traditionally when a player designs a flesh and blood deck they focus on including good cards (usually reds) and then including enough blues to pay for their turns; from there, you simply pick the best options from those groups and optimize
this tends to produce decks that perform at a solid level, and is a relatively intuitive and mathematically sound process
for example, take a standard meta deck like slippy (arakni, slipped thru the cracks) - you include the most powerful cards you have access to, even though some are yellow (and thus on average below rate) they are important enough to the strategy to justify it e.x. take up the mantle, decide how many blues you want e.g. 15, then pick the ones that are a bit above rate such as blue shred or bonds of agony
makes sense, right? easy logic to follow, the math checks out, and playtesting reveals the powerlevel of cards so you can refine the overall value of your deck
BUT
what if you could increase the overall value of your deck by replacing (alot of) the blues with yellows?
the obvious problem is if you need to pitch a card then of course a yellow is worse than a blue... but if this ends up being false, then the entire premise of deck pitch value becomes inverted
what are you pitching for? how much energy do you need? lets take a look at some of the most popular cards in the game right now:
what do they have in common? they all cost either 0 or 2, overwhelmingly, with rare exceptions that usually require an entire hero be built around blues (like kano)
weapons follow this trend as well - assassin daggers cost 2 to attack with, double kodachi is 2 to attack with, anothos usually has two cards pitched to attack with it anyway for maximum value, fang daggers are 2 to attack with (as well as 2x dawnblade, 2x cintari saber)
a lot to think about, right? take a moment and consider this
okay, so take our previous example of slippy - instead of being forced to run blues that are, on average, less powerful, we can run better yellows acrosst the board to power our turns
we already have take up the mantle, so instead of being a power card we slot it with our resource cards and play a red in addition, effectively replacing a blue with a red in the deck (thats a lot of value!)
replace blue shred with yellow shred, even more value
worst case, cheap blue stealth attacks can all be replaced with their yellow counterparts, making it harder to block them out with a single piece of equipment e.g. valiant dynamos - but this is just the minimum of the value we can generate with this approach, are there any yellow cards that have been ignored by assassin players but actually represent incredible value?
...
...
...
yes! behold~
yet another reaction to force impossible decisions by your opponents, and a resource gem more powerful than riches of tropical dhani, both substantial improvements to the deck
and again, this is simply scratching the surface of the sort of holistic mindset we can achieve by reimagining how we value "pitch" in the game
okay i will leave this article here for now, i could go on for quite a while but i will keep it succinct and just focus on the basic principle
my parting wisdom for you today is to think of all of the good yellow cards you would want to run and how much better your deck would be if you could replace blues with them - after all, alot of the reason gravy bones is so good is that his hero ability and class cards basically makes blues and yellows all reds for him; what if your hero could just "be a necromancer"? ;)