Dear Mario, A Battle Hardened: Portland Special Report

I almost wasn’t going to make it to Portland,

but my dear friend Natalie had constructed an entire Arakni, Marionette deck, and would not be playing it in the competition. I decided to take the opportunity to return to the tournament scene, something I have not done seriously since Heavy Hitters. I was going to be Mario in the Battle Hardened. The only deck I really own is Levia, and she’s the only deck I truly love. I love sticking the landing on a perfect Blasmophet flip. There is simply no other hero in the game that replicates the feeling of moving to end at 14 with 2 Dread Screamers and a Writhing Beast Hulk loaded in the banished zone. I love rolling on Scabskins and being happy with a 1 because I took 4 minutes exploring every outcome first. I love setting up a perfect Shadowrealm Horror and watching my opponent tilt off like it was lucky. Nothing will come close. However, Levia is really bad. In the card game arms race for consistency, a deck that is inconsistent at its core will be worse than those that are not. I accept that. For a while, the quest to become a specialist on a bad deck was satisfying, but how much satisfaction can be had in repeatedly losing to Mordred Tides and Arc Lightnings. Sets come out, best decks change, and new bad decks are introduced. Imagine my joy when Arakni, Marionette was announced. Six demi-heroes, and you get to roll dice! (I called it btw)

That’s three times more demi-heroes than Levia, and the only downside is that they’re Assassins! So, with Mario sleeved and waiting for me in Portland, I decided to give it a shot. Maybe Mario could be my new Levia. Maybe playing Mario could come close to the highs of piloting a rogue deck to explosive wins once more. From what I had heard, the deck seemed fully capable of putting out results, but not enough to draw too much attention. Perfect.

The Super Armory

I actually don’t know how the deck works at all, and I’ve never played Assassin, so I decided to start my night with the Super Armory. I went 3-1, surging with confidence. Super Armory, like Super Mario.

I beat two Boltyns and an Ira, losing in the final round to a Viserai in an absolute blowout. It seemed like I couldn’t race the Runeblade, but the rest of the matches felt fair. One of the Boltyns was very tuned, and got close; the other was a slightly upgraded armory deck that crumpled to a stiff breeze. The Ira felt similar to what I expected I might face in the BH and was a match where Mario’s inconsistency felt particularly noticeable, even if I ended up pulling through in the end. Arakni, Marionette is a strange deck. It seems to be more aggressive than the other Assassins, or at least my list didn’t to want to block. That and Mario’s Agents need you to attack to have anything more than blank text. At the same time, it has some massive bricks. All red hands of all reactions, hands with no Stealth attacks, and ill-timed transformations. It seems like you have to wait for your Agent and your arsenal to line up for a power turn, but also sit through hands where your Up Sticks or Codexes are 2-blocks that burn into your Intellect. You’re also dealing with the fact that Assassin has probably the most point-for-point value on each individual card out of any hero in the game, but very few ways to string these cards together to take them above their base value as 3 blocks. You also have: Mark, a mechanic that I mishandled almost as much as my childhood disk of Super Paper Mario for the Wii, and Stealth attacks, and token daggers, and Codex of Frailty, and Tunic triggers, and it all feels like the deck is being pulled in 8 different directions all while focusing on the reaction step, possibly the most complex back-and-forth in FaB. Luckily, I finally learned how reactions work after a scuffle in the final round of the Super Armory. After a peaceful sleep, I scarfed down a peanut butter bagel and drove to the convention hall. It was time to be Mario.

