Flesh and Blood Round the Table Review

On this website, I have been journaling my discovery, entry into, and now love for Magic: The Gathering. It took a while to get into, but with every set, I became more and more obsessed with it. So naturally, with a Kiwi company making their own TCG, I wanted to know more. The problem, as always, is: where do you start? Well, after dabbling with the Free Ira decks you can pick up, the next place to dabble was the Round the Table box. But is it worth it and a good place to start?

So what is Flesh and Blood?

If you have played MTG, then this one is quite different. Instead of throwing creatures out to knock down a player’s health, you instead have a hero you need to keep alive. You start the game with your hero on the board and equipment equipped. Then, as the game goes on, you may be able to upgrade their equipment, but for the most part, it’s about driving down your opponent before your heroes lose their lives.

The fundamentals of the game are interesting too. The bulk of your cards have a pitch value, an attack value, or a defense value. This means you can use many cards at any stage of the game. You start with your full hand on the defense turn and can throw your cards or equipment out to defend. Where the complexity comes in is if you defend all your opponents attacks, then you may have nothing to attack with next.

Also, unlike other games where you build up the mana or energy you need to do bigger hits later in the game, Flesh and Blood flips this massively. When you throw cards out to attack, they have a pitch requirement. You have to pitch your other cards to play an attack or ability, and then those pitched cards go to the bottom of your library. Do you use your big attack that requires pitching all your other cards? Do you swing with a couple of smaller hits? Have you used too many cards to defend, so you don’t have enough to even pitch and launch an attack? It’s designed in a way that’s reasonably simple to learn but can get gnarly to play. 

In a good way, of course. There are a bunch more nuances to the game, like how the attack chain works, being able to stash a card for later, etc. But fundamentally, the above is what sets FNB apart from the others.

So what is Round the Table?

Round the table is basically Blitz in a box. Blitz is a super fast format where a couple of 40-card decks go head-to-head in a short battle. Well, it should be short. My boy and I were stuck on a stalemate of one life for a while until he could slip an attack past me.

The Round the Table box comes with four preconstructed blitz decks, a proper play mat, and a snazzy cardboard box that can hold over 1000 cards. The playmat looks fantastic, and since FNB has a bit of a board structure, having an official one makes that way easier. This whole setup is fantastic and makes it easy to be a casual player who wants to jam matches. Fill your box up with more preconstructed Blitz decks and you have yourself a nice ready to play box that can hold heaps of variety.

Speaking of which, the Blitz decks themselves are awesome. If you are playing one vs. one, then whipping out a random two gives you heaps of gameplay value as you can mix it up. If you want to raise your stakes to more players, well, up to four can play here. The match-ups between the decks were consistently tight and fun. So as a new player, this is a damn good place to start.

What are the Blitz decks like?

One thing that kicks ass here is the variety in the decks. It comes with The Professor, Melody, Brevant, and Ira. Each of these heroes has their own unique way of playing, which makes this box awesome.

The Professor starts with gear that doesn’t do anything. But it gets upgraded as you play and can become damn useful. Brevant, on the other hand, is all about strong defense and can then swing with his big hammer. Then there is Melody who is a bard that uses abilities to generate tokens and can swing her violin at people, because it is fun. Then there is Ira, who does heaps of attacks that chain together, ninja style.

This variety makes this an incredible out-of-the box playset and a whole lot of fun!

So what is wrong with it?

There has to be something, right? Well, I managed to find something to nit pick.

The one issue that mildly annoys me is the one little issue I have with Blitz decks on the whole, and that is their box. The boxes Blitz decks come in are a perfect fit for the unsleeved cards, which means if you want to sleeve and store them, you’re kind of shit out of luck. The reason this bugs me is that everything else about the boxes is great. They have a cool design, and stacked in the Round the Table box, sideways, they look fantastic. But if you want to be able to pull them out and play, you either have to play unsleeved, have a few moments at the start of the game as you sleeve them, and then un-sleeve them at the end of your game.

It’s a minor thing, but I love having my preconstructed decks sleeved so I can whip them out and play, as opposed to risking them being damaged or the faff at the start of a game as you sleeve everything. I know it’s a minor thing, but it’s such a niggly little oversight.

Annoyingly, the box also doesn’t fit the Burger Tokens cases I use for storing my sleeved cards. The unsleeved cases fit, but again, there is a specific problem I am trying to fix here.

So should you buy Flesh and Blood Round the Table?

Hell Yeah! One of my favorite MTG products are the Commander Precons, as they are fun to pull out and play. They vary from $80-140 each, so it is expensive for a way to casually play the game. FNB Blitz decks cost $20 each, and Round the Table is consistently priced between $80-90. So for this price, you can get enough to have up to four people play or have heaps of replay value with different decks to pull out and play.

Add to this the top-quality play mat, and you are already in with a steal, and then the handy storage box, even with the minor downside, immediately makes this incredible value. Definitely pick Flesh and Blood Round the Table up and give this fun New Zealand made game a go.