Choosing the Right Guardian for You

I can tell you that I find myself at the Guardian's table for many reasons. I enjoy the high blocks and consistent damage, for starters. I like being able to play the most expensive cards in the game, and I like being able to present some of the biggest natural attacks available. What keeps me shuffling up and coming back for more, though, is the feeling I get from knowing that I can be an unstoppable force or an unmovable object. I can sit in the middle of the waterfall, power crashing all around me, and I know that I can withstand the tumult if I am just careful, fastidious, persistent. I can move the river itself, tearing foes asunder with blows that can crush spines and cripple futures. With the toolset that I am granted by the Guardian class, I get to be the most powerful one at the table– or, at least, feel like I am.

I ask you, then, why do you play Flesh and Blood? Not just for camaraderie, but, what do you like to do in a game?

Bravo, Showstopper first came on to the scene with the very first release of the game, Welcome to Rathe. He has been here the longest, and we have had the most time to develop his strategies. There are a few different ways to play him, ranging from defensive and life-gain builds, to aggressively forward leaning, 12 go-again builds, and everything in between.

What each build has in common, though, are these. Bravo has access to Crippling Crush, Show Time!, and Star Struck, as well as his core text box. That core ability allows us to pay two and affix dominate to our expensive attacks for the rest of the turn. We even use this ability to power up our main hammer, Anothos. In fact, most of our strategies and cards still come from the set that saw his release: Anothos, Tectonic Plating, Fyendal's Spring Tunic, Crippling Crush, Spinal Crush, the list truly goes on.

An average Bravo turn cycle looks a bit like this: block with two or three cards, swing back with a hammer, arsenal either a threat or a reaction. When we are blocking and attacking, we are increasingly aware of our pitch stack: whether we are using Fate Foreseen, Sink Below, our ability or hammer, paying for an Unmovable or Staunch Response, we should be consciously aware of our simplistic pitch stack. We want to line up 3 blues + red threat, 3 blues + red threat, on loop. If we want to get fancy with it, we can bother to try lining up Rouse the Ancients with enough pitch and attack power. We generally want to space out our defense reactions that get sent to the future as well: you wouldn't want to draw in to all of them at once, much less be the person who put them all together in the first place.

As I indicated, Bravo is a popular character. He has been here a long time, and has gained a lot of fans: Bravo is certainly my main hero. Five years on, and he is slowly creeping upwards in Living Legends points. I don't think that we can point to his history as any sort of trajectory, however: that's just not really how the Living Legend system works. Briar, famously, was teetering on the edge of Legends for many moons before finally tipping over into the Living Legends format. Just, be aware that Bravo has nearly 700 of the required 1000 points at the time of this writing.

Betsy is one of the two newest Guardians at the proverbial table, and she plays a wee bit different– and a wee bit the same– as what we have come to expect. There's no doubt about it: she's a Guardian, so let's start with some similarities. 

In my experience, they both prefer the use of Anothos, and can make good use of either the Tectonic Plating or the Tunic. Both Bravo and Betsy have a two-cost ability that grants evasion, and both have a tendency to hold back for a bit before going all-out.

Since she's quite new to the scene, Betsy only has two specializations: Bet Big and the Good Time Chapeau. That hat might as well be a Legendary, it just powers on Betsy so effectively! 

Cards that grant wager to attacks can be just as important as natively-wagering attacks themselves for a deck like this one, so let's take a peek at those. Most of my Betsy builds start with 9 copies of Money Where Ya Mouth Is, and although I don't usually land on running all 9, it's definitely a consideration.

These, along with her two-cost core ability, signpost us pretty heavily that Betsy is one to be wagering. Wager is the new mechanic that accompanied her release in Heavy Hitters, and it effectively puts a bet on whether an attack will be landing or not. If the wagering attack hits, we gain a thing (usually gold, might, or vigor); if not, the opponent who we were attacking gets the thing instead. We don't risk our existing tokens to do this: wagering creates tokens to the battlefield, and does not typically cost any tokens to initiate. Additionally, our core ability allows us to pay 2 to tack overpower onto a wagering attack, hoping to nearly guarantee the hit. Unfortunately, overpower just isn't as strong as dominate - but the developers were two steps ahead and gave us +1 attack power to boot.