Battle Hardened: Portland

The Marionette

-Tunic Counters Missed: 0

Arakni, Marionette is the base form of the hero. It also seems to be the most consistent of the heroes at your disposal. Giving your stealth attacks +1 is quite strong, and the on-hit go again allows you to chain together cards to smooth over the gaps between the often synergyless assassin cards. The dream is Mark of the Black Widow for 4 into a Leave No Witnesses or a CNC. The reality is Mark. These effects are only active when your opponent is marked, which seems easy enough: a hit from one of your two klaives slaps the token on your opponent. You can even Flick a dagger in reactions, and since the effect is constant, your stealth attack gets boosted before resolution. This is all well and good, but any hit will clear the Mark, and Assassin cards all want to hit. They especially want to hit to get the incredibly valuable go again. In play, Mark felt much less available than it seemed initially, and much more valuable than I imagined. I thought I would see Mario’s Agents every other turn; I usually only saw two or three in a game. The game is about value, after all, and round 1 I sat across from a Zen. I hadn’t played against the deck since the Bonds ban, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I ended up facing a much slower deck than anticipated and missing a Tunic trigger somewhere around turn 2 or 3 to the morning coffee jitters. Most decks are running Shelter from the Storm, which incidentally is also a card that hoses Marionette. There were many spots where I was hoping to take 2 cards or a piece of equipment with a Mark of the Black Widow for 4, only to meet a Shelter from the arsenal that bricked my turn. It seems that the deck has problems with consistently delivering reactions when you need them, a problem my opponents never seemed to share. This match was absolutely a knowledge check. While I managed to hit enough disruption to slow down Zen, I flubbed when I discarded my own Shelter to prevent 3 chain links of damage instead of waiting to block their 1-for-4 at the end of the chain. Again, value is everything. That point probably cost me the game. In this kind of point race, getting every inch out of each card is crucial.

The Black Widow

Tunic Counters Missed: 1
Shelters Discarded: 1

Arakni, Black Widow is one of the Agents of Chaos. She’s number 1, and like 3(4?) out of 6 of the Agents, can turn a card into your hand into an attack reaction, effectively allowing you to feed hanging Assassin cards (that you probably should’ve blocked with last turn) into the paper shredder of value. In this case, that attack reaction banishes a card from an opponent’s hand on-hit (given that it’s slapped onto a stealth attack). This proved to be crucial in Round 2, where I faced an opponent who presented “Ahscilia”. I started to board in my Widow equipment, aiming for 2 spellvoid to parry a Mind Warp, and told my opponent how happy I was to see the big elemental represented. They sort of nodded and agreed, and then as I continued to talk about how long they’d been playing the hero, they clarified that the hero was Azalea. We hadn’t got all of our equipment set up yet, so I quickly laughed and switched my board to the race plan. I don’t think it was an angle: in the din of the convention hall, I had misheard the forbidden name of the Elemental Wizard Ranger (coming in Outsetta 2034). Glad I caught it. The game was a bit scary, but Mark of the Black Widow is good, and a flip into Funnel Web let me blow up Ahscilia’s arsenal. If the deck blocks me, they lose, and if they don’t block, I take cards anyway. It was still closer than I’d like thanks to a Judge, Jury, Executioner that ripped my hand apart, but we got there. Also, I saw them pitch an Energy Potion.

The Funnel Web

Tunic Counters Missed: 1
Shelters Discarded: 1
Oscilio Encounters: 0

Arakni, Funnel Web is one of the Agents of Chaos. They’re number 2 and sit at the big kid’s table with Black Widow and Redback since they’re Attack Reactions. Funnel Web targets arsenal, which seems good, until you realize that the card in arsenal is always Shelter from the Storm. Round 3 was Enigma. My opponent was gracious, quiet. We boarded in silence, gave a respectful fist-bump with a “Good luck, have fun”, and launched into game 3 right as the judge announced our 55 minutes. How could Mario ever beat Enigma? I still don’t know. I brought in my Pick to Pieces, but it didn’t matter. It’s very hard to beat the ceiling of Defense Reaction in arsenal + 2 - 3 cards blocking from hand. Frailty Trap proved useful, since every aura is a weapon in Enigma, but I couldn’t stop the Rage Specter + Miragai turn, electing to take all the damage and push for tempo next turn. I learned a few things in this match: one, “If damage was dealt this way, the dagger has hit” is brutal text against a hero that makes countless Ward 1 auras essentially for free, and two, that Bonds of Agony is a very strong card if you can count to 3. That’s why I need the big kids from the Attack Reaction table (which is 3/6 of the brood, a coin flip), since Flick Knives starts our count. Snapdragons is number 2, once again, and was such an important card that I ended up using it to chain a Pick to Pieces into a CNC earlier. Number 3, then, is tricky. Sometimes you don’t have an attack reaction in hand. If you didn’t think too hard about using Snaps earlier, you need two attack reactions, which is even more difficult. Nuu has it easy. So, even though my flip into Trapdoor was undeniably valuable, I just couldn’t use the Bonds in my arsenal. I ended up losing to a trick with Astral Etchings which I could have seen coming easily with more matchup knowledge, but I knew over-blocking would only benefit Enigma. Fistbump, GG, and my opponent timidly informed me that Vambrace would be good. He was right.

