5 Things I Like (or Don’t) About Dusk to Dawn
This week is a return to peak Opossum Paper performance, as we return to our roots and actually talk Flesh and Blood for once. This “5 Things” format is beat pretty well to death in dime store content creation spaces (by dime store, I mean casual stuff like the Opossum Papers), but it’s for good reason. With any set in Flesh and Blood, there are a lot of highlights, and you’d have to basically write a treatise to give it the full attention it requires.
So, with that being said, I introduce you to 5 Things I Like (or Don’t) About Dusk to Dawn!
The Artwork is Amazing
FAB has always held itself out as “adult” game. Not like adult, you little weirdo, but geared towards an adult audience. The art in this set is as equally haunting as it is beautiful. I don’t have a lot to say about it, but it’s pretty (I genuinely don’t know how to talk about art. Maybe that’s something I should add to my reading list?).
Let’s just look at a couple of my favorites:
DTD having no limited functionality is bad.
Monarch was a great set. This set is an expansion of Monarch and does a lot of cool things. Why can’t Dusk to Dawn be drafted alongside Monarch? I’m thinking 2 packs of Monarch, 1 pack of Dusk to Dawn. Old Magic sets used to have block draft, and Dusk to Dawn is an amazing opportunity to introduce block formatting into the game. It doesn’t support every class, so why it wasn’t designed to support Monarch in limited, I’ll never know.
You could even get creative (and I know some local stores will) where you draft three Monarch, then open a Dusk to Dawn pack or two to add to your pool. Maybe you could do some number of packs of Monarch and some number of packs of Dusk to Dawn for sealed. There’s so much opportunity here. Knowing that LSS passed by the opportunity to make this a unique thing that paves new ground is frustrating.
I know we’re getting two more draftable sets this year, so I’ll chill a bit on how much this upsets me, but it would have been real cool for this to be a special Battle Hardened or Calling format.
DTD Doesn’t Support Every Class
I thought with supplemental sets we were sacrificing draftability for universal character support. I know we currently don’t have a light illusionist or a shadow runeblade knocking about, but underrepresented heroes rely on these supplemental sets to have any inkling of playability. This complaint is really just a continuation of the last one, but if we’re going to restrict class support in supplemental sets, why can’t they be draftable?
My hope is that if we can’t ditch supplemental sets all together, we can at least return to a place where every hero gets a nibble of support, or at least each class.
I’m really excited for the prerelease
All my complaining aside, I’m excited about Monarch drafts. The last time Monarch was a draftable set, FAB was a small indie game that hardly anyone could get product for. I started in Tales of Aria, for example, so Monarch draft exists in my mind as only a side event and post-main event with your friends type of format.
Getting to draft it at a prerelease will operate as nostalgia for the earlier adopters of FAB, and it will give newer players a gateway to past draft formats. One of the prereleases I’m going to is doing Monarch 1st Edition drafts, so that’s an even nicer treat. Can you imagine open cold foil footsteps at your prerelease? What a time to be alive that would be.
Vynnset and “Runechants Matter” Cards are excellent game design
I’m a runeblade player at heart. No matter what happens with my Flesh and Blood collection, I’ll keep all my runeblade cards. Something about the art, and the theme, speaks to me. This sword wielding master of the dark arts thing is a powerful vibe.
So I’m definitely excited to Vynnset for a spin. I don’t think it will be better than Viserai at the outset, but who cares? Oblivion is such an awesome card that probably won’t be that hard to activate. Remember: you can respond to your own Runechant triggers, so if you have more than six (the dream), you cast this instant before the sixth one resolves, making your Nasreth token.
Vynnset’s blood debt interaction is obvious, but seeing the Rune Gate mechanic really makes it sing. Rune Gate + Vynnset is so good, it makes me sadder than anything we won’t get to play with these cards in limited.
Conclusion
This article has somehow gotten to 800+ words without actually saying anything at all (they call that the Opossum Pack special). All in all, I’m excited for Dusk to Dawn, if only because it marks a special time in FAB’s life. Sets have history now, and people have nostalgia for the game’s earlier days. The game isn’t that old compared to the big three, but compared to the TCG market as a whole, FAB is an old bear cat that is in better shape than ever.
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Next week: who can be sure