Breaking the Combat Chain: Let's talk about the future of Flesh & Blood at Vault Games

Hey there folks, in particular, the Flesh & Blood community we have fostered at the store over the last three years.

Today, I bear some unfortunate news. Over the last few months, we have tried to adjust our Flesh & Blood organised play offerings at the store but it has become apparent that the game is no longer sustainable for us to continue to support it.

We enjoyed this new trading card game hitting our tables, and are proud to be one of the first stores in Brisbane, let alone Australia to support the organised play. We streamed content, we showed new players the ropes, and worked to bring the best events we could. Unfortunately, it appears it is no longer enough to maintain the community.

Now, with our recent Win-A-Box event attracting only 8 players, we are making the decision to no longer support Flesh & Blood organised play at our store.

To help you understand why, allow me to show you what the recent event looked like from a store’s perspective…

If you want to know what that means from a human cost, that’s three hours of a saturday staff member, and this is all before we factor in power, water, insurance, and the myriad of other expenses that come from operating a store.

We’ve also identified four major concerns that have made the game unsustainable for us at Vault:

9 months between draftable sets

We understand that DRAFT and SEALED are not the primary formats for Flesh & Blood, but they are the formats that are the most monetisable from a store perspective and it serves a purpose for both the store, and the community... 

• We are able to move through product that may not necessarily be a strong addition to the constructed environment 
• Players have the opportunity to try out new fighters without needing to invest in competitive deck builds.

This format has been the most successful with us here at Vault. But we are about to enter ANOTHER extended period without a draftable set, and players get bored. Don’t forget, this has already happened before, during Tales of Aria; a set that also made us consider dropping Flesh & Blood from our lineup due to a mix of dwindling player numbers and a community with financial goals that don’t allow for a sustainable secondary market (which, thankfully, LSS has pulled away from over time).

LSS’s decision to focus on competitive play

Before you start writing your comment, please understand that we KNOW that Flesh & Blood is a competitive game. But we’re not talking about the game here, we’re talking about play, in particular, organised play.

In our experience running the store and pop-up gaming events over the last 8 years, we’ve noticed how communities form around games, and how they evolve over time. The more competitive an organised play structure becomes, the less “community focused” the players are, until eventually it’s about what you are playing instead of where you play (which I’ll go into in the final concern)

LSS pushes towards competitive events (Calling, ProQuest), publishes competitive promo structures (see armory kits’ suggested structure - this becomes the expectation of all players), and the entire organised play system earns players points towards competitive play marquee events. These all mean that if you want to get the most out of Flesh & Blood, you have to be the best, all the time. And when those competitive blinders go on, it becomes more about the single player than the community around the game. We’ve seen this happen in other CCGs too (particularly the constructed formats).

The Finance Community

In its early days, Flesh & Blood courted a part of the community that, while profitable, in our opinion, was not healthy for the game. We can’t fault them for it. The pandemic hit, in-person play suspended worldwide and, in some parts of the world, it is still only just starting back up again. It buoyed the game financially through a time in its life cycle where it needed to be in front of people to be sustained.

Unfortunately though, that came at a cost. The price of sealed products and staple rare cards shot through the roof due to speculative investment as a commodity and advertising via certain investment-oriented youtubers pushed a lot of hype-based collectors into the environment.

Once in-store play started again, the frenzy got worse and LSS responded by printing more product, as they should have. After all, it’s a game that requires access to game pieces. What came next though is what hurt stores. 

Some store owners staked a lot on the game, naively so. With the ease of access to largely printed product, the bet that these store owners made on high value product was lost, and they were forced to discount product to recover some semblance of funds as the market for sealed boxes tanked, creating an unsustainable race to the bottom in prices as a bunch of stores, some without any semblance of a player base, rushed to offload their stock.

For us, this created a problem. We try to price our products as sustainably as we can, and are often below the recommended retail price set by publishers, and have been with Flesh & Blood in everything but the first edition boxes while they were available. But it is impossible to compete with online warehouses, or over-invested stores, who offer $10-15 above cost price for a box. And that became what a sizable chunk of the community around Flesh & Blood expected. Which leads us to the fourth issue…

Competitive Community Expectations

As identified above, Competitive Communities shift towards what they are playing instead of where they are playing, and this changes the expectations from that community. In fact, this experience lines up with the sentiment we received from a recent survey in our Flesh & Blood community. It can be summed up as follows:

More prize support for lower prices

At Vault, we aim to run sustainable events. At the end of the day, we are proud of the space we have built, and are keenly aware of how important that space is to many people within Brisbane’s gaming community, not just from Flesh & Blood, but Board Games, Magic: the Gathering, Role-Playing Games, Warhammer, Miniature painting, Star Wars: Legion, A Song of Ice and Fire minis; people that just want to hang out with other nerds and enjoy whatever hobby they share. 

To meet the requests of this competitive community, we would have to run unsustainable events. And unsustainable events are a fast way to disappoint more than just the Flesh & Blood community. If you find that you are someone demanding lower and lower prices from a store in exchange for more prize support, I’d invite you to take a breath and look around the hobby right now. This is very evident if you live in Brisbane. 

Our number one goal is to serve the gaming community, the entire gaming community. Simply put, we’re not going to be able to do that if we continue to haemorrhage money running Flesh & Blood.

Some Questions You May Have

Does this mean you’ll never run Flesh & Blood?

No. Nothing has ever ended for good with us. If there is enough interest in the future, we may end up running Flesh & Blood again, though our expectations from the game will be impacted by our previous experiences with it and what we’ve established earlier in this post. 

Can I play Flesh & Blood in store?

Sure. You can play it in the store. We’re not gonna stop you unless we need the tables for an in-store event. Which applies to everything in store.

Will you organise Armory kits for us to use?

No sorry. As we will no longer be supporting Flesh & Blood in-store, we will not be organising Armory Kits or Events, and it would be against Flesh & Blood’s rules to organise Armory Kits for someone else.

Will you still sell Flesh & Blood?

For the foreseeable future, we will still have some Flesh & Blood products. We typically don’t like stocking TCG products for games we don’t support through organised play. We still are supplied by the Flesh & Blood distributor in Australia so we should be able to order anything you may be after, if they have it in stock at our usual pricing, below RRP.

What about the new store at Clayfield?

Flesh & Blood is not on our current roadmap of events at the new Clayfield store. But with a new store, comes new opportunities and new communities, and we are always committed to supporting our community. So never say never…

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We will be farewelling Flesh & Blood with a big draft event in the coming weeks so make sure you keep an eye on our Facebook Page for that announcement.