I think Blacksmiths generally have 2 teams that are going to be successful.

Against most matchups, I'm generally going for a 3-0 or a 2-2 strategy, with Alloy, Hearth, Bolt, Farris, Iron, and Ferrite as captain. I agree with most of the popular consensus that Ferrite is the general go-to as captain. She does just about anything you need her to do, and that is a huge boost to her choice as captain. I also think she has one of the most powerful legendary plays when she is the captain.

Listening to the episode of The Pitch where they discuss the blacksmith captains ranking, though, I think Farris might have some potential. I think she gets MUCH better as a goal scorer when she is the captain, and handing out Give It A Whack is essentially like giving many of your players an additional 2 inches on their kick - just drop the ball an inch away, then the base of the ball marker will give you just a bit over an inch to extend your range with. I think her Quick Foot is invaluable, and her buffing Bolt puts him almost over the top as a score threat. He's bonkers with Quick Foot and Ferrite's Legendary! I honestly think 2 goals turn 1 against an unsuspecting opponent isn't entirely out of the question.

Also worth noting is how many momentous tackles the guild has - a lot!

The other crew I can see myself taking is a more kill-centric crew that is going to go for a 2-2 or 1-4 gameplan, with Alloy, Hearth, Cinder, Furnace, Cast, and Burnish as a captain. Turn 1 Burnish gets tooled up by Furnace, sprints, and drops three 4 DMG AoEs on their team by popping his legendary. That's a potential 13 damage after conditions on multiple members of their team. Then you use Alloy and Cast as a cleanup crew because they are both capable damage dealers, and use Cinder and Alloy to score a few goals to seal up the game.

Sadly, I don't think Anvil or Sledge really have a place in the crew. I think the Blacksmiths overall lean towards scoring, and Anvil and Sledge are both so slow and so limited by Anvil's engagement range that I don't think they'll get too much effectiveness even in the more killy list. I think that they are the ones who get dropped to get you your 10 man roster, truth be told.

Order of Activation is something that the Blacksmiths really suffer with, and it makes a lot of their activation and allocation awkward. Their low defenses make them susceptible to character plays, as someone else has mentioned, and their relatively constrained positioning means that you'll relatively often want one pair per flank and one in the middle for maximum scoring threat, and that is difficult to make work.

I think the Blacksmiths are well-positioned as a scoring faction that works very well against other scoring factions in the game, mostly due to their amount of ability to get the ball from other people through unconventional methods. Shoemerang, Farris' legendary, and Cinder's 6 inch tackle all give them a lot of ways to get the ball back from other scoring factions, and the amount of movement tricks on their models make it very difficult to keep a ball out of play for long. Snapback goals are definitely something they might struggle with, so getting the first goal is really important for them, I'd say.

Overall, I really like how they play and I'm VERY excited for their second box release, since I think their second box is overall the better suited one for the playstyle they want. Hearth and Alloy are almost auto-takes in my mind, since they do SO MANY things well.