Classic Constructed
The following changes to Classic Constructed are effective from Tuesday, May 20, 2025:
- Count Your Blessings is banned.
- Germinate is banned.
- Scepter of Pain is banned.
- Bonds of Ancestry (Red) is unbanned.
Count Your Blessings is perhaps the most controversial card in Flesh and Blood history. We have previously spoken favorably of Count Your Blessings’ role in our game system. However, it has become clear that while there are certainly Count Your Blessings fans in the real world (just ask our current World Champion!), our internal team overestimated player tolerance for burst life gain. What some may see as a control deck tenaciously clinging to life, others view as a single card invalidating turns and turns of hard work.
Both perceptions are valid, and if opinions on Count Your Blessings gameplay were split down the middle and evenly distributed across our player base, perhaps we’d hold the line, as the card is not presently performing at problematic levels. However, it has become clear that Count Your Blessings-style gameplay has a disproportionate impact on games at the Armory level, where players who chose strategies particularly vulnerable to its life gain are left feeling hopeless week after week.
In addition, the burden of Count Your Blessings development is becoming too large. Most new heroes must be put through a Count Your Blessings check. New defensive tool? Time to build a bunch of Count Your Blessings decks. Making a new card to challenge Count Your Blessings? More development time allocated to a single card. And all these games must be played against a Count Your Blessings deck that is assuredly looking to play a 50-minute slugfest. The total time invested in the card has simply spiraled out of control.
It is time for us to move on from Count Your Blessings in both Classic Constructed and Blitz. We have taken many lessons from the experience and would not categorize the cards influence on the game over its legal lifespan as strictly negative, but the strategy and its mode of gameplay has run its course for now.
While Aurora stole all the headlines this past Pro Quest season, Florian outperformed her on virtually all metrics, only being kept from a similar reign of terror by lesser representation. Rather than let Florian continue on a similar trajectory, we are taking some quasi-preemptive action.
Much like Kraken’s Aethervein, Scepter of Pain was a card designed prior to the existence of amp. While the output may not be as problematic, Channel the Millennium Tree plus Scepter of Pain still feels like too much to ask decks to account for. There is no realistic way to present large amounts of Arcane Barrier against a Florian without getting destroyed on the many other axes he can fight on.
Add in the fact that Florian is already a hero that can present aggro, combo, and control builds without changing his weapon, and it’s clear that Scepter of Pain is compounding the difficulty of pregame assessments. It can also lead to some truly monotonous game states, as players manipulate their deck through pitch to find perfect combinations of cards.
Germinate is probably the card that comes as the biggest surprise on this list. There are two things driving us towards a ban here. First, Florian’s endgame feels like it has gotten too simple and deterministic, and it is achieved at almost no deckbuilding cost. Germinate doesn’t overtly influence every matchup, but against heroes foolish enough to try going long against Florian, they will always pay the Germinate toll.
Secondly, there is a card in the High Seas Expansion Slot that you have not seen yet, which is both an effective replacement for and a brutal combination with Germinate. Given Florian’s current success, we’ve decided not to allow both cards to be legal at the same time.
With the ascension of Zen, Tamer of Purpose to Living Legend, we are now returning Bonds of Ancestry (Red) to the card pool and allowing Katsu some reprieve from the splash damage he has taken in recent months. It is still unclear whether this card has a long-term future in the Classic Constructed format, but the coast feels sufficiently clear at this point to cautiously reinsert a single color into the metagame.
Blitz
The following changes to Blitz are effective from Tuesday, May 20, 2025:
- Channel Lightning Valley is banned.
- Count Your Blessings is banned.
- Flicker Wisp is banned.
- Storm Striders is banned.
The last Blitz Skirmish Season was defined by two things: Aurora and Wizards. These changes look to bring both down a peg.
Count Your Blessings will leave the Blitz format for all the reasons mentioned above. Despite rampant fears, defensive decks seemingly underperformed last Skirmish Season, even with Count Your Blessings. However, we are optimistic that nerfs to the arcane classes can leave defensive decks able to compete using more traditional tools.
Aurora is every bit the terror in Blitz that she was in Classic Constructed, and she uses many of the same tricks. With the reduced life totals of Blitz, even a single successful Channel Lightning Valley turn can end the game in Aurora’s favor. Likewise, Flicker Wisp can randomly provide those massive spike turns or just be pitch stacked to play through an opponent who commits to a defensive gameplan. Aurora needs some weaknesses, and hopefully the absence of these two cards starts to create them.
Storm Striders has long been a contentious card internally when it comes to the Blitz format. There is a portion of the team that views it as integral to the Wizard identity, and another portion that believes the extra turn it provides is not compatible with the reduced life totals of Blitz. After many years of Blitz play, a lot of evidence has piled up in favor of the latter.
Wizards have always been top tier in Blitz—this even proved true during the few short months where Storm Striders was banned and Iyslander was still viewed as the best deck. It’s time to let Wizards cool down for a bit while they wait for a suitable, more Blitz- balanced replacement for Storm Striders to arrive.
Living Legend
The following changes to Living Legend are effective from Tuesday, May 20, 2025:
- Carrion Husk is banned.
- Crown of Seeds is banned.
- Cull is restricted.
