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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