The Orb-Weaver

Tunic Counters Missed: 1
Shelters Discarded: 1
Oscilio Encounters: 0
Enigma Losses: 1

Arakni, Orb Weaver is the third Agent of Chaos. They think they’re so cool because they’re an Instant, and sure that’s sweet, but Bonds of Agony doesn’t care. They also have Graphene Chelicera, or Graphing Calculator, or Graphene Cha-ril-ee-ka, which is a super sweet token dagger that you actually really want to have since it lets you pitch a blue for 2 dagger swings with your Klaive in offhand. And it has stealth! Showoff. Orb-Weaver didn’t really come into play round 4, against Aurora, because the game came down to a crucial Bonds of Agony play. Because of one of the Attack Reaction agents, my Bonds of Agony hit 3 reactions and let me peep into my opponent’s hand. Arc Lightning. I thought, now that’s a power card. I riffled through my opponent’s deck, found only 2 Arc Lightnings, checked their graveyard, checked their hand again, and gave them their deck back. “There should be a third”, they said. Oh boy. I saw as they picked up their inventory and passed the third Arc Lightning into the banished zone. “Well, it’s supposed to be in the deck”, they said. “I’m not really sure what to do from here”, they said again, as they explained that they were missing 5 cards from their deck. I responded with, “Do you think we should call a judge?” One head judge escalation and game loss later, we decided to play out the rest of the game. I won. Mario seems to like decks that don’t want to block. I thanked my opponent and moved on to the next game. Surely if I could win against 55 cards, I could win against anything!

The Redback

Tunic Counters Missed: 1
Shelters Discarded: 1
Oscilio Encounters: 0
Enigma Losses: 1
Judge Calls: 1

“Yeah! Redback!”

-Me, rolling a 4

I love Redback, the fourth Agent and my favorite member of the Attack Reaction club. Probably my favorite of all 6 in the gang. Look at that blade umbrella! How does that even work? Redback gives your stealth attack go again. Unlike Black Widow and Funnel Web, who timidly ask your opponent for one of their cards, Redback skips the asking and just lets you play your whole hand. “Why does that Under the Trap Door need to blow up their arsenal?”, the Redback whispers in my ear. “Let’s just play CNC dude. Watch them overblock.” I laugh, and it’s raining blood, and we’re dancing under the blade-umbrella, and I’m not a spider-demon so the blades are pretty inconvenient and hurt, actually. I’m imagining all this because in reality I’m facing down a Phantasmaclasm for 9 against my second Enigma, round 5. This one was closer, but this one was also playing a bunch of Phantasm attacks. I tried to hold onto a CNC to pop one of them, but they just used their shoes to get an action point anyways. Oh well. They also banished one of my daggers turn 1 or 2 with Pass Over, a risk I was aware of. In practice, though, Flicking a dagger for guaranteed Mark is pretty important to get your deck off the ground. Without Mark, we are an untalented (minus Spur Locked and the gem) Assassin with no text. Playing with just one dagger made my Retrieve cards into sad 2-blocks and pushed me into a few positions where I had to pray for Orb-Weaver. The game was closer, but we couldn’t get there. I’m beginning to realize how good Mask of Recurring Nightmares is. Also, Vambrace would have been good.

