Flesh and Blood's Armory Deck: Malice Lands Friday for $39.90, One Week Before Usurp the Shadow Throne
A ready-to-play Classic Constructed deck for a new Shadow hero, 29 new cards, three reprints and one card already carrying a suspicious pre-release price. Here is what Armory Deck: Malice is and who should buy it.
Flesh and Blood's fall calendar is compressed into ten days, and the first product lands Friday. Armory Deck: Malice releases September 18 at 39.90 dollars, one week before the Usurp the Shadow Throne booster set arrives on September 25. If you have never played Flesh and Blood, or you have been curious about the game that keeps showing up at your local shop on Tuesday nights, this is the most sensible 40 dollars you can spend to find out.
What an Armory Deck is
Armory Decks are Legend Story Studios' answer to the on-ramp problem. Flesh and Blood's most popular format is Classic Constructed, a 60-card format built around a single hero with a fixed weapon and equipment. Building a competitive Classic Constructed deck from boosters is expensive and slow. An Armory Deck gives you a ready-to-play 60-card deck for one hero, including the hero card, weapon and equipment, with a mix of brand-new cards designed for that hero and reprints of the foundational cards the hero actually runs. They are named for Armory Events, the weekly in-store tournaments most Flesh and Blood shops host.
The value proposition is unusually clean: the deck is legal on day one, it is built by the people who design the game, and the new cards in it are often the ones that make the hero work.
Who Malice is
Malice, Domina of the Dead is a Shadow-aligned hero who animates the fallen. The flavor text describes her as the mistress of the risen dead who corrupts the fallen legions of her enemies and calls their beshadowed corpses to enact her commands. In practice that means a deck built around creating and manipulating undead tokens, with an engine of "Restless" cards (Restless Looter, Restless Magister, Restless Quartermaster, Restless Outlaw, Restless Commander, Restless Steed) and payoff spells like Skeletal Puppetry, Rites of Nightfall, Pull from Beyond and Countdown to Extinction.
The card list is 32 entries: 29 cards appearing for the first time and three reprints, with Sink Below and Mage Master Boots among the returning staples. Her weapon is Vox Necropolis, her equipment includes Corrupted Crown and Drop Dead Bodice, and the deck ships in a case sleeve rather than a booster.
The card everyone will ask about
One card in the list has an early price tag that does not look like it belongs in a 40 dollar preconstructed deck. Gate to i'Arathael, card AMA030, is showing a pre-release asking price near 290 dollars on aggregator sites. Treat that number with extreme suspicion. Pre-release prices on Flesh and Blood singles are set by a tiny number of speculative listings and routinely collapse once product is in hand. What the number does tell you is that Gate to i'Arathael is the card players think is the deck's competitive reason to exist, and that it is likely a Legendary or otherwise limited-run card within the product.
If you are buying the deck to play Malice, the price of that one card does not matter. If you are buying the deck to flip that one card, wait until you see actual completed sales after Friday.
How the ten days line up
- September 18: Armory Deck: Malice, 39.90 dollars. Ready to play in Classic Constructed.
- September 25: Usurp the Shadow Throne, the next booster set. Malice is a Shadow hero, so expect the new set to add tools that slot directly into this deck.
- Weekly: Armory Events at local shops. This is the format the deck is built for and the easiest way to learn the game from people who already play it.
Should you buy it?
If you already play Flesh and Blood and want to try a Shadow hero, yes, without hesitation. If you are new, the Armory Deck is the right first purchase: you get a complete competitive-legal list and you can walk into an Armory Event that week. The one caution is that Armory Decks tend to sell through quickly at shops that run active Flesh and Blood events, because every regular player buys one on release week. Preorder or ask your shop to hold a copy.
Not every shop runs Flesh and Blood. Use our directory to find a card shop near you and ask if they host Armory Events. A shop with a weekly Flesh and Blood night is the best place to learn the game and the most likely to have Malice on Friday.