Deckbuilding is fluid and iterative. You won't necessarily hit each step once, or in this order. Jump around and come back as needed.
That said, there's a natural place to start. In Flesh and Blood you pick a hero first, then build a deck around them. Every hero card has a text box with one or two abilities, and every hero also has weapons they can equip. Those two things tell you what kind of cards your deck should be made of. A hero ability only pays off if your deck is full of the cards it rewards, so the first question is always: what are these two asking me to include?
Vocabulary
Before going further, a few terms that come up constantly:
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Power: the damage number on an attack card.
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Resources: the cost to play a card. You pay by "pitching" a card from your hand. Red cards give 1, yellow 2, blue 3.
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Go again: lets you keep playing cards that turn instead of ending your turn.
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Talent (Earth, Lightning, Draconic, Chaos and others): a subtype on cards. A hero with a talent can only play cards of their class and their talent.
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Token: a card-like object you create during the game.
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Graveyard and banished zone: two separate discard areas. Some abilities count what's in them.
What the hero and weapon ask for
Most heroes want a specific type of card, a specific colour, or cards with a specific property. Read the text box literally and turn it into a shopping list.
A hero whose ability switches on once a certain number of cards sit in a particular zone needs cards that put them there, plus the payoffs that make the ability worth switching on. A hero who rewards attacks above a certain power needs a deck built almost entirely of attacks at that threshold. A hero who rewards a particular game state needs both the cards that create that state and the cards that punish the opponent while it's active.
Weapons complicate this in a useful way. A hero often has several weapon options, and they don't always want the same things the hero does. One weapon might reward non-attack actions while the hero ability rewards a talent. Another might reward a specific attack type. Choosing between them is a deckbuilding decision, not a preference, because each one pulls your card list in a different direction.
Watch for hero abilities that change the practical threshold of a card. If your hero gives attacks a static bonus while they're in hand, a card printed below the number you're looking for may count as being at it. Those interactions are easy to miss on a first read and they change what belongs in the deck.
What equipment adds
Equipment is a separate set of cards from your deck. You choose it before the game and it starts already in play, one piece per slot (head, chest, arms, legs, plus your weapon and off-hand). You never have to draw it, so whatever it does is guaranteed to be available in every single game. That reliability is why equipment deserves real thought rather than being an afterthought.
Equipment does one of two things:
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1. It blocks. Most pieces have a defense number and soak damage, which saves you cards from your hand. That's baseline value with no consequences for the rest of your deck.
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2. It does something. Some pieces have an ability, often one that destroys the equipment as part of the cost. If that ability is only good when your deck contains certain cards, then choosing the equipment forces choices in your 60.
The second kind is what "build around" means: a card strong enough that you reshape the deck to make it work. This is a spectrum. Some equipment asks for nothing. Some asks for two or three deck slots. Some restructures the whole list.
A worked example of the middle case: a piece of equipment that lets you play one of your non-attack actions as though it were an instant, meaning you can fire it off during your opponent's turn rather than your own. On its own that does nothing. It becomes strong when your deck contains spells that specifically reward being played on the opponent's turn. Two or three card slots, and suddenly the equipment is generating a turn's worth of action out of your opponent's turn.
One cost that's easy to overlook: some of the most interesting equipment has 0 defense, meaning it can't block at all. Taking it leaves that slot contributing nothing defensively for the entire game. That's a real price, and it's the trade-off you're weighing whenever a build-around piece competes with a plain blocker.
Source: https://fabtcg.com/articles/masterclass-deckbuilding/
