All changes in today's announcement are effective from Friday, December 22, 2023.
Classic Constructed
- No changes
In the aftermath of Iyslander and Lexi ascending to Living Legend, the Classic Constructed metagame has looked novel, balanced, and above all, it has provided players with an opportunity to explore a wide range of heroes with credible potential to make Top 8 and win tournaments. With the release of Heavy Hitters just around the corner, we see no need to interject at this moment.
Blitz
- Aether Wildfire moves from banned to legal
- Stir the Aetherwinds moves from banned to legal
- Cintari Saber will become the signature weapon for Kassai, and will be legal from the release of Heavy Hitters (February 2nd, 2024)
Blitz has recently undergone the largest shakeup in the format's history, and some of the clearest power outliers have now ascended to Living Legend. Right now, the metagame feels like a blank slate, and we are excited to see how players will write the next chapter.
In the absence of Kano, Aether Wildfire and Stir the Aetherwinds are both clear to return to the format. However, we are choosing to be a bit more careful with Snapback. Emperor, Dracai of Aesir already feels poised to ascend to high-tier status, and Snapback’s inclusion in the format has the potential to change the math on many of his Storm Striders kill turns. We are comfortable with where the Emperor’s instant speed output currently lies, and see no reason to push things any further with a Snapback unban at this time.
Finally, we turn to the question of Cintari Saber in Blitz. When Kassai (the young version of Kassai of the Golden Sand) becomes a legal hero in Blitz upon the release of Heavy Hitters, her signature weapon will be Cintari Saber. As such, Cintari Saber will once again be legal for official tournament play in Blitz.
You can expect both similar and divergent outcomes in the future when a new version of a previously Living Legend-ascended hero returns to the fold. In other instances, we may choose to produce a new signature weapon to align with that hero. In this case, Kassai is free to bring her trademark swords into the arena once more.
Living Legend
- Awakening is restricted
- Channel Lake Frigid is restricted
- Crippling Crush is restricted
- Hypothermia is restricted
- Oaken Old is restricted
- Star Struck is restricted
- Warmonger’s Diplomacy is restricted
(If a card is restricted you may only include up to 1 copy in your registered deck.)
At the Battle Hardened in Barcelona, the community made their stance abundantly clear—the Living Legend format has a vital role in the pantheon of ways to play Flesh and Blood. Also made clear was the fact that Bravo, Star of the Show, remains every bit the power outlier he was during his time in Classic Constructed. However, despite the most dominant tournament performance we’ve ever seen from a single hero, players still seemed to come away from the event with a smile on their face and a desire to play more games of Living Legend format.
People enjoy doing powerful things during their games of Flesh and Blood, and Living Legend is meant to be a format where those power fantasies can be showcased. In the case of "Starvo", we just need them to play out less frequently. And in the case of… well, every other hero, we need those fantasies to play out more frequently.
With this goal in mind, we begin our management of Living Legend format with the liberal use of a restricted list, rather than the typical bans we see in Flesh and Blood. A registered deck can contain up to one copy of any particular restricted card. We’d like Living Legend format to be a place where you can continue to play all of your cards in as balanced a metagame as the circumstances of the format allow us to create. However, we recognize that some power outliers may ultimately make this an impossibility. If that is true, you can rest easy knowing we will also use bans where necessary.
As for the individual cards making their way to today's list, no single card in the history of Flesh and Blood offers greater efficiency and catch-up potential than Awakening. However, it does have some timing requirements and potential for opposing counterplay in life management. As a one-of, we hope that its influence over games becomes more of a rare occasion, and aggressive decks are able to find windows to punish Starvo players when they do not have access to the instant.
The trio of Oaken Old, Crippling Crush, and Star Struck comprise a selection of Starvo’s most brutal disruptive attacks. While only Oaken Old really stands out as a true power outlier, restricting that card alone would not have a large enough reduction in the number of turns that Starvo's opponents play under some form of restricted output. Yes, Star Struck and Crippling Crush are less efficient cards than Oaken Old, but when Starvo is chaining disruption, efficiency stops mattering—you simply don’t get to be enough of an active participant in the game. As heavy handed as this approach may seem, it’s very plausible this is not the end to our reduction to Starvo’s disruptive attacks. Any powerful on-hit in a Starvo list should consider itself on warning notice.
While Channel Lake Frigid, Hypothermia, and Warmonger’s Diplomacy all feature in Starvo decks, the restriction of these three cards is intended to have direct impacts on other decks, as well as emphasize our goals for the format. 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 degeneracy your deck is designed to create.
The combination of Channel Lake Frigid, Hypothermia, and Warmonger’s Diplomacy, especially when deployed by Starvo, was simply preventing too much of the format from doing cool things. Hypothermia continued to steal turns out of nowhere from Fai and Chane. A Warmonger’s Diplomacy parked in arsenal meant that none of the Runeblades ever quite got to reach their power apex. And finally, Channel Lake Frigid represented a frosty nightmare for every go-wide deck in the format. Having the perfect disruption to foil your opponent’s plans should be an exciting moment in the story of a game or tournament, not an absolute guarantee. While we do believe that all of these cards play important roles in creating interactivity and longevity in games, we’d just like to see them do so in smaller doses when deployed in this format.
We are 100% committed to the Living Legend format, and see it as an important, albeit more occasional, part of our competitive ecosystem going forward. It is critical we all have a place to revisit the heroes we’ve loved in the past. While it is unlikely that we can ever reach a state where every Living Legend-ascended hero is a substantial part of the metagame, we do intend to find ways to have greater competitive diversity than we saw in our first major event.
Starvo may be facing a mountain of restrictions in this announcement, but he is in many ways the face of the Living Legend format, and a huge impetus for many to participate. Rest assured that we believe Starvo will continue to be a fixture in the metagame despite these changes, hopefully fulfilling his role as format flagbearer in a much healthier fashion. We will continue to closely monitor format health, use our tools of bans and restrictions liberally, and strive to make Living Legend a format we are all excited to play for many years to come.
Commoner
- Amulet of Ice is banned
- Stubby Hammerers is banned
While we don’t get to check in on Commoner often, the recent side events at World Championship: Barcelona as well as conversations with the community caretakers of the format have given us the opportunity to evaluate the current state of the Commoner metagame. We see a healthy format with solid representation for multiple classes, but it does feel like several notable power outliers which previously faced bans in other formats have been given a bit of a free pass.
With an Amulet of Ice ban reducing Iyslander’s ability to invalidate an opponent’s defensive measures and a Stubby Hammerers ban taking just a pinch of explosiveness away from Ninjas, Runeblades, and any other heroes looking to go exceptionally wide, we are optimistic that there can be more room for slower, more controlling strategies in the Commoner format.
The End of Suspensions
With this update we are also officially discontinuing the use of the “suspended” category. Suspensions came about during a formative time for our efforts at format management, and seemed an important way to let players know our long-term intentions around targeted cards. Since those early days, we have worked hard to develop our communication channels, and now feel prepared to deliver appropriate context around banned and restricted decisions in articles such as these. If it is our intention to ban or unban a card only until a certain hero reaches Living Legend, as a contingent experiment, or in any other scenario that falls outside the realm of a typical ban, we will disseminate that information in the announcement of that cards banning.
Next Banned and Restricted Announcement
The next scheduled Banned and Restricted Announcement will be on Monday, March 25th, 2024.