The Tarantula

Tunic Counters Missed: 1
Shelters Discarded: 1
Oscilio Encounters: 0
Enigma Losses: 2
Judge Calls: 1
Klaives Banished: 1

Arakni, Tarantula is the fifth Agent of Chaos. They’re the fourth kid at the Attack Reaction table, but they’re the one that nobody really likes, so the other 3 talk about how cool they are and how many cards they take from their opponents while Tarantula eats in silence. It’s not that bad, really, but Bonds of Agony isn’t a dagger attack. In fact, basically nothing is, especially not Mark of the Black Widow or Leave no Witnesses. In practice, Tarantula exists mostly to turn Flicks into an offensive Reckless Swing with the life loss effect. And that’s neat, Tarantula! Don’t worry, that’s pretty good! You’re cool and we like you! However, we don’t like CYB Nuu, my round 6 opponent. I played fast. I chained together a Tarantula turn that ended up with me Retrieving a dagger and Flicking a Kiss of Death for 3 damage. We had 5 dagger hits together. You’re cool, Tarantula. It didn’t matter because I was starving. I had 6 Kind bars in my backpack, the ones with almonds and dark chocolate that are a little salty (editor’s note: these are rad as fuck). I had knocked 3 of them out by now, but with no solid meal since breakfast I was still running on empty. I hoped to end the round early to get some food and reorient myself before the final round. Nuu made that impossible. As we moved into time, I realized I was doomed. I passed back rapidly, swinging with Klaive and missing my Tunic. The judges began to swarm our table. Try as I might, Mario has a problem with outputting high damage quickly, our only chance against Nuu. Even with some huge spike turns, the race was impossible. Time was called. I stepped aside to talk to a judge. I had 2 cards in my deck; they had 10, but our life totals were 24-30 or something like that. I asked if I could concede. The judge said yes, but I would have to do so immediately. So I did. Did Nuu deserve it? No. Should we have tied? Yes. But I needed a break, and I also knew the matchup was doomed. I had no outs. I was here to play Mario, not to win the Battle Hardened (although that would be a plus). I decided a loss would be good data, and again, I needed as much time as I could get. I didn’t get a chance to eat since we were the last table playing, which was a severe misplay on my part. I quickly moved to my final round.

The Trapdoor

-Tunic Counters Missed: ~5 -Shelters Discarded: 1 -Oscilio Encounters: 0 -Enigma Losses: 2 -Judge Calls: 2 -Klaives Banished: 1 -Games Conceded: 1

Trapdoor. Number 6. We all laughed at you, Trapdoor. Look at you, you don’t even convert a card from hand! You ruined this hero! “I was thinking about playing this deck casually at armories, but because of Trapdoor, I can’t.” - Casual player “All the traps suck, and you suck too, Trapdoor!”- Flesh and Blood Veteran “Can they print an attack action with Stealth that’s a trap? Otherwise, this hero is doomed” - Spike And yet, Trapdoor, I love you. Frailty Trap is good. And, blocking with our Mask, we can load up a Frailty Trap and block for 5 with our helmet. Potentially more, with the Frailty threatening to “block” more if they swing with weapons or their arsenal. For that reason, you’re alright, Trapdoor. What’s not alright is round 7. Exhausted and low on blood sugar, I scarf down Agent 4 of 6 from my Kind Bar Brood and face an Aurora. “Can my brother watch the game?” they say. I should have said no, but this is the loser’s bracket and I’m ready to be done. I play pretty sloppily, but I decided to be aggressive and pack no Widow equipment. Mario is weird: the equipment we have is pretty alright, but absolutely essential. Mask blocks at least 5 or wins you the game with a perfectly picked Agent; Tunic is Tunic, and our deck is heavy on reds, and Flick Knives might as well be hero text. Snaps feel good, but not ideal. Still feels better than AB 1. We push Aurora down to low life. My opponent turns to their brother, mentioning that since I’m an Assassin, I want to complete Contracts to buy back my equipment with Silver. I wonder if this is real, staring at my Snapdragon Scalers. I wonder if perhaps I’m being manipulated by a master of tilt, and if this “brother” (who reminded my opponent to update their life total when it was inaccurate) is an Agent of Chaos, sent to sap ELO by exploiting the goodwill of exhausted round 7 losers. I think back to the blade-umbrella. What I don’t think about is that since I’m Black Widow, my attack won’t get go again on hit, and I pass reactions knowing that the game is locked on the next chain link with my Razor’s Edge buffing a Mark of the Black Widow. Damage? I say, realizing my mistake immediately. They had one card in hand, and I know it’s not a reaction. We had it. I mutter something about reactions, but we passed and it’s fair game. Whoops. I think again about how they kept mentioning on previous turns that when I hit with stealth, my attack gets go again, and I reminded them that I’m an Agent, I no longer have that text. I see my opponent playing Weave Tilt. I’m going crazy. They draw up and Shock me for the win. In all seriousness, they were a nice opponent. I can’t prove intent. I am responsible for my gameplay. I fist-bump, and as we debrief, I explain my mistake. “Comp REL”, I say. “Fair Game”. It was a fair game that I could have won, undoubtedly. I wonder how much it would’ve been worth to banish the brother at deck presentation. I wonder how much a win is worth anyways.

