A Treatise on Living Legend

It's time to talk about Living Legend.

I'm probably the Rathe Times' biggest hype man for Living Legend. I absolutely love the idea of the format and what it has the potential to be for this game. Even though I knew I wasn't likely to survive the Starvo gauntlet, I registered Chane in the inaugural Living Legend Battle Hardened in Barcelona because I just had to rep the Demonastery. I've written at least five pieces on LL for the Rathe Times, and even talked about a hypothetical future for Chane in LL in a piece from May of 2022, well over a year before the format would be officially announced.

LSS is in a tough spot here. They've already, admirably, admitted to fumbling this year of leadup to having Living Legend at the World Championship. Player sentiment around the format has not been good, which has been tangibly demonstrated by the severe lack of interest in LL Pro Quest events (606 CC Pro Quests vs 40 LL), as well as the Philadelphia Calling being less than half full as of the Tuesday before Worlds (assuming the registration website is to be believed, it shows 402 Calling entries and 128 Fabled packages available, and the Calling has a 1000 player cap). This stands in stark contrast to the two completely sold out 224 player-cap CC Battle Hardened events, and it's especially staggering when you think about the drastically different prize structure for these events. 

People like Classic Constructed, and the player base has just not gotten behind Living Legend in its current form.

It's easy to complain, spout hot takes, and talk about all the challenges facing LL. It's much harder to solve the problem. I've heard a lot of ideas thrown out, ranging from intriguing to insane: ban Starvo and Chane, turn LL into a singleton format, heroes can only use their signature weapons (get rekt Starvo). But unlike the challenge of trying to make Blitz a viable competitive format, I think the challenge of making Living Legend not only viable, but a good competitive format actually has a solution. 

But before we decide how to fix Living Legend, first we need to determine who the format is for, as well as settle on goals and guidelines for the format.

With the dawn of the Silver Age format, new players have a perfect onboarding format, budget players have their haven where they can build multiple fully competitive decks for a modest price, and plenty of competitive players I know are excited to have a new format to brew in. This lower power (but still quite fun) format feels like a natural next step after the Ira intro decks teach you the fundamentals of Flesh and Blood. As the replacement for Blitz, it also serves an important role in being a format with shorter rounds, as the CC round time commitment can be too long for some people.

Classic Constructed remains the standard, default mode of playing the game. It allows for more powerful things to happen within certain bounds, and features a slowly rotating cast of characters, effectively capping how many heroes a player needs to know in order to prep for and play in CC events. 

So, with Classic Constructed offering the baseline Flesh and Blood experience and Silver Age serving the new player, budget, and time-conscious, what does that leave?

As a truly non-rotating format, Living Legend should be aimed squarely at entrenched players. Higher power, higher complexity, where all the evergreen strategies of CC get turned up to an 11. Plenty of folks have (fairly) bashed Blitz in the past (turns out it is basically not possible to have cards balanced around starting at both 40 life and 20 life), but when you weren't two ships passing in the night with someone dying on turn two, the good games of Blitz could be genuinely great. Where Blitz failed, Living Legend can succeed.

It's not a brand-new suggestion, and it's an option that I'm sure LSS has discussed at length. If a card is too good in a specific hero, or if a hero is just too powerful (*cough* Chane and Starvo *cough*), you can ban specific cards for individual heroes as appropriate. The standard way of banning weapons/equipment or restricting cards would remain intact. Kraken's Aethervein would still be banned for everyone, and likewise Count Your Blessings would remain restricted for all heroes.

In Classic Constructed, if a card is too powerful for a certain hero, cards can be suspended until the offending heroes hit Living Legend (they don't use that terminology officially anymore, but they can still do this where appropriate). The prime example of this was banning Seeds of Agony in an attempt to reign in Chane while he was still in CC. Once Chane ascended to LL status, Seeds of Agony was unbanned. But in Living Legend, heroes don't rotate, which means splash damage from bans and restrictions is pretty effectively permanent under the current B&R system. Hero-specific bans can help to avoid this unintended splash damage by making their bans more precise to the problem at hand. Hero-specific bans can also be viewed like a badge of honor among the heroes in LL. The stronger your hero is, the more cards they get banned for themselves.

Not only that, but hero specific bans can as a balancing mechanism for the format. Not all heroes are created equal. And no, not all heroes and maybe not even all classes can be viable in LL, but heroes like Starvo and Chane are two heroes clearly on another level from everything else Flesh and Blood has to offer. 

If someday LSS runs out of ideas and releases their latest hero "Jeff, the Shadow Runeblade", a vanilla Shadow Runeblade with no ability, maybe something like Carrion Husk can be a powerful tool that Jeff the Shadow Runeblade can have access to help bridge the power gap between him and his more powerful Runeblade brethren.

