For Skirmish Season 7, Legend Story Studios (LSS) announced a limited trial of revised rules for the Blitz format. As of 08/16/2023, those Blitz changes are permanent. Meant to be the most fun and pick-up friendly format, Blitz is the way players first experience Flesh and Blood. LSS has produced myriad preconstructed Blitz decks to help new players try the game out and find a good fit. Sealed Blitz is even an accepted format for organized play in GEM stores now! But why change blitz? And what do those changes mean for FaB?
Blitz deck size change
Before, Blitz decks were limited to 52 cards – a 40 card deck, an 11 card gear inventory, and a young hero. Only being able to change your gear set-up for any given matchup really hindered the flexibility of the format. Some heroes are more dependent upon sideboarding than others to stay competitive. What’s good in Levia against Azalea is most definitely not what’s good in Levia against Kano. (Actually, who am I kidding? Levia smash.) The Season 7 FaB Blitz changes added another card to the inventory, bringing it up to a round 12. More gear is good gear, since it means being able to include another piece of Arcane Barrier gear, or add back in that piece of gear you may have cut from your Lexi list for a quiver. But the Blitz change isn’t JUST to deck size. No, it goes farther than that.
Sideboarding comes to Blitz!
One of the things that makes the FaB Classic Constructed format dynamic and interesting is that sideboarding is a huge part of strategy. There are specific gear and card combinations used against certain heroes that you wouldn’t dare run against others. CC lets you change out abilities as well as gear, so if you don’t necessarily need three copies of Command and Conquer for a given matchup, you don’t have to run them. Pre-change, Blitz didn’t have that flexibility. The 40 card deck you presented had to be from a fixed list, and the only thing that could change was your gear setup.
The new Blitz rules change the deckbuilding rules to allow for sideboarding. The inventory (your sideboard) can now contain arena cards (gear) and deck cards. This opens it up for heroes who have struggled in Blitz, like Uzuri, to pack the answers so desperately needed to counter the format’s threats. Rather than making a jack-of-all trades 40 card build, Blitz decks can be more fine-tuned for matchups.
Easing the transition to Classic Constructed
While it wasn’t one of the stated intentions of the Blitz change, introducing proper sideboarding softens up the transition from Blitz to Classic Constructed for new FaB players. Sideboarding strategy is a key skill needed for success in Classic Constructed, and players coming in via the Blitz precons previously didn’t get a chance to develop that skill. While the preconstructed decks don’t come with sideboards, at least not right now, it’s a logical starting place for upgrading one out of the box. Ultimately, the Blitz change makes for a more enjoyable gameplay experience, and has been met with wide approval from FaB players.
How has the change to FaB’s Blitz rules changed up your decks? Has it re-shaped your local meta? Drop a comment below and join the discourse! I’m dying to see how other folks are brewing around the update.
