The Dawnblade Dilemma: Why Warrior Weapons are Doomed to Fail

The Warrior class is defined by its weapons. Comprised largely of attack reactions and non-attack actions that buff and modify your weapon swings, the Warrior card pool dictates a strategy of presenting the attack without giving away all the details of what it's truly threatening. It's the closest you'll get to bluffing in FAB, and its kept its premiere hero Dorinthea relevant (but not dominant) for 9 sets now.

With its strategy firmly centered around the weapon, it's not surprising that Warrior has more weapon cards than any other class. Starting with 2-handed and 1-handed swords, the armory has expanded to include axes and even a dagger. All told, Warriors have 7 weapon loadouts - without counting the Hatchets of Body and Mind as separate weapons, and excluding the Light-exclusive Raydn.

With all these options, Warriors should be diverse heroes with extensive sideboard options available to pivot their strategies in response to their enemies. But that has not proven to be the case. Excepting the fringe efforts of a large community willing to try anything, Dorinthea has remained tied to Dawnblade (with a small Hatchets following), while Kassai and Boltyn stand by Cintari Sabers (with a small Raydn following for the Light Warrior).

While hope remains for more diversity in Boltyn builds when next we expand the Light card pool (in July's Dusk Till Dawn), Dorinthea's prospects feel pretty bleak at this point. We've seen Warrior support in 5 sets now, and still the Dawnblade remains the default. Why has the original remained the best in class? And what would it take to provide a truly viable alternative?

As is so often the case with FAB, Dawnblade's superiority can be proven with math.

At its most stripped down - after you've been forced to defend with 3 cards from hand and only have a resource card to work with - Dawnblade is rivaled only by Jubeel for damage output. This represents the minimum floor of your weapon, and already we see that the Dawnblade has the highest floor.

Of course, we're happy to accept a lower floor if our ceiling is higher. Since Dorinthea lets us swing a weapon twice if it hits the first time, let's add a simple 'go again' buff from Hit and Run this time.

Dawnblade and Jubeel continue to out-perform the other weapons at absolute baselines: with no blocks and no modifiers. With the exception of the Merciless Battleaxe (which is looking absolutely awful at 3 cards and 6 resources for 6 damage), these are 2-card hands with 1 card played and 1 yellow (or blue) pitched. Notably, these are also fairly below-rate in the economy of Flesh and Blood; we're looking to get 4 points of value out of any card we attack with, and playing Hit and Run only got us 3 more.

But there are some x-factors we haven't brought up yet, and of course that's what makes the deck work across a long game. If unblocked, Dawnblade's 2 attacks will give it a +1 counter, so next turn this same Hit and Run play would threaten 8 damage. Jubeel's 1st hit would net you a Spellbane Aegis token, which prevents 1 arcane damage - but notably, you can't gain a 2nd at any time, so your unlikely to get more than 7 points of value from the one-two swing. The other weapons offer no reward for hitting, furthering the spread between the top two weapons and all the others.

How are the 1H weapons supposed to compete here? By managing a 3rd swing. Of course, to do that, we need another source of Go Again. Assuming we have another completely neutral source of Go Again to drop on our 2nd weapon swing, Cintari Sabers can also deal 6, while Hatchets can deal 8 - which does sound impressive, but again we're asking for a whole extra card to make that happen.

Okay, it's time we were fair to the other weapons. Let's toss a 3-block defense reaction onto the first weapon swing in each of these sequences and see how they fare.

Suddenly, we get a glimpse of why Hatchets Dori is the other viable build! That simple first-swing block completely shuts down our Dawnblade floor, but Hatchets are still threatening the same damage, and netting 6 value as they pull a 3-block out to cover their opening swing for 2. This also shows why the attack reaction game is so essential to Dorinthea: if the first attack is covered completely, the rest of your turn just fizzles.

So let's add another layer. Now, after the defense reaction for 3, we'll respond with an Ironsong Response (R) from arsenal. Again, we're keeping it simple, to show just how these weapons behave.

And we're back to our Top 2 again.

It should be noted just how much our 'neutral' defensive block is holding back the Cintari Saber, which gets a +1 attack for the rest of the turn when it's defended by an attack action card. The math on the above line would change to 9 threatened, 6 dealt - assuming you used the same Saber for both of your attacks. Of course, Dawnblade and Jubeel both have on-hit benefits that don't care what you're blocked by, so in the end Cintari still falls behind - but it's not by as wide a margin.

The traditional mantra for a new Dori player is, "Dori's first swing needs two things: it needs to hit, and it needs go again." We've now added both of those elements to our core example, so let's leave the math there. It's time to talk about building momentum.

When building a deck, it's important to have a gameplan. Some decks simply plan to maintain a baseline punctuated by power turns that ensure 'neutral exchanges' end in their favor. Others make a constant effort to gain momentum and, eventually, push that advantage to victory. You'll find both paths available to Dorinthea - and more specifically, you'll find both paths are concurrently viable in Dawnblade builds.

Every time you swing the Dawnblade, you force your opponent to use a card to block it, or face it again - and give you value for the future in the form of a +1 counter. This is a trick that should feel familiar to Guardians: you pitch the card, while they lose the card. It's a win-win value proposition. Neutral eventually benefits you.

At the same time, Dawnblade players are always ready with attack reactions to climb over the top of blocks and force those hits to occur. When you do manage 2 hits in a turn, that +1 puts every swing on your next turn at a breakpoint 4; and now they really have to block you out, or the next turn you'll be throwing 1-for-5 value and threatening to reach 6, and so on and so forth.

Other weapons offer similar value-based sustaining strategies, but lack the threat of momentum. That is to say, they don't incentivize blocking in any meaningful way. The Cintari Sabers actively disincentivize blocking!

Without giving your opponent a reason to block, you're put in a position where you have to get more out of your cards than they do. There are a few ways to manage that, and to illustrate those I'm going to compare them to decks that epitomize those strategies.

In the future, I expect to see Merciless Battleaxe at the forefront of a strategy more closely tied to outlasting our opponents, with a much greater emphasis on pitch cycling. But for the moment, efforts to incorporate this strategy only serve to emphasize just how closely the Warrior class - and Dorinthea specifically - has been built around the Dawnblade.

We've had plenty of heroes whose mechanics closely align with their weapons, and that's not inherently a problem. But it does make for some rather narrow design space; and while LSS has innovated many times before, you've got to wonder just how much more can be done for Dorinthea and the Dawnblade without pushing both above a critical mass of power and efficiency. Generally, Dori enjoys a pretty low profile; but like Rhinar, it really only takes a few more key cards and the deck could absolutely pop off.

The challenge here is that Dorinthea has been painted as a central character to the story of Rathe. More than that, the Dawnblade has been portrayed as more than just a signature weapon for Dori - it is her legacy, a symbol of her past and her future. Maybe even Solana's future.

So how do we keep Dorinthea fresh without replacing the Dawnblade? And how do we continue to iterate on Dorinthea when 95% of her attacks are the Dawnblade? When a class is built around modifying an attack rather than the attacks themselves, but no other weapon enters the conversation, how do you innovate without simply escalating?

But as things stand now, it's hard to imagine where Dorinthea could go next. It's nearly certain she'll carry the Dawnblade with her as she goes, and that means we can expect the same strategies to dominate her builds. Strategies that players have been learning to counter since Welcome to Rathe: overblock, or don't block at all.

We're due for a revitalization.