An easy downside to point to with this approach is the bookkeeping and additional out-of-game knowledge required to participate in the format, but I'd argue that Flesh and Blood already has a steeper learning curve than most other TCG's on the market. It's easy enough to pick up a deck and start playing, but it takes the average player a long time to learn, see, and realize how one of their seemingly minor decisions on turn two ended up being a determining factor in the outcome of the game 15 turns later. 

Yes, on a long enough timeline, hero-specific bans will become fairly numerous and therefore the LL B&R list will be more complex than what we're dealing with now, but that fact used as an argument against hero-specific bans falls flat for me for a couple reasons. 

• Players already need to be familiar with the B&R list for whatever format they are playing. CC has 28 cards on the banned list and utilizes partial color bans. Silver Age, the format that at least partially aimed at catering to new players, was officially launched with a banned list of 35 cards. Ban lists for games that can't be patched are always going to become long.
• As the hero pool and card pool continues to expand, any given new hero will be less likely to make an impact on an eternal format, which correspondingly means they'll be less likely to have an impact on the B&R list.

In the grand scheme of knowing you need to know to play a format, hero-specific bans only represent a marginal increase to the learning curve, which was already set to linearly increase over time regardless. Plus in another five to ten years, they'll need to launch a new eternal format anyways, so that their newer heroes with modern design sensibilities can have their own evergreen playground.

Obviously, I wouldn't throw down a brand new banned and restricted list without explaining how I reached my conclusions. Most of what's on here are cards already on the current B&R list with a few notable changes, and while I'm sure it's imperfect, I present it only as a reasonable potential starting point for a way forward in LL. 

Banned

• Kraken's Aethervein
  • We live in a world with Amp, and that is a world where Kraken's Aethervein cannot be allowed to exist. Damage amplification is a really cool part of the Wizard toolkit, and Kraken's Aethervein is not cool or interesting enough for LSS to stop exploring that aspect of Wizards. I always wondered if Duskblade would ever lose its infamous title of the most broken weapon ever printed, and I don't have to wonder anymore.

• Zephyr Needle
  • While the manifestation of how broken Zephyr Needles are wasn't quite as in your face as Kraken's Aethervein, Needles stay banned for similar reasoning. The retrieve mechanic was designed and balanced around daggers with 1 power, and Needles are from a time before that feature of the weapon type was fully normalized. Needles are fair when they break and stay broken, and negating that very intentional downside is just too strong, and consistently so, to allow.

Restricted

• Awakening
  • This one probably goes without saying, but letting a two-card hand straight up negate a hard-earned life deficit is just not something that should happen more than once per game.

• Count Your Blessings
  • CYB stays gone because the same problems it caused will never cease to exist. CYB decks die to LL's aggro decks and only serve to suppress the slower decks that could exist on the disruptive axis.
• Open the Flood Gates
  • There is one universe where Open the Flood Gates could come off this list, and that is if it trades places with Aether Wildfire and LSS pinky promises to not print compounding damage amplification ever again.

Hero-Specific: Starvo

• Winter's Wail
  • Starvo gets to say "Frosty Four" no more. Part of why Starvo has always been so good is because he backs up his disruptive, evasive attacks with more disruption (on a break point at that!). 

• Crown of Seeds
  • Far too good of a consistency tool for a deck that is unmatched in oppressive power when things are humming. We leave this to the more pedestrian Earth heroes looking to make a mark in LL.
• Electromagnetic Somersault
  • Aurora, Oscilio, and even Briar took an undeserved hit for this card being too absurd in Starvo. Somersault let Starvo skirt around the (at the time) restrictions of Oaken Old, Star Struck, and Crippling Crush, and the way it could play out was even more offensive than if they had simply had 3 copies of each attack. Have you ever been hit with the same Crippling Crush five turns in a row? Some people have, and that's not alright.

• Oaken Old
  • Even when this card was new, it always felt weird that it wasn't an Oldhim specialization, and Starvo did everything in his considerable power to make LSS regret that decision. It is the most egregious card to have coming at you with a Starvo fuse, given that normal fusing on top of that is nearly a given, as was following it up with a Frosty Four.
• Star Struck
  • I've been scratching my head on this one since Star Struck was unrestricted. For the life of me I don't know why they unrestricted this instead of Crippling Crush. Most decks in LL can stop the first problematic Starvo fuse using a card plus the majority of their equipment suite. With Base of the Mountain, now many decks can stop the second one as well, at the cost of most of their hand (Base and two action cards only blocks 8, so you need to give 3 action cards to not get crushed by Starvo powered Star Struck). But the Crush effect of Star Struck ranges from irrelevant (fully Arcane Wizards) to "you probably can't play the game this turn" (Runeblades, Ninjas, Rangers). On the other hand, Crippling Crush is an equal opportunity offender, and is an ancillary debuff to Starvo since it's a red card and doesn't provide the Unity effect.

