What is Golden Age?

Golden Age (also known as GAge) is a fan-made format for the Flesh and Blood trading card game by Legend Story Studios. Golden Age is an eternal format, where cards and heroes do not rotate out over time. The intended power level philosophy is between the official Classic Constructed and Living Legend formats. Our intention is to offer players a feeling of high-powered gameplay while avoiding one-sided games in the format through the banning of problematic cards; including heroes, if necessary.

Why Make Golden Age?

While Classic Constructed (CC) remains the best way to play Flesh and Blood, numerous beloved heroes are no longer legal in CC due to the Living Legend (LL) rotation leaderboard. Though this system is beneficial for the health of the CC metagame, players still desire a way to play these retired heroes. The official Living Legend format offers one avenue of doing so, but many players seek a power level that avoids abrupt, one-sided games. As fellow enfranchised players, we identified two primary components that are causal to this ecosystem:

  1. The legality of deck cards with powerful effects enabling extreme offensive overlaps. This includes sources of card advantage like Cash In and Art of War, but also start-in-play payoffs that scale into oppressive gameplay loops for exceptionally low opportunity costs (ex. Bloodsheath Skeleta, Stubby Hammerers). These types of cards being legal creates game states that can end in the first 1-3 turns, affording few or no meaningful decisions being made by the losing player.
  2. The ban list included an unreasonable number of cards that themselves were not particularly egregious, all targeted at a relatively small number of heroes. While the effort to keep all heroes legal is laudable, the necessity to ban or restrict cards that collatorally decimate fringe heroes’ playability in an effort to keep a handful of overpowered heroes in the format was unsatisfactory. When the LL format debuted in 2023, it was a format to play the LL’d heroes Bravo, Star of the Show (Starvo), Chane, Bound by Shadow, and Prism, Sculptor of Arc Light. Three years later, in 2026 with 14 additional heroes LL’d, the Philadelphia World Championship was still defined by Starvo and Chane, despite 67% of the Banned and Suspended list being devoted to Shadow Runeblade and Elemental Guardian cards.

In an effort to address these concerns, we created Golden Age, founded on the observation that removing Starvo, Chane, and some start-in-play equipment solves a great number of Living Legend’s problems. After initial testing, we have curated an initial Ban List for Golden Age informed by several format philosophies:

  1. Ban the problem card, not the supporting cards. This includes hero cards, if necessary.
  2. Ban cards that create non-games. This includes cards that create unreasonable offensive overlaps and defensive tools that overly punish stumbling when applying pressure.
  3. Ban without consideration for the secondary market. This includes individually expensive cards like Fables and Legendaries that are problematic.

In parallel with the Ban List, we will maintain a separate Watch List, which highlights cards we suspect of being eligible for being banned.

We believe the initial Ban List offers a good starting point for the format based on initial testing. We will closely monitor player feedback and meta performance over time, and react accordingly. Regularly scheduled Banned and Watch Listed (BnW) announcements will take place four weeks after each major product release, with emergency BnW announcements occurring as needed. While the format is young, we anticipate BnWs to be more rapid, as thorough testing is still underway. We reserve the right to ban cards not previously on the Watch List, but will make efforts to give fair warning. Similarly, we will regularly consider if any cards on the Ban List are eligible for being unbanned.

We sincerely hope that you enjoy Golden Age and that this strictly-for-fun format helps expand the ethos of bringing people together through the common language of playing great games in the flesh and blood.

Rhea Adams, Taylor Crawford, and Winry Owen
Format Founders

Last edited 2 May 2026