Legend Story Studios developer Karol lifts the curtain of the Dev Room so we can take a peek behind the scenes. Learn about the work that went into designing, testing, and evolving the iconic cards you know and love today. Sometimes all a card needs to be great is a Dev Touch!
Over four years ago, I received an email from James White asking me if I wanted to come into Legend Story Studios to do development work for their newest project. As an avid fan of Flesh and Blood, it was a dream opportunity.
I finally got to have a proper look under the hood and see how the machine behind the best TCG truly works. From the name, art, theming, through to the mechanics. How does Flesh and Blood get made?
After years of honing my skills in game development, I can now share my discoveries with you.
Before cards get proofed and beautified by the art department, they go through two core stages—design and development.
Design is coming up with card concepts then turning those ideas into text. It's creating the broad strokes of what a card becomes. If you ever asked yourself "who had the idea to make this card?", the answer is a designer.
James White is the lead designer at Legend Story Studios, and when you ask the above question about a card, more often than not the answer is James. Chris Gehring and Bryan Gottlieb also both contribute a tremendous amount to the design process, and the rest of the development team has opportunities to design cards, but I cannot overstate how much of the game comes from James himself.
When the set is presented to the developers, it is usually almost complete, with a few gaps to fill out during the development process to see what cards are needed once we get a better understanding of the format and the overall metagame. These gaps are a great way for us, the developers, to test out our design chops and suggest ideas to fill them.
So what do developers do?
Designers and developers have similar roles to architects and engineers of a building construction. If designers are the architects for a building, developers are the engineers that verify that those blueprints are sound. The designers envision how the game will play and feel—like architects designing how a building will look and function. The developers turn that vision into a playable reality—like engineers making the building stand structurally.
In both cases, the developers and engineers want to ensure that the creation is solid and enjoyed by their end users for many years to come. But how do developers do this?
Developers do so through critically analysing the set of cards through multiple lenses and make adjustments accordingly to ensure each card is flavourful and balanced.
Are there any cards that this created egregious combos with?
Is it balanced in all formats of the game?
Does it work in both Limited and Constructed?
Does playing it FEEL like it suits its talent or class?
Do the play patterns reflect the hero?
Broadly speaking, all these lenses that developers use can be grouped into two main categories—flavour and balance. My favourite way to illustrate how flavour and balance intersect is how we developed Leave No Witnesses.
My fellow developer and dear friend Tom Penny is known to be a bit of a 'lore-yer'—it's what we internally call developers who love to bring up the flavour or card interactions and call out any discrepancies.
We were testing Assassin cards for the first time ever in Dynasty. The disruption from Leave No Witnesses and Surgical Extraction felt quite strong, but for me it stood out that Leave No Witnesses banished all cards in the arsenal. This felt like a lot when playing New Horizon—it was Lexi with a double arsenal slot. Now, a single card play of Leave No Witnesses coming in for 4, binning both arsenal cards, a card from top of deck, AND making Silver?!
It felt like a little bit too much, so I suggested as a balancing measure that we should change Leave No Witnesses to banish a single arsenal card. In terms of gameplay it felt like a simple fix, but Tom found a huge flavour flaw in my solution—the card is called Leave No Witnesses not Leave a Witness. If it doesn't banish all cards in the arsenal, the card's name is simply misleading.
Tom was adamant the card's name had to change if the fix was implemented. This led to a discussion with the wider development team. Do we keep the high power level and the flavour? Do we adjust the power level and rename the card? Ultimately, someone much smarter than us pointed out that in the vast majority of matchups the card’s flavour still holds. This is how we ended up the with final version.
Leave No Witnesses
But to this day, the two of us still refer to the card as Leave a Witness. While Tom didn't get his way this time, this example shows how cards can be pushed and pulled through their gameplay balance and how flavour can play an important role with the final version of a card.
We had a similar situation come up in a recent set we’ve been working on and Tom got his way—creating, in my opinion, one of the most flavourful cards in the set. Hit me up when it releases and I’ll tell you the tale.
If you have any burning questions about the development process and the roles flavour and balance play, feel free to reach out to me on Bluesky: @lss-karol.bsky.social