In most circumstances, this adds up to being powerful enough– but sometimes the opposition will mount a perfect defense and stop our overpowered attacks. It is because of this that we see Betsy running more attack reactions and setup-type cards like Earthlore Empowerment and Big Bop: we have to disrupt the math, either in advance or in the moment. Maybe it makes for an unfair fight, but a few notable things come to mind. One, we’re winning; and two, it's gonna be hard for them to make that argument after a deathmatch.

Going hand-in-hand with these buffing and wagering cards, we find ourselves slotting old favorites like Thump and Spinal Crush with new threats like Concuss and Command Respect. Pummel and Lunging Press compete with Money Where Ya Mouth Is for importance and relevance: they are all so good in our builds, threatening on-hits or pushing the boundaries of our attacks, but there is truly only so much room in our lists.  

There's a lot to explore with Betsy, which makes her a very attractive option to consider. With so much ground to cover and new corners to consider, there is simply a lot to unpack and sift through. For having similarities to Bravo, she really does play a bit differently, almost a bit more like a Runeblade. If you have been wanting to try out something new and exciting in the Guardian cardpool, I think Betsy is right up your alley!

Victor Goldmane might just have the most punchable face in all of Rathe, but it's gonna be a tough row to hoe if you want to be the one to actually haul off and do it. Despite being one of the two new Guardians, Victor has already begun to pull his weight on the leaderboards, netting over sixty points in the month of his release. This guy can pull a huge amount of value out of his cards, and even turned one of Guardian's toughest matchups (Fai, the Draconic menace from Volcor) from being extremely difficult to win to quite easily handled. 

One of the things that Victor has that the other Guardians don't is an inherent focus and affinity for clashing. Clash is the other new mechanic from Heavy Hitters: when players clash, they reveal the top cards of their decks and compare attack powers. Victor can, the first time each turn he would lose a clash, destroy a gold that he controls and float the clashing card of either deck to the bottom, revealing a new card to clash with. This ability lets Victor win more clashes than he otherwise might - but don't let it trick you into thinking that you can skimp on attack cards in the deck! It's a hefty price to pay, sacrificing gold, as there's only so much gold to go around in the arena.

Victor’s hat, the Golden Glare, can be used to create gold when blocking with yellow cards; his shield, too, can be used in the place of gold to fuel his power. Gold is very important to Victor, and he does run most of the ways to go and get it. I've seen Starting Stake, Test of Strength, Trounce, and Golden Son all as means of gold production for him, as well as Performance Bonus and Wage Gold.

His weapon, the Millers Grindstone, is a really interesting and effective tool for Victor as well. This 3-cost, 4-damage hammer threatens the top card of the opponent's deck every time it hits, and frequently demands two cards from its target thereby. The number of times that I've hit Codices of Frailty, Art of Wars, and other monumentally important pieces is too high to count. It's not all fun and games, though, because if you lose out on a clash with this weapon, it will being to slowly grind itself away and will immediately downgrade from nearly demanding two cards, to only needing one card to be silenced.

Not only does Victor spend the gold, he actually gets a benefit from merely making the stuff too! The first time each turn that we make a gold from an effect that we control, we draw a card. If we play our cards right and space things out, we can have five- and six-card turns for almost half the match, getting unprecedented block and attack power. This actually also means that we are churning through our deck a wee bit faster than most heroes; if we are fastidiously making a gold and drawing an extra card every other turn, then we will be coming to our pitch stack that much faster. If we are bottoming cards with Victor's ability every so often to fix our clashes, if we are blocking with Trounce and cycling the first clashing card, if we are using sink below - then we will be speeding towards the bottom of the deck and coming up on fixed hands and stacks faster than ever before!

If you like getting great value out of your plays; if you like fixing the rules when they work against you; if you like pretty much always winning the arm-wrestling contest, then Victor might be a good place to start. There are certainly those who claim that Victor is just a better Bravo, but I would have to contend that Victor has many things going for him, and nearly as many things going against. He's all the rage in the Guardian world right now, though, so if you like playing one of the latest popular powerful decks, one that is earning Living Legends points through hard-fought victories but hasn't yet crested into the dangerous upper-hundreds territory that Bravo finds himself in, then Victor might be the Guardian deck for you!

