Living Legend
The following changes to Living Legend are effective from Monday, October 6, 2025:
- Count Your Blessings is restricted.
- Zephyr Needle is banned.
- Warmonger’s Diplomacy is unrestricted.
In both TCG play and format management, so many decisions boil down to trade-offs. Play fewer Defense Reactions to gain points against control decks but be softer to Assassins and Warriors. Skip that Arcane Barrier and pray you don’t run into a Kano. You’ve all been there.
On our side, as we head into the World Championship in Philadelphia in just a few short weeks, we initially made the decision to reduce player preparation time in favor of gathering more data from a run of Pro Quests and Battle Hardeneds. We felt this decision most strongly benefited the Living Legend format, which simply has not had much time in the competitive spotlight.
However, since we initially published the date of our intended Banned and Restricted window, a few things have changed. First, the sample size of the Living Legend data we would be able to analyze is smaller than we initially anticipated. Second, with the previous lack of competitive focus on Living Legend, we’ve learned that players are, entirely fairly, less comfortable testing this format on a tight schedule than they are in Classic Constructed. A similar timing window for our final bans before Pro Tour: Singapore may have presented few problems, but the calculus is just different with Living Legend in the mix. Third, we feel like we have already garnered a solid understanding of the current best decks in Living Legend and have a reasonable plan to adjust the format now.
While the extra time and results would have been appreciated in our decision-making process, the trade-off is no longer in favor of making players prepare in a tighter window. Instead, we’d like to get our pre-Worlds adjustments out now.
We said the following about Warmonger’s Diplomacy when we first restricted it all the way back in December of 2023:
“When you sit down to play a game of Living Legend, you are supposed to be able to do exciting and powerful things. While you shouldn’t be able to operate with impunity, and the threat of disruption should loom, you need to occasionally get away with whatever [powerful play] your deck is designed to create.”
Runeblades have taken this invitation to heart as of late and have been living their best lives at the top of the format. In the two years since the Warmonger’s Diplomacy restriction, multitudinous powerful cards have joined the Runeblade ranks. As evidenced by Viserai’s reign at the end of his Classic Constructed lifespan, more tools than ever are available to overcome the full suite of Warmonger’s Diplomacy. Runeblades may have to go back to the deckbuilding drawing board, and some will take the return of Warmonger’s Diplomacy harder than others. However, it now feels like there is a viable path forward for Runeblade success, even in the face of disruption, that was not previously present. Other decks lurking just below the top tier of Runeblades, such as Dash I/O, also very much deserve the splash damage they are catching here, as their combo turns have gotten very consistent and powerful as of late.
Viable Ninja decks in Living Legend have quickly congealed around the Up Sticks and Run/Zephyr Needle combination, with both Ira and Zen often running the full 9 copies. At the same time, these two heroes might be the readiest to go ahead and pick up a full suite of Warmonger’s Diplomacy, despite having some surface-level incompatibility with the Up Sticks and Run plan. Not bringing the Ninjas down a peg would almost certainly crown them as the new best decks in format.
Play in Classic Constructed has proven that Up Sticks and Run presents little problem in and of itself. Even if we had gotten rid of Up Sticks and Run, Zephyr Needle still carries all of its old baggage. If games are fast, the weapon is just too good for any Flesh and Blood format. And games in Living Legend will almost always be faster than their Classic Constructed brethren. Zephyr Needle needs to hit the bench.
While we discussed a Zephyr Needle restriction, we ultimately determined the impact to Zen to be too minimal, and we wanted to take a bigger swing here in advance of Worlds, trying to get some fresh contenders into the mix. In addition, for the time being we prefer to maintain a dichotomy in our Living Legend ban list: deck-cards are restricted, arena-cards are banned…
Which hopefully gives context to a Count Your Blessings restriction which essentially functions as a full ban. While we would love to see viable control options arise in Living Legend, Count Your Blessings decks were not effectively challenging the aggressive decks at the top of the format. Those decks were too fast for Count Your Blessings’ incremental advantage to matter.
What they are very effective at is assuring anyone who is not pursuing the poles of the format will simply fall to Count Your Blessings. Add in the logistical challenges Count Your Blessings has the potential to present in untimed play, and once again, we need to simply move on from this card.
We will continue to hold open the previously announced November 3, 2025 (with an effective date of November 10, 2025) ban window, but this window will only be used, for both Living Legend and Classic Constructed, in the case of upcoming competitive events revealing a previously unforeseen emergency.