Spoiler Weekend, a Living Legend Revamp, a Con Promo, and Gold Packs?!

Welcome back to your source of news in the World of Rathe! 

With the events of Warsaw and Taichung in the books, players can collectively take a breath in the moments before Part the Mistveil launches. The Legend Story Studios Developer and Organized Play teams seem to never rest, however, and we can see that the Social Media Crew has been working in high-gear as well: the spoilers have just about spilled, the new card database just had its beta launch, and some changes have been announced for the Living Legend system.

You just have to check out these spoilers, folks- we are seeing some really wild stuff come to light, like a 9-cost attack for 20, or new instant auras, new generic legendary equipment, and more. Check out Alex Truell's reveal for The Rathe Times here, as well as the main page of spoilers on the mothership.

 My favorite spoiler so far has been-

This just in from the Social Media team in Japan, where box breaks of the new set were happening live, and at least two new chase cards have been found!

Apparently, as FaB Unsealed found out, roughly one in 4 cases (that's 20 boxes or 480 packs) will have a special 25th pack, a Gold Pack, containing the new Young Mystic Illusionist hero: Enigma, New Moon. New art, new gorgeous jade card border, and new text to accompany the young hero - if you're lucky, maybe this special hero will show up to your Blitz, UPF, or Clash night!

What's more is that the Fable was also found, by none other than the Fable Hunters! I had my proverbial money placed on the fable just being a naked Chi, starting ready to go in your deck, and further I thought that we were stepping away from landmarks for a while. Instead, we've got a little bit of the both going on: this landmark is played as an instant, acts a little bit like a Zen State token, and can possibly transform into chi when it tries to leave play every turn. If you were looking for a reason not to attack a Mystic hero on turn one, this is it: with just a neat blue Unmovable (or even new cards like Territorial Domain) and at least one blue to pay for it all, a defending Mystic player can play the Gully at instant speed by pitching a blue, then resolve a blue defense reaction (which counts as both a blue card being played and a blue card defending). Suddenly, they've got access to Chi on their very first turn, so do be careful!

Calling Warsaw has come and gone, and it brought a Battle Hardened event along for the ride. At the Calling, 7 different heroes representing 7 different countries took to the final stage- and the accompanying Battle Hardened event was no slouch either, with six different heroes competing for the glory and points. When all was said and done, when all the spells had been cast, Vincent Weinzierl and their Kano deck brought home 100 fresh points for the Dracai of Aether- and Jesse Härmälä packed up 40 more points for the Wizard as well. What a weekend to be a Wizard!

Taichung hosted its own Battle Hardened, as well as the rare Pro Quest+ Event. I haven't been able to dig up any information about the outcomes on this event as of Wednesday morning, but if you have any information pertaining to the event please do message it to me on Discord so that I can share it with the World of Rathe!

Flesh and Blood continues to grow right in front of our eyes: this year, and hopefully for many more years to come, Legend Story Studios will have presence at conventions all over the world! Coming up soon is the UK Games Expo, with more shows like GenCon and Games Con Canada on the docket as well. Maybe we'll even get to see them at a PAX Unplugged, too? Either way, with this deeper step on to the global stage, LSS is bringing some goodies for anyone who can make it out to those Conventions. From the looks of the article, I would say that they are likely to have more, different cards for future conventions, as this is called the Summer Convention Exclusive Promo. We will just have to see.

I'm also thinking that this hero is a preview, and not necessarily an exclusive: the long-talked-about 'all-arcane set' may just be right around the corner, and how cool would it be to start with a playable promotional piece like this one? Who knows exactly how powerful effects like Blaze's will be, especially without access to the top of the deck like Kano, but it sure seems like a mockup of Storm Striders might just be as powerful as it sounds.

Also, changes have been announced for the Living Legend system in Flesh and Blood. After seeing another season of play come to an end, LSS has announced that there will be slightly less emphasis on the higher level events, seeing a 50% or more reduction across the board for Worlds, Callings, and the Pro Tour. The USA Nationals was also reduced, which is nice- It's a big event, but it's pretty exclusive so I'm glad to see the reduced importance there. Likewise, non-USA Nationals were adjusted to be have a higher floor (and lower ceiling) for LL points. On the other end of the spectrum, we are seeing slightly increased importance for the LL points on the more local side: Pro Quests, Road to Nationals, and even Skirmishes have been bumped up to 5 points each. With so many heroes in each of the formats, it makes some sense to me that wins would become more impactful. Perhaps this will fluctuate again as more events of this level are released to stores, but only time will tell.

To cap this week off, we've got some interesting news for the back end of things: there is now an official public beta of the Flesh and Blood card database as hosted by the mothership, fabtcg.com. There are a few deckbuilding and card searching sites out there already, developed in the gap years following Flesh and Blood's public debut in 2019, and LSS seems to be positioning themselves in support of those.
"It is important to note that we acknowledge the amazing work the community has done to create their own card databases and deck-builders - they have made amazing contributions to the community over the years and in no way do we want to diminish their efforts with this project. We hope that we can eventually serve data directly to 3rd parties so that they can build on top of this official resource and continue to provide additional services that cater to more specific wants and needs of the community."

We here at Rathe Times have been using FABDB and FABrary throughout the years, and it is perhaps about time that we see LSS themselves develop a public-facing database of the cards beyond the card gallery system. Having an accurate, searchable, up-to-date card database makes a lot of sense for any card game to have, and it was just a matter of time before Flesh and Blood got there too.