(Lexi, Livewire | Art by Federico Musetti)

Hi everyone! Welcome to a brand new series on FABREC: Lost in Thought! It’s a place to freely explore topics relating to things like game and product design, marketing, and all the other big picture kind of things that relate to the state of Flesh and Blood and our collective enthusiasm for the game.

For our first issue, we’re looking back at Lexi, Livewire.

We’ll consider the question people were asking about her for months before she finally hit Living Legend status: should her deck have been nerfed? And we’ll take that as a jumping-off point to ask a much broader question: what is the purpose of the Living Legend system and, crucially, is it any good? Let’s find out!

Establishing a Heuristic

I know, I know – very pretentious first sub-heading there. But it’s really just about finding a baseline that we can use to answer our initial question. What makes a hero ban-worthy? The first answer, the one that’s most often cited, is metagame share. If a hero takes up a very large portion of the metagame, it only feels natural to consider nerfing them. After all, a metagame should consist of many different, equally viable heroes. Right?

I’m not convinced that it’s that easy. For one, players are very, very good at breaking cards. Much better than designers are at creating them. This largely comes down to scaling: If, say, 50 people design a set during their working hours, but then 50,000 people spend a large portion of their free time brewing decks with them, they will very quickly figure out what cards are good and which combinations of cards best work to further amplify what those good cards are doing.

This makes it much more likely for a metagame to end up producing a clear best deck, either by archetype or by sheer numbers and efficiency. If we consider our Lexi example, it didn’t take long for the community to go from trying out all the new Ranger toys like Codex of Frailty to make Azalea, Ace in the Hole into a respectable meta deck, to realizing that the new cards are just that little bit more efficient in a Lexi shell.

This largely comes down to how well Lexi utilized Ranger power cards like Rain Razors, Three of a Kind and Codex of Frailty. The reason for that was clear to most of the community: Voltaire, Strike Twice. It just makes Lexi the best Ranger because it fixes many of the issues the class can run into, by either providing slight buffs that turn on Bolt'n' Shot without another card, or by giving the first arrow in a turn go again to consistently utilize hands with two or three arrows.

So while a large part of the community was clamoring for Voltaire, Strike Twice to be banned as Lexi raked in the wins, Legend Story Studios instead opted to merely shave off a bit of her deck’s ceiling by banning Bull’s Eye Bracers until Lexi hit the Living Legend threshold. But they also punished her fellow Rangers Azalea and Riptide, Lurker of the Deep, who found it much harder to craft wide turns without the Bracers than Lexi did.

The Case Against the Living Legend System

Much of the ensuing controversy, I believe, stems from the Living Legend system and a lack of clarity surrounding its purpose. Is it meant to be a balancing factor? An accolade for legendarily powerful decks? If it’s either of those things, then not banning Voltaire, Strike Twice was the correct move. The deck got a bit weaker without access to Bull’s Eye Bracers, and then moved out of the meta by winning a ton of events.

But the community response to Lexi’s metagame domination was very intense, as people were endlessly discussing other targets for bans from the deck. Three of a Kind allowed Lexi to freely block with a handful of cards to prevent otherwise crippling hit effects, while still returning a four- or five-card hand. Rain Razors easily achieved four to six extra points of damage while usually pushing through the hit effect of the first arrow in a turn. Codex of Frailty provided large amounts of value in conjunction with disruption in the form of a forced discard and a Frailty token while replacing itself. And each of those cards got better with access to Voltaire. So, discussions usually circled back to the question of if it should’ve been banned instead of Bull’s Eye Bracers.

I believe it’s fair to say that if Voltaire had been banned, Lexi would not have hit Living Legend status yet. And I’d like to consider whether or not that would be a good thing. On one hand, she wouldn’t have dominated as many tournaments as she did, and the metagame might have been more diverse – as Lexi pushed out other aggressive decks, such as Fai, Rising Rebellion, that struggled to keep up with her rate of damage and got disproportionally punished by her disruption. Case in point: Fai won the World Championship almost as soon as Lexi left the meta.

On the other hand, she might not have been nearly as playable without her signature bow. And this gets to the heart of the matter: is it better for a hero to be legal in the Classic Constructed for a long time, even if they’re not close to viable beyond the level of Armories, or is it better for people who’ve played a deck like Lexi for a very long time to get rewarded with a meteoric rise until they hit the shrouded heights of 1000 Living Legend points?

Obviously, this is a bit of a false dichotomy, at least on an idealized level. Why, you might say, not have a deck’s position be less polarized? For an easy example, Bravo, Showstopper has been viable for a very long time while also not shooting to the top of the Living Legend leaderboard within a few months. But this brings us back to our initial assessment: it’s much easier for a deck to be broken or largely sub-optimal than it is for it to be perfectly in the golden mean.

As a result, the Living Legend system, as it is, only really affects over-tuned decks. By extension, it only really can act as a balancing safety valve or, by extension, a gold medal for legendarily powerful decks. This, in turn, means that a hero hitting the Living Legend threshold usually comes with much less of a fanfare than its implied trophy status might warrant, solely due to the community having very quickly grown sick of it.

The Case for the Living Legend System

This is all neat and tidy and, I believe, a somewhat accurate reflection of the way the community engages with the Living Legend system as it is. Recently, LSS changed the rate at which heroes accumulate Living Legend points. We’ll have to see how this change plays out in the future.

On the flipside, I’d like to make a case for the big-picture benefits and future potential of the Living Legend system, because I believe that it’s part of what makes Flesh and Blood great and unique.

For a game that has rightfully been compared to a fighting game turned TCG to have a built-in community leaderboard, complete with an immortalized list of the names that helped push any given hero to the top, is straight-up awesome, and dripping with flavor. It’s something that players can aspire to, and it adds another dimension to the record of competitive and casual players’ tournament records alike.

The Living Legend system taps into gamers’ penchant for storytelling; hero identification is a large part of what makes Flesh and Blood the game that it is, and the mythmaking and nostalgia surrounding certain heroes helps build a shared experience between players. Trading war stories with newer players of days when Prism, Sculptor of Arc Light or Oldhim, Grandfather of Eternity ran the meta, and the wins one might have squeaked out on heroes that are or were demonstrably out of their league. Living Legend adds a layer of legitimacy to these practices that players engage in anyway, and helps to make tier lists and power levels a bit more measurable.

In more tangible terms, the Living Legend system adds a different way to play the game – a wild land of no-ban list insanity that might one day not lead to eight different Bravo, Star of the Show players facing off against each other in Top 8. This is by far the weakest point in favor of the Living Legend system as it is today. But the resulting potential is the greatest point in its favor. Imagine if another card or hero gets printed that specifically only turns the Living Legend format on its head. Imagine the stories we might tell then: Starvo rose to Living Legend in a matter of months and then single-handedly ran the Living Legend format from its inception, until …

Further reading:

A Review of the 2023 Flesh and Blood World Championship

Legends, Stories, and Immersive Gameplay

Where to Start in Flesh and Blood

Jonah Lara

Raised on a steady diet of fantasy storys and video games, Jonah discovered trading card games at the impressionable age of 12 and has since spent over half his life and about the same percentage of each monthly salary on card games. If he's not brewing new decks or catching up on the latest FaB news, he's probably dead - or painting a new Warhammer mini.