The crane civil all war with the false clan champion who was spawned by his scored lover was such an amazing story line. Ree for Story leader on new L5R

The Crane Civil War was Kuwanan vs. Uji. Hoturi vs. False Hoturi was just...chaos.

Bah call it what you like it was the original crane vs crane. Any thing that came after is a pale imitation of the original

The biggest issue with faction purity is the way card distributions work in the LCG model.

You start with a core set that is about 240 cards. Some cards are 3 copies, some are 2, some are only single copies in the core. The maximum number of copies of a card you can have in a deck is 3. So you're likely buying 3 core sets to get a full play set. But how many cards are in a full play set? Let's look at Netrunner as an example.

There are 241 cards in the core. But if you buy 3 copies, you have 295 cards that are just wasted because you already have 3 copies in the first core or 4 after the second core. That means your actual card pool is 525. If we assumed 9 clans in the core (very unlikely) you'd have 58 cards per clan. that's actually pretty good. Most LCGs have a minimum deck size of 50. But could you actually have 9 playable starter decks out of 1 core? 240/9 = 26.6. So no, you can't have a playable mono-faction deck out of the box. That means that FFG would have to include neutral cards or some way of mixing factions in order to let a player play with a legal deck with just 1 core. Now Netrunner only has 5 factions out of the box and a bunch of neutrals. Granted, Warhammer: Conquest has 7. But the point is that you have to have neutrals and/or out of factions in order for the core to work when it's released.

The problem doesn't go away with the core, either. Each expansion pack has 60 cards with 3 copies of each card. That gives you about 2 new cards (6 total because of 3 copies) for each faction in each pack. If your clan-loyal, that's a lot of wasted cards. So FFG will probably give you incentive for allied clan decks so that you feel more compelled to buy each pack that comes out.

I predict that as the card pool grows, we will start to see powerful cards that support mono-clan decks, especially through deluxe expansions that have about 130 cards. I imagine these will support 2 clans each and give you bonuses for playing mono-clan decks.

These are my predictions, considering what I've seen of the LCG model so far.

The crane civil all war with the false clan champion who was spawned by his scored lover was such an amazing story line. Ree for Story leader on new L5R

Is Ree still working on Guild Wars 2? Anyway, I think she probably gets more money working on video games so I doubt we will see her back working on crad games or good old tabletop roleplaying games...

I think the current system for restricting out-of-Clan personalities works pretty well. The inability to gain Honour (unless you run Alliance or suchlike) makes sense, and the extra cost is necessary as an extra balancing factor because plenty of decks don't care about Honour. You can still run out-of-Clan personalities if they're strong enough - pretty much every dishonour deck I've seen runs Shizuka, regardless of their Stronghold - but the default is to run in-Clan personalities, which I think is as it should be. If people stop caring about their own faction, I'm pretty sure L5R dies.

One thing to keep in mind with L5R is that with the exception of Personalities, every card in the game is technically neutral. There will often be one or two strategies or attachments per arc (clan armours and swords mostly) restricted to one clan, but every other card in the game can be played by anyone although some will obviously have synergy with a couple clans. If FFG keeps this setup in the LCG supportingb mono clan decks in the LCG release model would be easier than it is in other LCGs.

One thing to keep in mind with L5R is that with the exception of Personalities, every card in the game is technically neutral.

This is also true of Doomtown, and for my money, 4 factions was a pretty good number for that game. Even then, some strategies for each outfit were underserved (though this was also a problem of introducing too many themes to each outfit given the small card pool).

Granted, though, it's likely that FFG's L5R core will have more unique cards. You basically got two of everything in Doomtown's core, so it was only about 150 different cards.

Still, the release model meant each outfit only got two dudes per pack.

It's a bit premature since we have no idea what is staying, getting cut or added

As far as factions go I am hoping for all 9 clans. As for decks construction, and how all 9 could be fit into the initial release, as was pointed out, other than personalities all cards are really faction neutral. I am more worried that the game will lose its feel by having one deck per player rather than two.

Let's say we only have 3 Strongholds for victory conditions: Military, Political(Honor/Dishonor) and Enlightenment

Samurai is the keyword most helpful for Military, Courtier for Political and Shugenja for Enlightenment.

The Senseis are there for certain themes like Ninja, Duels, Magistrate, Monks, Navel, Tacticians.

And Strongholds and Sensei do not have any Clan alignments.

