A Group of Assassins Walks Into a Bar

As the year comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on the year, reflecting on the game, and thinking about what I want to do next year and in the future. I know I'm not alone in this period of self-reflection; otherwise, gyms would have a substantially less sustainable business model. As I look into the future, one thing becomes incredibly evident: I have not put in nearly enough time into the projects I work on, and I intend to put in a lot more time moving forward.

Over the past year or so, I've been very active in the FaBCube discord server, posting half-fleshed-out ideas for portions of cubes with a promise of creating more. Somewhere between a minute and a month later, I have lost interest, and I subsequently move on to a new idea to post.

For those unfamiliar, allow me to quickly walk you through what a cube is. In just about any card game, you can take a box of any limited set, sit down with a group of 7 friends, and fire a draft pod. Each player opens packs, picks cards from the packs, passes them around the table, and crafts a card pool from which they build a deck to immediately go head-to-head with the players nearby. Now, imagine if you took the developer out of the cards and crafted your own limited space to play in. This is what a cube is: A collection of cards that you curate to draft from.

Within Flesh and Blood, though, this framework offers a few key disadvantages. With how closed off the card pools are, there are only a few channels you can go down to create your cubes. Many different cube builders offer various solutions to this problem: "Shapeshifter" cubes that open up the card pool beyond the restraints of the game, set cubes that take preexisting sets and amp them up, or just regular old cubes that work within the closed-off card pools and make them as effective and incredible as possible.

What draws me to cubes is none of the above, though. Personally, I believe the space of a curated, limited environment should not be restricted to merely the ideas LSS has created, but should instead be opened to fully custom environments with wholly unique designs and infrastructure.

Therein lies the problem. In spaces with unique infrastructure, the ability to create completely custom environments is found in commitment, something my brain can't seem to find. I just keep starting projects and leaving them unfinished on the drawing room floor. This is what I want to change in 2026. My goal for the new year is to create a fully designed custom cube ready to draft.

Where to start, though? The only thought I have right now is that I want to play around with Assassins and reactions, my favorite class and my favorite interaction space. So why not start with the Assassins themselves?

That's right, in this article, we're going to be throwing a bunch of different Assassin hero designs at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Before we begin, though, a note on the cube framework. In Flesh and Blood, my favorite limited spaces and my favorite drafts are far and above the square drafts, as seen in Rosetta and Superslam. While there are problems with the gameplay of these spaces, the drafts themselves are unrivaled in planning and orchestration. Thus, in the cube I intend to create, I will be working within the same space, meaning each Assassin I create here will have to be able to support both an Assassin card pool and an additional talented card pool, like Lightning or Mystic, without being able to rely much, if any, on talented Class cards to fuel the mechanics, like Draconic Assassin.

Let's start with Mystic Assassin.

Mystic Assassin has always felt strange to me. The Mystic cards want you to play blues, the Mystic Assassin cards are all reaction-focused and create tokens, the base Assassin cards all focus on banish and lifegain, and then Nuu swoops in wanting to play opponents' cards and making blocks harder. It feels disjointed.

Wan is my answer. When functioning perfectly, you play out a stealth attack, drop a blue attack reaction, play a transcend card, activate Wan to return the attack reaction to your hand, play it again, and stack three Fang Strikes on the stealth attack.

Zooming in, Wan's Chi ability effectively allows you to turn any Chi into an attack reaction. Both the Assassin and Mystic cardpools will feature attack reactions to recur, but even if you don't find any, you can still always recur a Fang Strike you generate. If I were to create this hero in constructed, I would definitely add a restriction so that you can't just repeatedly bounce back Just a Nick or Siren's Call, but in the cube, I can make sure to work the card pool around the ability.

Wan's Stealth passive is where things get interesting. Effectively, any blue Attack Reaction or Instant that you play while a Stealth attack is on board grants an additional +1 power. Due to its limit to blue cards, you're never pushing attacks beyond the scope of regular hand conversion, as a stealth with a +1 blue adds up to 5 total damage. This allows me to be relatively liberal with the creation of these tokens, incentivizing you to put more below-rate offensive cards into your deck for additional synergies.

