March 2025 – The Lair of Evil Dr Ganymede

(Note: This is a follow-up to my previous post that discussed the Living Legend points of heroes in the Flesh and Blood TCG. That post looked at the Classic Constructed LL leaderboard – this one focusses on the Blitz LL leaderboard)

Classic Constructed is the most popular competitive format for Flesh and Blood TCG, but there are others too – Blitz, Living Legend, Commoner, etc. Blitz is a commonly played faster format that uses Young versions of heroes with 20 life instead of 40 life and decks that have a minimum of 40 cards (unlike CC’s 60), and is the only other format that has a Living Legend system where heroes rotate out of play (when they reach 500 LL points, though this has changed recently). It should be noted that at the time of writing there are heroes that only exist in Young form (such as Terra, Kavdaen, Blaze and Emperor) and so are only legal to play in Blitz.

The Blitz graphs are more straightforward than in Classic Constructed. For one thing, there are fewer data points here because the Blitz leaderboard is updated less frequently – Blitz is generally only played competitively at side events and Skirmishes.

Traditionally heroes rotated out of play in Blitz at 500 points but recently this was (somewhat clumsily) adjusted by LSS to prevent Zen from retiring so quickly after he went from 205 to 505 points in one week! As a result, in November 2024 LSS decided to raise the Blitz LL limit to 1000 points and double every Hero’s point except Zen’s, who now found himself back in the middle of the pack again. This adjustment would have appeared as a sudden discontinuity in these graphs, so I made my own adjustment to keep things visually consistent – when all of the official points doubled, I halved them back down again so they remained consistent with their previous scores, and also I retroactively halved all of Zen’s scores since his introduction. This means that the Blitz LL limit on this graph remains at 500 points (even though it’s officially be 1000 now).

What is interesting in Blitz is that there is no obvious “Mistveil Effect” (seen in CC, where most of the heroes’ scores flatten out in May 2024 when Part the Mistveil was released) – instead it looks like heroes jump in points when other heroes retire. e.g. at the end of Dec 2023 Chane, Kano, Ira and Kassai (Sellsword) all reached LL within a month of eachother and many of the other heroes gain a lot of points immediately after that, presumably because they started winning events once those heroes left. This appears to happen again later when Dash, Briar and Rhinar all rotated out within a couple of weeks of eachother in Aug 2024.

I won’t go over each class individually this time, I’ll just present the graphs below (Blitz excel sheet is posted below too for anyone who wants to look at the data). Assassins and Rangers seem to be the classes that struggle most in Blitz, with none above 150 points. Many of the other classes have a couple of heroes who do really well while the rest linger around the lower end of the leaderboard (this is particularly noticeable in Mechanologists, where the original Dash was quite successful but all the other Mechanologists have less than 100 points). I haven’t shown the minor Blitz-only classes here (Bard, Merchant, Shapeshifter) because they don’t really have any support and haven’t won many games – Melody (Bard) and Genis (Merchant) each have 0 points, Kavdaen (Merchant) has a single point, and Shiyana (the only Shapeshifter) has 22 points. I’ve included Emperor (the only Warrior-Wizard) with the Wizards – he is doing fairly well (despite being dead :D) considering he is a hard-to-find character with Legendary rarity (like Shiyana).

Full dataset: final_LL_table_for_Blitz_25Feb2025

Please let me know if you have any further comments or observations!

Further demonstrating the randomness of my blog entries – here’s a nerdy data analysis post about Flesh and Blood, a Trading Card Game (TCG) that I started playing recently!

Flesh and Blood (usually abbreviated to FaB) is a competitive TCG published by Legend Story Studios (LSS) from New Zealand that revolves around “Heroes” battling against eachother (I use quotes there because some of the characters are decidedly not heroic, but LSS use the word “Hero” to define all of the characters!) – the aim is to reduce the opposing Hero to 0 life before they do that to you! It has a pretty strong competitive scene and lots of well attended major events all around the world (raning from local Armories, to Callings, Battle Hardeneds, Road to Nationals, Nationals, and Worlds). I won’t claim to be any good at the game yet – I’ve been playing for about four months now and I’m still fumbling my way through the heroes and I’m lucky if I actually win a single game at an Armory event – but I still enjoy playing and I like collecting the cards too (which have very nice artwork) :D. I’d like to think I’m slowly getting better anyway!

You can find out more about the game at https://fabtcg.com/en/resources/learn-to-play/ and there are plenty of gameplay, reviews, opinions and deck tech videos on twitch and youtube (and probably someone is playing it at an FLGS near you)!

FaB is played in a variety of formats, but the main competitive format is Classic Constructed (CC) which is played with a deck of at least 60 cards, with Adult Heroes starting around 40 life. One interesting thing is that Heroes rotate out of play based on how many Living Legend points they accumulate over time – they gain these LL points by winning major events. They start at 0 points and once they get a total of 1000 points they “retire” and rotate out of play and are no longer legal to play in official CC events (there is another format called “Living Legend” where all heroes – even the retired ones – are legal to play and that features some particularly powerful decks). Usually after a few months the hero is republished in a different form (with different abilities) and can be played again, so they aren’t out of action for long. I may refer to “Young” and “Adult” heroes later – Adult heroes are the ones that are played in CC, while Young heroes are 20-life versions of the Adult heroes that are played in the smaller Blitz format (I have gathered the historical leaderboard data for Blitz too that I’ll post in a similar way here at a later date) – usually there are Young and Adult versions of each hero but some heroes only exist in Young form (e.g. Terra, Data Doll) and some only exist in Adult form (e.g Jarl).

Nowadays LSS usually updates the Living Legend Leaderboards on their website every week (or during/after every major event), and I wondered if there was an archive of the scores so that we could see how the LL points had evolved over time for each hero. To cut a long story short: I managed to track down a lot of older LL leaderboard pages on the Internet Archive and I compiled the data, did some programming jiggerypokery with Python and made a table and some graphs out of it! It seems that LSS didn’t start publishing the LL scores on their website regularly before mid 2022 so the earliest data is completely missing, but enough had been archived since then (albeit irregularly) to give us a decent idea of how the LL scores evolved over time.

I’ve plotted the graphs by Hero Class – I’m not sure if that’s the best way to do it but it works! I’m not sure that I’m particularly qualified to offer any expert commentary on these but I will try to share some relevant observations at least, and you can draw your own conclusions from the graphs :).
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[Flesh and Blood] Living Legend Leaderboard data analysis – Blitz!

[Flesh & Blood] Living Legend Leaderboard data analysis (Classic Constructed)

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