Hero-Specific: Chane

• Carrion Husk
  • With enough time, Chane will get the better of virtually any opponent. Shackle banishes will average out over time, and by turns 5/6/7, an undisrupted Chane will pop off for some crazy turns. Taking Husk away makes him a lot more vulnerable to physical disruption and removes a decent chunk of effective health from him in aggro matchups. 

• Deadwood Dirge
  • Rune Gate Chane is super busto, and Dirge is absolutely the biggest offending enabler. Read the Runes and Spellblade Assault at least have the decency to use up Chane's built in go again for the turn, and that is a much healthier place for the deck to exist.
• Cull
  • Cull in Chane is just too good. You can get it as a free card, it serves as potent disruption on offense or defense (upside), it allows you to banish extra cards from your own hand, many of which are stronger when played from banish (more upside), and against any opponent trying to fatigue you, it is late game inevitability (shocker, more upside). A trio of Culls can strip your opponent of most of their hand and each would also power up all your Rift Binds or any other NAA synergies. Chane can already combo out fatigue decks with a decent game plan and clean play, but Cull turned those matchups into "go to lunch" games.

• Succumb to Temptation
  • Chane can present two very solid aggressive game plans, and Succumb to Temptation is very good in both of them. Succumb was restricted after Calling: Chicago as at the time Chane was simultaneously the one of the fastest decks while also having the best disruption. LSS decided to tone down the disruption package and I don't see any reason to change that as Chane is still plenty powerful.

Hero-Specific: Viserai

• Sonata Arcanix
  • "Ban the enabler, not the payoff" is the conventional wisdom for situations like this, and that's why Bloodsheath Skeleta is banned in CC and Sonata Arcanix is not. But Living Legend is supposed to be the format where you can play with the broken cards, within reason. I'd argue that without Sonata Arcanix, Skeleta can actually fall "within reason", at least for now. The reason Skeleta is egregious in the current form of Viserai is that it allows you play like an aggro deck, but with the added bonus of being able to "oops you're dead" your opponent when things line up. Malefic in play, Mordred Tide, Runerager Swarm, Revel in Runeblood, break Skeleta, Sonata, add 3-5 more attacks to your hand and you're off to the races. Without Sonata, the ceiling on Skeleta stops being infinite, and suddenly it either looks like an awesome tempo play in the aggro builds or a build around piece for a dedicated OTK deck that does not get to abuse Viserai's excellent aggro numbers. I don't recall anyone calling for a Skeleta ban when Chris Iaali was bringing Scepter of Pain + Sonata Fantasmia OTK Viserai to AGE events, and I similarly haven't heard complaints about Florian being able to run a very similar Germinate OTK list. Why? Because dedicated OTK decks have exploitable weaknesses. Skeleta Sonata Viserai has no such weakness. And before I get called out for my Runeblade bias, I am under no illusion that Bloodsheath Skeleta will be legal in Viserai and/or LL forever. LSS will continue to print cards that say "Runechant" on them or have Sonata in their name and X's in their cost, and eventually the critical mass will be too much and Skeleta will have to go. I just don't think that time has to be right now, and hero specific bans could allow LSS to do what they couldn't reasonably do for CC, which is ban the problematic payoff rather than the enabler.

Hero-Specific: Zen

• Stubby Hammerers
  • In my mind Stubbies is firmly on the watchlist for a potential upgrade to just being banned from the format entirely, but for now I think it's fine to remove it from Zen and take a wait-and-see approach before taking it away from Cindra and Fai as well. The problem with this equipment, particularly in Zen, is that it's a disproportionately large contributor to non-games, as piling it on top of another anthem or two are how decks can hit 50-60 damage turns a bit too easily. Zen without Stubbies means less games that end with "I blocked with all my cards and armor on turn two and still died", and I think that is a good thing.
• Bonds of Ancestry
  • Bonds of Ancestry is an absurdly broken card when paired with other un-interactable tutoring, but the important word here is "un-interactable". Flesh and Blood is at its best when you have meaningful decisions to make, and while Katsu with Bonds in CC certainly stretched the limits of what was acceptable, the fact that Katsu must hit in order to tutor to pull off double and triple Bonds turns meant that there was at least some agency to the whole experience. Similar to Electromagnetic Somersault, I think Bonds of Ancestry is a great example of how hero-specific bans can help shape the format for the better, as Bonds of Ancestry is the kind of powerful card that could allow a hero like Katsu, who currently has virtually nothing going for it compared to Zen, to potentially compete in the format.