Wan's hero ability also builds in some very niche synergies, such as doubling up Fang Strikes if you can play out two stealth attacks, which opens the door to more interesting card designs and gameplay spaces that are begging for players to discover and abuse. I think that if this hero were to be in the cube, there are a ton of wild interactions that will keep players hooked both in the draft and in the gameplay.

Next, let's touch on Draconic Assassin.

One of the very first Assassin designs I came up with, way back during Outsiders, was a hero with the simple ability "Whenever a Stealth attack you control hits a hero, banish it. You may play it this turn." Playing your stealth attacks twice has always been a space I've desperately wanted to explore.

K'aakai does this very thing. Hunt tokens are simply costless, pitchless, blockless, ephemeral, 1 power Assassin attacks with stealth. Meaning, if you can make your active stealth Draconic, then you can activate it to play out a follow-up 1 power attack with the same abilities.

Within the cube, there are going to be next to no Draconic Assassin cards, meaning every stealth attack you can put in your pool is talentless. As such, K'aakai presents a simple quest where you use Draconic cards to mark and create fealties, which you activate on Assassin cards to double up on hit effects and go an extra chain link deeper.

K'aakai does bring hunt tokens to the table, which are an incredible resource to utilize and potentially abuse with additional designs. Regardless of whether or not K'aakai ends up as the hero of choice, hunt tokens will most likely make their way into the cube in some shape or form. As worded, hunt tokens cannot be played; any effect that would create hunt tokens immediately attacks with them. I want to limit how easily you can abuse Hunt tokens, meaning I don't want you to be able to pile them up and burst them out in a single turn.

K'aakai opens the door to some super interesting deck builds reliant on multiple aspects of both Draconic and Assassin, leading to a puzzly hero that scratches an itch for the premier deckbuilders at the table.

Moving on to a classic: Shadow Assassin.

Heirett is 100% a flavor-first approach. Shadow, as a talent, is shown to be granted to heroes who enter into a contract with demons and embra, and Assassin already has access to the literal contract keyword, so it just makes sense that we have to make Shadow Assassin work within contract.

In a vacuum, Heirett functions as a character who builds up a ton of contracts in the banish zone to fuel impressive turns. But this is a cube, and the card pool in question will 100% drag this hero towards an intended philosophy.

Within the cube, Shadow cards are going to be the sole source of banishing your own cards, and will often incidentally throw some extra blood debt into your banish zone. Thus, to get your contracts into the banish zone, you'll have to live with a blood debt card going in with it. Additionally, the contracts in question are more similar to the stealth contracts from HNT, with tough variable conditions and a powerful reward, both fully removed from the mill and silver found in DYN contracts.

With both things considered, Heirett plays out Shadow cards to stack contracts for a snowbally game plan that can quickly get out of hand, until they slip up once and immediately take lethal damage to their blood debt.

I'm unsure how viable this hero design is. It will require a very carefully crafted and curated card pool, which could be way more trouble than it's worth. And yet, the flavor speaks volumes in ways I just can't stop thinking about it.

As with the War of the Monarchs, Shadow is always mirrored by Light.

Light is, to me, vastly in need of a massive overhaul. The whole talent still feels underbaked four years after its release. There are a ton of things the talent can do, but mostly things the talent probably won't do.

Harker is my attempt to find something interesting within the marsh that is the Light talent. The two aspects I intend to lean most heavily on are soul and life gain.

The whole hero is very simple on the surface, offering raw value in place of complex puzzles. Your stealth attacks gain you life; every card you put in soul buffs up your attacks. In that simplicity, an engine is found, fueling incredibly efficient high-rate turns that keep your gears turning the longer your engine is allowed to run.

The card pool is where this complexity will be found. Light cards will likely care about life gain in some way, granting effects that key off of gaining life and conditions that require certain life totals. Assassin cards help fuel your life gain requirements for the Light cards.

On the flip side, Assassin cards will likely care about being buffed, and banishing cards. Stealth cards and attack reactions will be able to key off of both the buff from the activated ability and the soul banish in the cost.

Both aspects will turn the card pool into a positive feedback loop, leading to an engine you get to construct and manipulate to power you to victory.

Along the same lines of thought, with life gain, here's Earth Assassin.

