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!
This article is for the Wizard lovers, the combo players, and the rules virtuosos.
The Wizard class has held a contentious position in the world of Flesh and Blood since its introduction in Arcane Rising. And whether you love them or hate them, Wizards have been part of the game for more than five years now. Over that time, our internal view of the class has evolved significantly.
Personally, I see three defining features of early-era Wizard:
- Big chunks of arcane damage
- Playing at instant speed
- Winning through elaborate combos
In Kano’s case, those combos typically came from a select few cards that “double-dipped” damage – cards that amplified arcane output when combined with something else. The best examples were Aether Flare, Forked Lightning, and Blazing Aether. Then Aether Wildfire arrived and pushed that math even further. As Kano players refined their lists and the deck accumulated more tools, it trended deeper into a pure combo, one-turn-kill strategy. Not only did it disengage from the usual attacking and defending flow of Flesh and Blood, it also abandoned dealing meaningful damage turn by turn, instead compressing the vast majority of its output into a single explosive turn.
The next Wizard, Iyslander, added a healthy dose of disruption to Wizards through the Ice talent. While the deck still had a strong combo component, the combination of chip damage, Frostbites, and smart turn-cycle management was generally the primary win condition. Michael Hamilton’s physical attack packages, Wounding Bull and Fyendal’s Fighting Spirit, became core contributors to Iyslander’s plan. I personally saw this shift in how the Wizard class functioned as a net positive. Even though getting frostbitten at instant speed wasn’t exactly on anyone’s bucket list, Iyslander created interactive turn cycles and offered a unique way to engage with the game.
Let’s Get Physical
Rosetta opened the door to incorporating physical attacks as part of the identity of our two new Wizards, Verdance and Oscilio. Their Earth and Lightning maps added attacks that actively synergized with each hero’s Wizard toolkit. It gave players meaningful flexibility in how deeply they wanted to lean into their respective talents.
For Oscilio in particular, the play pattern of charging up a large Volzar and then unleashing a huge arcane blast felt perfectly on-theme for a Lightning Wizard. The tricky part was building tools that enabled different synergies and card combos. Fortunately, the attacks fit well from day one. Blast to Oblivion, Gone in a Flash, and Flittering Charge all aligned naturally with Oscilio’s identity. I vividly remember our Wizard fans in the dev room bouncing Sigils, replaying them, charging Volzar, and generally having an absolute blast. No pun intended.
Finding the Lightning Wizard Identity
As we settled on Oscilio’s various components, we kept discovering the weird and wonderful ways they all interacted with each other – the plethora of different instants, Lightning attacks, and burn spells. All these varied card interactions had an overarching goal of building the amp and setting up the big Volzar moment. It wasn’t consistent, but with a worthy pay-off, it seemed like the juice could be worth the squeeze. That pay-off, however, proved to be a tough nut to crack. Kano has Blazing Aether, Iyslander has Ice Eternal and Frost Hex. We needed that equivalent “big spell” for Oscilio. Initially, the Majestic slots reflected this idea: a grand crescendo – an arcane spell that benefited massively from amping. One of these was an Oscilio specialization – an arcane damage spell that converted your action points into card draw. 4 action points? Draw 4 cards with a chunk of arcane on top. All of this looked exciting on paper, but testing revealed a few issues:
- Oscilio’s kit had a lot of moving moving parts, making consistency a real deck building challenge. Drawing a functional hand did not happen often enough, even with his filtering hero ability.
- When everything did line up, the output was absurd, largely thanks to the specialization. Other than the complete damage swings, drawing 4 or more cards mid-turn can cause serious decision paralysis and it created impossibly complex puzzles on the fly.
The specialization sat at the core of these issues. It functioned almost exclusively in very specific scenarios, mostly when paired with Lightning Greaves to generate action points. Wizard players often had one incredibly powerful “Greaves + specialization” turn, but the rest of their games became awkward and inconsistent. A major red flag also emerged: the ability to chain specializations after one another. Any card draw in Flesh and Blood has to be carefully analyzed, but if the card draws 4 or more, it shoots up to top priority testing.
We tried the obvious fix to stop chaining multiple copies together – we gave it the Legendary keyword to limit it to one copy. It helped in some ways, but it also widened the gap between Oscilio’s best-case and worst-case games. If you drew it, the Greaves turn worked too well; if you didn’t, the whole deck felt like it fell apart.
Our feedback was essentially this: the deck had a strong Lightning component and a strong Wizard component, but it struggled to connect the dots often enough. And when it did assemble the combo, the ceiling felt too high. We relayed this to the designers. The verdict was that the initial specialization couldn’t be fixed through development or redesign. What Oscilio needed was a glue piece, something to stabilize his turn-by-turn gameplay and improve baseline consistency.
Then came Sigil of Brilliance.
At first glance, compared to the old specialization, it looked underwhelming. But it quickly became clear that it did exactly what Oscilio needed: it fixed his consistency, while reducing the outrageous spikes.
- It was Lightning, so it interacted with the instant speed synergies and Oscilio’s hero ability.
- It powered Volzar.
- As a Sigil, it reduced Volzar’s cost and enhanced all other Sigil synergies.
- Most importantly, it drew a card, enabling Oscilio to have set up damage overlaps.
By deepening Sigil synergies, through attacks like Blast to Oblivion, Aether Bindings of Third Age, and other interactions, we finally found the cohesion that Oscilio’s moving parts had been missing. Slowly but surely, as our internal lists were rebuilt to incorporate the Sigil of Brilliance, it became the card we wanted to draw more and more, until it became clear it was the power card of the deck.
Keeping the Spark
Despite Oscilio not making a major competitive impact on release, the Lightning Wizard has been slowly but surely building a cult following. And now, these players are taking him into the competitive spotlight. I believe the development process of his card pool is a reflection of our internal learnings on the Wizard class as a whole. We have discovered where the Wizard identity shined and where it strained the fabric of the game. In Rosetta, we have pushed closer to a version of Wizard that kept its spark, its cleverness, its “gotcha” moments, but grounded them in the ebb and flow of real turn cycles. Finding that sweet spot wasn’t about diluting Wizard’s essence, but refining it. The class still gets to play sideways, break timing expectations, and unleash spectacular bursts of damage, but now it also participates meaningfully in the push-and-pull that defines Flesh and Blood. For Oscilio, Sigil of Brilliance is the unifying piece that makes his whole engine tick.