• Rosetta Thorn
  • The Rosetta Thorn ban feels like a stopgap measure for the current prevalence of Runeblades in the format, and it's a very reasonable choice for them to have made right before worlds when they want to seriously tone down Viserai, Chane, and Briar without outright killing any of the decks. Long term I expect Rosetta Thorn to be back in the format as I don't think it's the root of the problems with Runeblades in LL.
• Crippling Crush
  • Crippling Crush effectively traded places with Star Struck for the reasons I mentioned above.
• Deadwood Dirge
  • This one is actually on my list, but only for Chane and not for Viserai. Thinking more about it, I stand by it not being banned in Viserai, because even when you're doing your thing and playing other NAA's, Dirge is just a funny looking Head Jab, and if a Runechant Head Jab is too problematic then I believe we'll have hit the threshold where Skeleta needs to go, at least for Viserai.
• Succumb to Temptation
  • This one is also on the list for Chane and not Viserai, but if the purely aggressive builds of Viserai are still too strong against other aggro decks, this is where I'd look next.
• Felling of the Crown
  • Felling of the Crown is particularly painful when it's followed by a Frosty Four, but I think that the lack of Winter's Wail might be enough to make Felling feel a bit less obscene. That said, this is the next card up on the Starvo chopping block if he necessitates further changes.

• Art of War
  • Art of War has me forever torn. This is a card I had as restricted for a while, but the relatively recent emergence of the Marlynn LL deck inspired me to keep it around. Tomes are banned from CC for good reason, but LL is supposed to be the haven for powerful things, and it makes sense that a hero that synergizes directly with card draw will have some extra juice in this format. With Quickdodge Flexors doing an admirable job of stymying ultra go wide decks, I think Art of War can stay for now, but it will never not be on the watchlist for Restriction and or bans for multiple heroes (Chane, Zen, and Oscilio chief among them).
• Aether Wildfire
  • Aether Wildfire is like a Skeleta Sonata combo that goes in your deck. Yes, you need to build your deck to maximize it, but when you do that, it just scales unreasonably well. Wildfire rightfully belongs on the watchlist as a contributor to non-games, but whether it should be banned or restricted is, I think, more of a question of LSS's philosophy on Wizard design going forward. Kano is about to Living Legend his way out of CC (probably during next year's RTN season), so the question for LSS becomes, do they just let Kano be "The Aether Wildfire Deck" in LL for all time? (My money would be on yes)

Warmongers Diplomacy

• Warmongers not being on the list should demonstrate how hard I've worked to keep my Runeblade bias in check. Runeblades are currently doing just fine with Diplo unrestricted in the format, so until we have evidence that they've been adequately brought in line, it stays. Longer term, when the format's power is spread more equitably, I'd like to see it Restricted again on the basis of not being a fun card (offering virtually zero counterplay into certain heroes is super lame), but that is a nitpick for the greener pastures of future LL.

I hope LSS doesn't give up on Living Legend, though its relegation to the "Special Format" section of the Formats page of their site, alongside UPF and the soon retired Blitz, is not inspiring. It's already been all eyes on Silver Age since the format was formally announced and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Attempts to hype up LL have given way to Silver Age hype even though there aren't Silver Age events scheduled for Worlds. 

I truly hope that the World Championship and Calling: Philadelphia are able to showcase the best of what the Living Legend format is capable of offering. And regardless of how it turns out, I hope LSS takes a timeout to regroup on their approach to the format. I think they can take solace in the fact that it's a format that people *want* to like. Underneath the layer of "it's just going to be all Runeblades and Starvo forever" skepticism, I believe that the vast majority of the player base really likes the idea of a format where you can run back your favorites. So LSS, let things chill out for a while, allow Sage to have some time in the sun, and when the time is right, take a big swing at reformatting LL.

I would also find it highly amusing if James White personally hosted a No Holds Barred event once per year, where Chane, Starvo, and any other contenders can throw off their ban list training weights and compete in small, high-level tournament, reminding the world why many of the cards on the LL B&R list are banned.

I'll be in Philadelphia for the Calling, playing my first love Viserai. Hopefully the strongest equipment in the format and a weapon worthy of pre-emptive banning in CC are enough to carry me a good showing in the Calling. And I hope Living Legend can become the eternal format of our dreams. Long live the Demonastery!