I need to do a lot of explaining when it comes to Earth Assassin, because this idea is... complicated. On top of that, this idea literally does not function in constructed.

Within Morel's card pool there will be a keyword ability featured called "X Haze N", where X is a token name, and N is a number. Take, for example, Parasite Haze 3. This is the reminder text: "Create three Parasite Spore tokens and shuffle them into target opponents' deck." Parasite spores are 0-cost pitch-less Earth instant affliction cards with the text "Target opponent gains 1 life. Draw a card."

In short, you're creating cards in your opponent's deck that offer you a benefit when they play them out.

This mechanic is so tremendously heavy regarding the complexity budget, leading to a very simple hero ability to complement it. I can't go around creating enormously complicated mechanics and making the hero's ability a novel right next door. In fact, in some regards, I should even make it simpler by not even referencing the affliction cards. I will do that if I absolutely have to.

There's a ton of extra space that needs to be created and explored with these spore cards, both in the Earth card pool and in the Assassin card pool that supplements it. At the end of the day, this might not be the right environment to make it work. But if I can make it work, spore cards could end up leading to one of the most unique draft environments in the game.

On the Elemental train, let's discuss Lightning Assassin.

If you had asked me to make a Lightning hero before Rosetta, I would have laughed at you. Since Rosetta, though, Lightning got a massive glow-up that puts most other talents to shame. What was previously just go again and extra damage sources, now there are instants and hand bouncing. The two I'm most interested in are the damage sources and instants.

Whisp offers an effective quest. Play multiple cards in the same chain link to get some free true damage and an on-hit on top of that. The condition will largely require Lightning cards to fulfill the needs, which results in an effect that needs Assassin cards to fully utilize.

What's more interesting about Whisp is not the effect, but the implications that it causes in the cube.

The first implication is in the relative power level of Assassin disruption. With the ability to sometimes just freely generate the disruptive effect, you can't feature designs with "When this hits a hero, they banish a card from their hand." Being able to highroll it and accidentally strip your opponents' entire hand is potentially draft-defining. Instead, disruption has to be lower power, focused on slight hits like "When this hits a hero, they draw a card and banish a random card from their hand." This is still strong, but they're net neutral on card advantage and it might end up doing little to nothing at the end of the day.

The second implication is found in damage prevention. As we've seen with Cindra in HNT, direct damage like this all but requires some degree of damage prevention to meet it. You can't freely disrupt if your opponent might have Calming Breeze or a similar effect sitting in their arsenal.

The third implication is found in playing out instants on your opponent's turn. Every single word on Whisp is carefully chosen to allow you to turn around your opponents' attacks on themselves. And against an Assassin, it takes their on hits with it. In other words, there will have to be defensive instants you can play to mess with your opponent's own attacks.

Whisp offers a very interesting and unique gameplay style, even if it's not the most blindingly "Assassin" hero in the world. It pairs very nicely with other heroes in this article and opens the door for Lightning to shine in a non-arcane environment.

Finally, the last talent of the Elemental saga: Ice Assassin.

Ice Assassin is perhaps the most difficult class and talent combination to effectively design for. As both Ice and Assassin heavily feature disruption, it's easy to fall into the hole of "disruption city". That said, I think I managed to settle on something that works quite effectively.

The most interesting thing about this design is the utilization of exposed. With the hero ability costing 4 and being reduced for each exposed zone, it incentivizes opposing drafters to pick up an equipment for every slot they have, so as not to be caught unaware by a 1 or 0 cost Lock ability.

Beyond exposed, the hero's ability needed to be relatively non-obtrusive. If the opponent gets down to 0 equipment, the ability can't just provide free frostbites every single turn. That kind of degenerative gameplay creates unsuitable play patterns and frustrated players. To combat this, I decided to use the freeze keyword as a much softer form of disruption.

Notably, weapons are included in the options for freezing, but this would definitely be cut from the hero should they wind up in a cube with classes or heroes overly reliant on their weapons, like Rangers or Warriors.

The impact Lock creates on the draft stage of the cube is impressive, leading to potentially an incredible format to play around in. That said, I'll have to be very careful not to make that intrigue turn into frustration and contempt.

