make a habit of pitching strong red cards along the way, to ensure your late game can be meaningful.

Viserai, on the other hand, is especially good at using extra resources. Between a sword that costs 2 and gloves that scale up from 2, it's easy for Viserai to burn resources at any point in the game (unless he's built up a pretty tall stack of runechants). The blue cards in Runeblade are fairly playable, in no small part because Viserai generates arcane damage by playing non-attack actions; and there are plenty of high-cost cards we'd love to play. These all point toward a deck that should look for effective, high-value blues, of course, but can also settle for blue copies of cards with effects we simply want to see more of.

The heroes of Mistveil bring this to a new level, as their shared Mystic talent offers plenty of blue-card synergy. The pinnacle of this is transcendence, which looks to see if we've played a blue card, and if so turns another one of our blue cards into an 'extra special blue pitch card', Inner Chi. The heroes are all equipped with a Chi-activated ability that serves as its own endgame plan, and each has a Legendary equipment they're likely to run for a 2nd Chi outlet. The Mystic card pool has some of the best blues in the game, making an inevitable blue flood in the endgame much less risky - but you'll still want to bring some standard resource outlets to help convert any useless blues into meaningful plays.

Part the Mistveil has given us one more thing to consider when building out our blue suite: Nuu's endgame. Nuu spends the game banishing our cards and hoping to hit some strong blues along the way; then she pitches Inner Chi to play out any of our banished blues without paying for them. The impact of this can range from mildly annoying (Kassai) to catastrophic (Bravo); and as Nuu's popularity grows alongside her deck refinement, deckbuilding and sideboarding with Nuu in mind will become a meta necessity akin to 7-power poppers and Nullrune equipment.

There are lessons to be learned from heroes already navigating this challenge well. Azalea and Riptide laugh at Nuu's endgame, offering only arrows that Nuu can't play and traps that she's overpaying for. Kassai and Dorinthea play blues that buff their weapons - which have minimal impact on Nuu's daggers at best, and none if the card specifies swords or axes.

All of these share a common theme of being low-cost, synergy-specific, and requiring a precise board state for relevance. Essentially, they're tech cards and/or tools, not powerful by themselves. Unlike the go-again chains offered up by Ninjas or the tall, damaging attacks that Guardians bring, these cards give Nuu little to work with, lowering the primary benefit of activating Nuu to 'cycling a Chi card'.

It may be too much to expect Bravo to find a path forward without standalone blue powerhouses, but the options do exist. A shift toward Guardian Auras would be incredibly inhibiting for Nuu, and Ninjas might want to consider siding out the blue elements of their combo lines when facing a her. For the wider meta, decks should be re-evaluating the cards that make up their blue base - it's a great time to get a little more experimental there.

But also, while we're in this warm and windy season, we might also consider lowering the blue counts across the board. Until Ice returns, we retain control over our pitch costs and our pitch curve; and while not every class can run on less, those that can may simply want to. This might be the moment of relevance that those neglected yellows have been waiting for.