You might be right in thinking of this as a cheeky inclusion, but I'm here to tell you that the Esteemed Magnate Teklovossen is a worthy mention in any discussion about Guardians. There are certainly decks that can be controlling and defensive, and I'm not here to argue that this is all you need to be a Guardian. What I am saying is this: if you're not sure of exactly who to play, here's another deck from another corner of the world of Rathe that gives me similar experiences as playing Guardian. Take a look around if you still aren't certain; there's a lot to explore with even more on the horizon. Mechanologist is an extremely variable class, and if the defensive style of Teklo is more up your alley than the strictly-guardian stylings of Betsy, Bravo, or Victor, then I'm happy to be the one to show you the way. 

Teklovossen is also a bit of an uncracked nut: he's been here for a few months and has yet to find many Living Legends points. If you want to buy in to a deck that might take a while to hit living legend, one that might go through an exciting arc of development, Teklovossen might just be your man there too.

Being a Mechanologist, Teklovossen pulls from an entirely different pool of cards. Bright Lights and Arcane Rising will have 90% of your cards, with the remaining few sprinkled through supplemental sets like Crucible of War. With this particular build, too, you're only playing one Legendary card from Bright Lights: Singularity. We care not for Tunic, the Crowns, nor any other expensive equipment. We even have our own Command and Conquers: War Machine!

The gameplan that Teklovossen enacts is similar to Bravo, actually. You spend a lot of time blocking and making one- or two-card plays, putting away defensive tricks in the arsenal and pocketing offensive tricks for later. The fun thing there, too, is the simplicity in the pitch stack. I just want to put cards back and forth, red and blue. If we're just careful and tuck away reds and blues in equal measure, then we should either be drawing six resources and a red threat, or three resources and two red threats. Make use of your arsenal and your built-up soul-powered attacks to keep your opponent oppressed and suppressed until they expire.

In the meantime, we play a very defensive game making use of our core ability to trick out refreshed equipment after squeezing full value out of the old equipment. Teklovossen takes some rules-knowledge to pilot, but it's worth knowing because of the incredible value that can be wrung out of his armors. I have, without exaggeration, blocked well over 60 damage with Sentry and Steel Soul equipment packages, plus the regular blocks from hand.

Imagine: you block with a Steel Soul evo from hand for 3, scrap it with an attack on your own turn. On the opponent's next turn, you block with your matching Teklo base equipment, getting the 1 block value alongside another evo from hand, stopping four damage. Before your armor breaks from the block, you activate Teklovossen and trick out the equipment that you just scrapped, saving your exoskeleton from blade break and bolting on a new set of 3-block. When this one equipment blocks for the third time while it's in play, it will have netted 9 total block value, 3 + 3 + 2 + 1. Then, before temper takes its hold and destroys the piece, we trick out yet another equipment, refreshing the block and saving our exoskeleton. As we continue to block and get an average of six value out of as many of our 24 pieces of evo equipment as we can, we are also building up our late game by soul-stacking. Each card that goes under our exoskeleton, every time that we get a new rasher of blocks, every time that we thwart our opponent's entire turn with our steel armor, we are putting away ammunition for the endgame. Even if we only get an average value out of merely half of our evos, that is still 72 block– if things line up just so, we can even fatigue our opponent before transcending to the Mechropotent!

Singularity is the crux of the deck as I play it, and for me it is what makes him feel the most guardian-like, even though it is his unique and legendary specialization card. When we play this card, if we have been careful and fastidious, we can turn the tide of battle. We can transition from immovable object to unstoppable force, and reap dividends from the turns we bought from our early-game defensive plays. Not only can we fire our core cannon by cashing in the ammo we stored up for this exact moment, we will also be drawing into Liquid Cooled Mayhem, Annihilator Engines, Terminator Tanks, and things like that.

Once we transition to the late game, any opponent is going to have a hard time weathering our storm– all of these things together make Teklovossen an excellent choice for any inquiring Guardian-style player.