Today’s scheduled Flesh and Blood Banned & Restricted announcement impacts four formats, with significant action in Classic Constructed following the game’s third World Championship in Osaka, Japan.
Classic Constructed
Count Your Blessings was the talking point of the World Championship, with Grzegorz Kowalski winning the World Championship with a controlling build of Enigma, Ledger of Ancestry that took advantage of playing all nine copies of the powerful generic instant from Rosetta. James White, creator of Flesh and Blood and author of today’s B&R update, noted that while he doesn’t view the card as problematic, other decks just don’t have the tools to compete against the sheer amount of life some of the control decks can gain. Notably, only the blue version of Count Your Blessings is being banned so that the control decks that use the card can still exist at a slightly lower power level. White pointed toward a card coming in The Hunted as one new option to combat controlling strategies: Jagged Edge.
High Octane, on the other hand, was already on the watch list due it conflicting with the new design goals that were laid out in the previous B&R announcement that made considerable changes in Classic Constructed. High Octane is too good at generating multiple attacks, effectively allowing a weapon to attack many times which White stated felt too much like getting access to extra cards. Dash I/O showed this at Worlds as two players made the Top 4 with the explosive Mechanologist fueled by High Octane.
Blitz
With Zen returning from Living Legend status in Blitz — something called out in the September B&R announcement — Belittle had to be removed from the format. Results of Skirmish Season 10 will inform the developers whether or not the card can come back in a future announcement.
Hadron Collider is being banned due to it enabling too many Turn-3 kills from the Data Doll deck. Data Doll’s Armory Deck offered new cards for the young Mechanologist and Hadron Collider made the hero’s gameplay a bit too degenerate. The developers will continue to monitor Blitz to see if this change puts Data Doll in line with the rest of the format.
Living Legend
Kano, Dracai of Aether has risen to the top of the Living Legend format, with multiple marquee wins from the deck utilizing nine copies of Open the Flood Gates and many of the other cards that draw multiple cards that are not legal in Classic Constructed. White cites that Kano was already a player in the meta before this build took off in popularity, so the loss of this surge card shouldn’t be too severe.
White also mentioned how the days of Bravo, Star of the Show dominating Living Legend are long gone, so the Elemental Guardian can, once again, have access to a playset of the Bravo Specialization.
Commoner
Lastly, Aether Ironweave is being banned in Commoner due to dominant results from Chane in high stakes Commoner tournaments. White said that the Shadow Runeblade hero doesn’t need the help from the chest piece to be a top deck in the format.
These changes go into effect today. Read the official announcement from White.
