I can hear the oldheads groaning, and with good reason. Blitz as a format has been somewhat divisive in the past; plenty of hot takes have been posted about the purported entry-level format of Flesh and Blood with the prevailing attitude of most professional players and content creators being that, of the two competitive formats, Blitz is the lesser sibling of Classic Constructed.

For just one example, its inclusion as a tournament format at Worlds was a big talking point among the community in 2023. Less so in 2024, which led me to believe that maybe things had cooled down with regards to the fast-paced sibling of CC, but apparently not.

Why Are We Talking About This Again?

Don’t hate me for this, but my reason for opening the discussion on Blitz again is pretty much just anecdotal evidence. My local community recently posited a change to our Armory events, with the Living Legend format taking the place of one of our Blitz Armories. The same question was asked last year – and Blitz won decisively.

But the Blitz haters were simply biding their time, and when the issue was raised again, the vote came in a bit more muddled. I’d like to take that as a jumping off point to review some of the more common arguments in favor of Blitz and those against the format.

The New Player Experience

Everyone who plays Flesh and Blood with any frequency probably knows the most commonly cited reason for the existence of the Blitz format: it’s a better entry point for new players. But is it really? The reasoning goes that with lower life totals and smaller decks, games will go by quicker, which in turn means more games can be played and more things can be learned.

Second, the deck building rules only allowing two copies of any one card means that, theoretically, Blitz decks are in general going to be a third less expensive than a Classic Constructed deck. Two very sound arguments, especially that last one, which (spoiler alert) I can’t really argue with, so I won’t. But I and many others believe that the first one does not quite hold up to scrutiny. Let’s review why.

The Instant Death Experience

With life totals in Blitz being lower across the board, heroes that are capable of putting out large bursts of damage in one go are much more likely to kill their opponents from full health – and the bigger the card and hero pools get, the bigger this issue becomes. It’s one thing for a Rhinar player to kill their opponent with a lucky Bloodrush Bellow. It’s quite another if there’s another two or three cards floating around in a deck consisting only of 40 cards total that are capable of achieving the same thing. To say nothing of Kano, Blaze, Firemind, Zen, or Katsu.

In theory, getting killed instantly (or near-instantly), shuffling up again and taking it from the top is kind of the most efficient way to learn a game. Everyone involved only has to look at about two or three game actions and a couple of cards to analyze where they might have made a mistake, or re-evaluate their deck build entirely. But in practice, we humans are squishy things with a lot of feelings messing with rational analysis, and we’re more likely to chuck our cards at a wall if this kind of thing happens too often.

Now, granted, this is a very extreme example. Not every Blitz game begins and ends with a big first turn combo. But even if it doesn’t, the very fabric of the Blitz format sort of lends itself to disadvantage new players, which should basically disqualify the whole thing from being the entry point to the game.

What Doesn’t Kill You Still Feels Bad, a Lot of the Time

In a game of good old-fashioned Classic Constructed Flesh and Blood, if both players are at twenty life, it’s very easy for one player to pull ahead off of a good hand. This is due to the fact that, at such a low life total, each player can only tank one hand of an opponent’s damage to keep a fully-functioning hand themselves. But in Classic Constructed, for both players to be at 20 health, the game has to have been very hard-fought and pretty evenly matched. Both players have made the same amount of mistakes, and have had the same amount of big turns.

Starting the game out on that razor’s edge heavily favors the more skilled player – because they’re much less likely to make a mistake in their assessment of a hand. They know what to look for to leverage their small bit of a life buffer on a hand that will swing the momentum of the game in their favor. Failing that, in a small percentage of games, one player will just get lucky and win.

So yeah, maybe the Blitz fans are all just FaB chads who win with their big brains and their perfect sequencing and their superior deckbuilding skills. I won’t deny that, in theory, Blitz rewards tight play, and in a perfect world, that would be its purpose: A no-holds barred, knock-down drag-out barnburner format, like a cage match in wrestling, but for nerds. But the other thing, the thing about just getting lucky/unlucky and killing/getting killed instantly kind of goes against that, doesn’t it?

So What Is to Be Done?

Honestly, I don’t know, man. While it’s a bit silly to write a piece about the issues with a format and then just shrugging your shoulders when it comes to actually trying to do it better than the people you’re criticizing, I’m not sure that there is anything that can be done that doesn’t just make Blitz a different format. Honestly, the only thing I could see that might fix Blitz would be to just cut damage numbers in half as well, but at that point, why not just play CC with a two-card deck limit?

Maybe you’re just supposed to play Blitz until you realize what its issues are, whereupon you self-select yourself into the Classic Constructed pool and then the only people playing Blitz are those who don’t mind the ultra-fast, highly optimized gameplay format with a bit of instant death roulette thrown in for good measure.

Maybe it’s supposed to teach new players the value of a higher life total, introducing people to the opposite land of FAB, since in every other TCG, having a high life total is the epitome of a new player trap. That’s actually the first thing I tell my TCG friends when I’m trying to the get them into FAB: Healing Salve is a good card in FAB. And FAB’s Black Lotus just gains you life. Wild!

If I had my way, I’d honestly just prefer for LSS to scrap Blitz as a format. Replace the Blitz precons that come with every set with CC precons in the vein of the newly-introduced Armory Decks. It would drastically increase the density of Armories that I would actually care to play in and help reduce the amount of feel-bad moments for new players.

In turn, a lot of Blitz aficionados would be very sad, and I get that. Losing your favorite format sucks. But I feel like, and correct me if I’m wrong here, if Blitz never existed and LSS were to pitch it today, just about nobody from among the Blitz fan crowd would go absolutely wild for a CC alternative were you’re that much more likely to be instagibbed.

Counterpoint:

The Blitz Format is Great, and You Should Be Playing It!

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.