As we leave Aria, we journey to the Deathmatch Arena with Revered Assassin.

The Deathmatch Arena is a region of showmanship and performance. Assassination is something that happens in the dark, behind closed doors. These two concepts are completely opposed. This was the problem I faced when creating both Revered and Reviled Assassin.

When thinking about Revered Assassin, you have a character who's highly skilled in a profession that requires efficient and practiced execution, who also cares greatly about both having an audience and hearing them roar. After much deliberation, I eventually settled on a knife thrower with elaborate setups and awe-inspiring tricks.

Arcaris has two abilities that come from the knife-throwing area. The bottom ability turns all your stealth attacks into daggers, which will be incredibly necessary in the limited environment that houses them. One of the big draws of Superslam, to me, was the lack of weapons in the environment. It felt like an actual hand-to-hand duel, and I would definitely want to replicate that in an environment with Revered Assassin. Thus, with no daggers in your weapons zones, you need something to throw each turn.

This ability would be terrifying in constructed, allowing you to play out Cheers and then play out back-to-back turns with Persuasive Prognosis or Infect daggers. In a limited environment, though, I am in full control of limiting the impact of what exactly you can throw.

The top ability is basically just a way to readily allow you to keep your dagger stealths on the chain link while you play something else out to throw them. I didn't want to make it free, though, as we'd start stepping on the toes of another currently existing Assassin. Hence, I decided to add on a prevention effect if you aren't giving go again to a dagger.

Revered Assassin is a tough nut to crack, but the design I've presented creates a super unique and interesting environment with a ton of counterplay between it and other classes in the cube.

But for every hero, you have a villain. Anyway, here's Reviled Assassin.

Brutus exists as an inversion of Arcaris. Instead of showmanship and performance, Brutus is simply in it to win. He cheats and claws his way to the top.

The top ability was created as a result of that cheating. Your opponent, who is playing fairly, blocks out your hit and stays ahead. Brutus takes this as a personal offense, tossing some daggers at them.

The bottom ability explains where he got those daggers. He picked up the discarded remnants of previous failed fighters in the arena.

Rusted Edges are the big question mark, here. I am not 100% confident in what they are doing. The only thing I know for sure is that these daggers are brittle, falling apart after only a single turn of use. In some way, Rusted Edges will not survive your end phase.

This creates an intended gameplay loop where you have to become boo'd earlier in the turn to have the necessary pieces to toss your daggers with the top ability later in the turn. All of this will be incredibly expensive on your resources, maybe too expensive. At the end of the day, it'll be a math equation in which I'll have to figure out how to cost all pieces of it, such that it isn't impossible to play out while not being too cheap to be unreasonable.

You may consider us done here. We've got 10 talents in the game, including Chaos, and 9 heroes here, not including Chaos. I'm not particularly keen on Chaos due to its talent identity feeling very antithetical to the space I want to curate.

So we're done. Unless you consider Pirate a talent?

Pirate Thief Assassin, otherwise known as "Rogue soup". A hero who is literally named "Rat", you are basically playing the power fantasy of a grimy, slimy scoundrel.

The hero abilities are relatively self-explanatory. Steal your opponent's equipment to use for yourself. And when you use it, pay a bit more to double up its effects.

Notably, the bottom ability puts in some serious work for triggering High Tide, as a single gold activation can be doubled up for 4 resources, leaving you with a card and 2 resources by pitching blues into it.

As far as the rest of the cube is concerned, there is a single idea that I've been toying with for ages: Raid. Way back in the day, the purple discord worked to craft a Pirate class. Among the ideas presented that I personally loved was "Raid", a keyword that grants additional effects if you've hit a hero this turn. Something along the lines of this: "Raid - When this attacks, if you've hit a hero this turn, it gains 'When this hits a hero, they discard a card.'"

Raid has been something I have never quite been able to shake. It works well in the Assassin framework, triggering off of dagger attacks, and it also works well in the Pirate framework, triggering off of their plethora of go again attacks. I'm not entirely sure which card pool I let Raid sit in, but the idea is sound and creates some very engaging mechanical spaces.