- Deadwood Dirge is restricted.
- Succumb to Temptation is restricted.
- Hypothermia is unrestricted.
As we’ve said time and time before, the Living Legend format has a massive role to play in the ecosystem of Flesh and Blood going forward. As proof of that, I am happy to announce today that at the 2025 World Championship in Philadelphia, Living Legend will be one of the formats used to determine our World Champion. In the lead up to Worlds, you can also expect more Living Legend events on the calendar, including the format’s first inclusion in a Pro Quest season.
As part of this continued commitment to Living Legend, format balance will receive extra attention in the coming weeks and months. The first order of business? Get Chane and Starvo back in line with other heroes.
We’ve tried for as long as possible to maintain iconic cards like Crown of Seeds and Carrion Husk as part of the Living Legend format, but at some point, we must target bans as close to the root cause of these heroes’ power level as possible. While the true culprits for Chane and Starvo will always be their own card text, these two powerful SIPSIPs are a very close second.
As more Earth, Ice, and Lightning cards enter the card pool, Starvo is going to fail to trigger his ability far less and find greater base defense values available to him in deck construction. Crown of Seeds only furthers both strengths, creating more consistency and extracting greater defensive efficiency from hands, particularly in conjunction with Fyendal’s Spring Tunic.
Crown of Seeds is a fun card to play with, and one that feels like part of the core Starvo experience. We recognize this one will come as a blow to the Starvo enjoyers, but the holistic needs of the format must come first.
On the Chane side, the problems are a bit more multitudinous. Prior to these bans, there was a strong argument that Chane was the best aggro deck, the best disruptive deck, the best anti-fatigue deck, and likely the best deck overall.
A Carrion Husk ban alone would not have the same impact on Chane as the Crown of Seeds ban will have to Starvo, but its banning does open the possibility of disruptive on-hits having some meaningful impact against Chane. Previously, Carrion Husk negated that mode of challenge during the brief window you had before Chane reached full power.
However, losing just Carrion Husk would still do little to stem Chane’s power against non-disruptive decks. New cards made for other purposes and heroes have simply given him too much disruptive power and offensive output in recent months. For that reason, Cull, Succumb to Temptation, and Deadwood Dirge will also be restricted.
Restriction is a very different tool than banning, especially for a deck like Chane that sees so many of its cards per game. A card like Cull will still get to have substantial impact in a majority of games as a one-of, and we believe Chane is still very strong even under these restrictions. Accounting for that fact, and alongside the nerfs to Starvo, we feel comfortable giving tools back to Ice heroes. We are particularly keen to offer Hypothermia to Iyslander—a popular hero that felt quite far from playability prior to these changes.
In the era of digital decklist submission, we feel like we finally have the data we need to more effectively manage the Living Legend format. In the coming months we’ll be keeping a close eye on events and making sure that the format is set up to have an epic debut on the World Championship stage.
Commoner
The following changes to Commoner are effective from Tuesday, May 20, 2025:
- Reality Refractor is banned.
In our previous Banned and Restricted Announcement, we spoke at length about the ability of SIPSIP weapons to have an outsized impact on the Commoner metagame. While Reality Refractor may require slightly more hoops to set up such a weapon, when the goal is achieved, Enigma is a numbers machine, fully on par with pre-nerf Ira, Chane, and Iyslander. There’s a good argument Reality Refractor should have been included in our last round of bans, and we’re happy to correct that oversight now.
Update to Living Legend Points Distribution
Going forward, two major changes will occur with Living Legend points distribution.
- Fractional Living Legend points will now be kept track of in the GEM backend, to mitigate the effects of excessive rounding.
- Living Legend points will be subject to multipliers that scale over a hero’s lifespan.
As mentioned in our recent Dev Talk, the Living Legend system is a unique experience in the history of TCGs, and one that is successfully serving as the narrative backbone of our entire tournament circuit. However, we can’t ignore the fact that having a hero rotate too soon after release can create undue hardship for our players.
Simply put, you should have confidence that new heroes have an acceptable amount of time where they can be played in Blitz and Classic Constructed tournaments before they move on to their forever home in non-hero rotating formats. To achieve this goal, the following point multipliers will be in effect as of June 5, 2025:
- During their first year of legality, a hero’s earned Living Legend points will be halved.
- During their second year of legality, a hero’s earned Living Legend points will have no multiplier.
- In all other years of legality, a hero’s earned Living Legend points will be multiplied by 1.5.
The propensity for this new system to create fractional Living Legend points is the spark for inspiring us to keep fractional points logged in our backend, but it is also useful for preventing us from having to round point distributions in seasons like the recently ended Pro Quest: Singapore, where the awarded Living Legend points had to be rounded from 2.51 to 3 to preserve whole numbers.
These updates, along with an increased cadence of bans, should help us avoid outcomes like the rapid ascension of Aurora, Shooting Star in the future, while keeping a healthy number of points flowing into the Living Legend system. As always, we intend to closely monitor outcomes and are happy to adjust again to best serve fans of Flesh and Blood.
Next Scheduled Banned and Restricted Announcement
The next Banned and Restricted Announcement will be published on Monday, June 30, 2025, with changes effective from Monday, July 7, 2025 (United States time).