Chaos

So we did it. Mario slid down the flag at the end of the Battle Hardened, finishing 2-5. Pretty bad.

Is the deck good?

It’s certainly skill testing. I have no doubt it can put up results. I’d likely refine the list quite a bit more, but I played, quite literally, with what I was dealt. Even though Leave no Witnesses and Command and Conquer present insane value, they are not stealth attacks. Mark is fun to play with and requires quite a bit of planning to use correctly. All of the Agents offer something valuable. They are my friends. As I handed my deck back to its owner, I thought again about Levia. I thought about the 35-minute games and the convention center hotdogs between rounds. I realized that it was never about the number of Demi-Heroes or dice rolls. I realized that tournament Levia gave me something Mario could never: a game that almost always ended within time and a deck that I could own. 3 out of 7 of my rounds in Portland were against grindy, brain-burning decks that tested my patience arguably more than my skill. One of them was determined by a judge call, and two others probably necessitated judge intervention that I was not willing to ask for. I should have been willing, but also, I can’t shake the feeling that the landscape has changed. Since Mistveil and Count Your Blessings, this type of longer gameplay seems to be the norm. I personally don’t believe that the games are much more interesting, or skill-testing, than they were in the days of Kayo. With longer matches comes player fatigue and rule infractions, and with the complexity of the game only rising over time, many more games feel determined by what is happening around them rather than what is happening on the cards.

Faced with this, the cost of buy-in becomes a real question.

I traded a Kassai marvel that I opened for most of my Levia deck, paying about 200 dollars for the difference. I spent months playing that deck. Mario, in its current build, costs at least 7 times that. To be clear, I had spent probably 600 dollars on the game at the point that I opened the marvel. Only about a third of this Chaos Assassin deck. Is this Chaos Assassin deck three times as fun as my ~4 months of Blitz play before Levia? No. Will it be as fun as Levia was if I owned it? Probably not, but that’s personal taste. This is an in-person game. The developers have expressed that second-cycle, hundred-decision-point games are the ideal for Flesh and Blood, but I don’t think they are ideal for me. Levia was a deck that ended the game, win or lose, and I took that mental space for granted. That’s all well and good. Mario taught me that Assassin isn’t my thing. What’s unsaid as well is that maybe my matchup spread was just bad luck, and that leaving with 2 wins on a deck that I’m very unfamiliar with is a given, maybe even better than expected. Those are lessons I learned for a 50-dollar entry to 8 hours of in-person entertainment. They’re lessons that other people, especially new players, will only be able to learn after spending at least 120 dollars on the two daggers required to even dip their toes into the deck. The recent Dev Talk has cemented that this is by design. There is of course the reality that this is a Competitive Rules Enforcement Level event, and that this is all part of the buy-in. That’s undeniably true. But is it worth it? Is Mario really a new-computer level of fun? Will Mario win you that piece of cardboard that you can sell to collectors and speculators to break even? I doubt it. If you do choose to go down this path, do it because “Assassin is well-positioned into this metagame” or “It’s a rogue deck that can punish the top decks” or whatever. Don’t make my mistake and see dice-rolling and demi-heroes and expect fun. Or, if you really want to walk with the Agents of Chaos, make sure you have enough printer ink.

FINAL SCORE:

Tunic Counters Missed: ~5
Shelters Discarded: 1
Oscilio Encounters: 0
Enigma Losses: 2
Judge Calls: 2
Klaives Banished: 1
Games Conceded: 1
Kind Bars Eaten: 4
Estimated Cost of Every “Mario” Game on The Nintendo Switch E-Shop, Including Donkey Kong and WarioWare and Other Games That Aren’t Really Mario But Whatever: $1,400
Cost of Deck As of Finishing This Article, 2/12/2025, Per Fabrary: $1,670