The trends from Armories, Skirmishes, and more have made one fact abundantly clear - a huge percentage of players absolutely love the Blitz format. When it comes to in-store play, Blitz is almost every bit as popular as Classic Constructed. While Classic Constructed steals a lot of the headlines when it comes to big events like Pro Tours and Callings, it is Blitz that carries the day for many local game stores around the world.
As a studio of gamers we love Blitz, and we see the format as an absolutely vital part of the Flesh and Blood organized play experience that we will continue to support and embrace at all levels of competition... but there’s always room to explore potential improvements.
With the goal of looking at ways to improve upon the beloved Blitz experience, we are announcing an experiment for Skirmish Season 7.
From July 29th to August 13th at GEM registered stores, Blitz will have modified deck construction rules, to be in effect ONLY at Skirmish Season 7 Blitz events.
- Players will bring a deck that includes 1 young hero and up to 52 cards (an extra card compared to the current Blitz format). Like Classic Constructed, these 52 slots can contain a mix of cards that go in your main deck (deck cards), or cards you can equip/that exist in your inventory (arena cards).
- At the start of the game, players reveal their heroes simultaneously, decide who is going first, then each player presents to their opponent a shuffled main deck of at least 40 cards, plus any weapons and equipment they want to start the game with. Any non-presented cards reside in player inventories.
- Players then reveal their equipment, draw up, and play some Flesh and Blood!
It is our hope that this new mode of deck construction will enable a greater degree of flexibility in strategy and gameplay, while still offering the pick-up-and-play, fast and frenetic style of Blitz we all know and love. We do not expect this change to have an immediate drastic impact on the current Skirmish Season 7 metagame, but we do expect that it will grant each hero more utility across a diverse spread of matchups, contributing to an even more exciting, balanced, and fun gameplay experience.
Sick of losing to your store’s Kano master? Pack a few copies of Oasis Respite and soften the blow of those Aether Flares. Prism's auras giving you nightmares? Time Skippers and Enlightened Strike to the rescue! Riptide laughing at you from behind a never-ending wall of traps? Introduce him to Burdens of the Past! With limited slots for extra cards and equipment, you’ll still have to choose your tools wisely, and we expect careful and thoughtful deckbuilding to be rewarded in this updated version of Blitz.
Ultimately, Blitz is a format designed to spark excitement and joy, and all the good intentions behind a format don’t matter if our number one priority - our players - are not having a blast. It is for this reason that we are running this change on an experimental basis. Surveys will be conducted at the end of Skirmish Season 7, where you’ll be able to provide direct feedback to us on this new Blitz experience. Only after consulting with you, the players, will we make a decision on whether this will be the new permanent standard for Blitz moving forward.
As always, we appreciate your ongoing support of Flesh and Blood, and look forward to seeing what you cook up for your local Skirmish with these new rules in effect!