And there you have it. 10 Assassins. Each with a ton of gameplay spaces and engaging designs that could work within their framework.

Wan, a Mystic Assassin who doubles your attack reactions and increases the value of blues.

K'aakai, a Draconic Assassin who doubles your stealths after a sizeable quest.

Heirett, a Shadow Assassin who builds up contracts and blood debt at record speeds.

Harker, a Light Assassin who uses soul to buff and stealth to heal.

Morel, an Earth Assassin who uses a completely new idea of spores and afflictions.

Whisp, a Lightning Assassin who wants to throw everything on one chain link for extra hits.

Lock, an Ice Assassin who punishes players who pass equipment during the draft.

Arcaris, a Revered Assassin who turns stealths into daggers to throw.

Brutus, a Reviled Assassin who picks up discarded daggers to guarantee damage.

Rat, a Pirate Thief Assassin who robs from their opponent and doubles activations.

There are 45 unique combinations of Assassin pairs between these 10 heroes. 45 unique cubes to build. Here are some immediate standouts:

Wan, Whisp, Rat - A cube where Assassin focuses on "If you've played or activated X or more reactions this chain link". Wan uses blues to meet the requirement, Whisp has the requirement built in, and Rat activates equipment for the requirement.

Harker, Morel, Arcaris, Brutus - A cube that necessitates and enables lifegain and life manipulation. Harker and Morel can focus on gaining life while Arcaris and Brutus need to reach specific life thresholds for their respective Revered and Reviled cards.

Lock and Rat - A cube that turns equipment into perhaps the most important draft decision. Rat punishes you for having equipment to steal, Lock punishes you if you try to pass equipment around.

K'aakai, Rat - A cube that adds a layer of depth by exploring Thief and Royal typelines. Perhaps we could have a Draconic Thief Hero and a Royal Pirate Hero on the opposite side of the cube, creating a square shape with an X in the middle where K'aakai is fighting with the Pirate King for Royal cards, and Rat is fighting with the Phoenix Rebellion Palace Pilferer for Thief cards.

Wan, K'aakai, Harker - A cube that focuses on fundamentals. Wan and K'aakai have very flavorful and interactive quests, while Harker sits around and builds up a massive engine using their soul.

Personally, I'm drawn most towards Lock / Rat, Arcaris / Brutus, and Wan / K'aakai / Harker.

Lock / Rat presents the most interesting draft, to me. Assassins might care about activated abilities, incentivizing you to have equipment to activate. Ice will then care about freezing and taxing equipment, making them harder to use. Pirates will be able to steal and pilfer the equipment, making them premium objects to protect. The final node of this cube might end up being Guardian or Warrior, something that cares about their equipment and uses it to fuel high-value turn cycles. As a whole, the cube also creates excellent theming. Pirates and Ice immediately evoke the feelings of the Viking age. Additionally, the Raid mechanic I spoke about in the Rat section immediately feels at home with the Vikings.

Arcarius / Brutus feels like a healthy middle ground. Though we're immediately treading on previously walked space with the Deathmatch Arena, we're exploring it in a very different framework. Superslam took the setup of no weapons and started asking what to do instead, while this cube can take the setup of no weapons and start asking how to work weapon archetypes into it. Additionally, Reviled and Revered already pose some incredibly interesting mechanical decision points related to booing and cheering, as well as life gain and life manipulation.

Wan / K'aakai / Harker is an incredible fundamental environment. Any two of the three pairs nicely together to create an environment ripe for skill and experience to shine. There's even an argument to be made that I could figure out a way to put all three in the cube, as well as three heroes of a different class. Instead of a square shape, we have a triangular prism. Wan fights with K'aakai and Harker for Assassin cards while also fighting with an unnamed Mystic non-Assassin hero for Mystic cards. It might be too much to handle, pulling focus in many different directions, but it could also create a super enjoyable space to draft and play in.

Even if I don't end up making a cube with any of these heroes, I do believe this exercise was worthwhile. Each hero is filled to the brim with possibility, just begging to be explored.

If you want to hop in the discussion for these cubes in real time, stop by the FabCube Discord and explore the website.

If you want to hop into the discussion for Assassins in real time, stop by the Spiders' Web Discord.