How do you make sure Clan alignment is still a thing?

Build cards with Synergy effects.

If my Akodo Tactician has an effect: All followers on Lion Clan Personalities have +1 Force.

The Mantis do things with Ranged Attacks, Scorpion with Poison Token, Crane with Honor etc.

You could even make the clan alignments bold faced keywords: Each spider clan personality increases your fear effects by 1.

So even when you decide to ax the concept of out of clan penalty, you have a lot of design space to make sure that Clan Alignments stay a thing.

I mean they have 2 years to figure out how they want to approach these topics, but since they will change a lot they will probably end up with very different solutions from the previous game.

My guess is that FFG will do like they have for Game of Thrones 2nd. ed: completley disallow cards form other Houses/Clans in a deck, but then introduce an Agenda/Banner system like in that game.

In GoT 2nd. ed. if you play Stark you cannot include Martell cards, unless you play with the Agenda Banner of The Sun. If you do, you MUST include at least 12 Martell cards. This allows making "dual-house" decks, but not "splashing" a little of each house into one "uber"-deck. There are also "loyal" cards that cannot be played outside each House, even with a Banner. In addition, taking a Banner Agenda prevents you from taking another Agenda that gives benefits, like the Fealty Agenda that helps pay for your loyal characters.

This seems to work well, it prevents complete mix and match (which is both anti-thematic, hard to balance and prevents attachment to a particular House, which is one of the main draws of the game) while still allowing dual-House alliances and a little more deck variants. Not only that, but Clans and Houses are very similar concepts, so the mechanic is easily transferable.

One of the things I really like about L5R is clan-identiy and Strongholds, so I really hope that FFG will not errode that by removing deck-building limitations so that playing Lion or Crane comes out as the same thing when building optimally.

One of the things I really like about L5R is clan-identiy and Strongholds, so I really hope that FFG will not errode that by removing deck-building limitations so that playing Lion or Crane comes out as the same thing when building optimally.

Jumping off Yandia's suggestion of having a stronghold for each type of victory, what if there were also a stronghold that any clan could play that granted additional synergy for shared clan affiliation? A "straight" clan deck would benefit from that the most, but it could still be designed such that it's balanced with the other non-clan oriented strongholds.

Even if you exclude clan strongholds, you can build in other ways to encourage clan loyalty. You could, for example, give powerful-for-their-cost personalities a "Loyalty X" trait, which requires you to have X personalities who share clan affiliation in play before recruiting them (rather than just checking for player affiliation as you describe in AGoT). The opportunity cost for such cards would be much lower in mono-clan decks because it's easier to meet that requirement. Going dual faction gains you other benefits, but makes those powerful personalities harder to play.

How high that Loyalty X is vs how powerful the personality is will have major impact on how powerful "pure" clan decks are vs. dual or more.

I'm just saying there are lots of ways to promote clan loyalty, and ways to make sure straight clan decks are competitive without taking away the ability to go cross clan or even all clan for those who want it.

Banners are another way to do it. As they've been described to me, they're a bit boring, though. Tastes vary.

One thing to keep in mind with L5R is that with the exception of Personalities, every card in the game is technically neutral. There will often be one or two strategies or attachments per arc (clan armours and swords mostly) restricted to one clan, but every other card in the game can be played by anyone although some will obviously have synergy with a couple clans. If FFG keeps this setup in the LCG supportingb mono clan decks in the LCG release model would be easier than it is in other LCGs.

I would expect this to change. The fact that the entire fate deck was, by default, not faction specific was a design choice from 20 years ago that it at odds with more modern design that we see today in Magic and the LCGs. I would guess that we will end up seeing most cards being faction-specific.

I also expect that it will be easier to bleed factions. As Budgernaut discussed above, the card pool is much more limited for an LCG (especially at the beginning), and not having faction mixing can leave mono-faction decks with very limited card choices. What form that mixing will take? No clue.

The clans need to be kept intact. The game has 20 years of clan loyalty that completely disbanding the idea of the clans would make this game L5R in name only.

That said, a little flexibility to encourage the occasional out of clan card would be wonderful. Something like Netrunner's Influence where the majority of your cards will be neutral or faction specific, but you can pull in a few other cards from other factions to round out your concept or shore up your weaknesses. Crab shugenja spending influence on Phoenix earth spells to increase their already impressive defenses, Lion armies using the occasional Unicorn mounted patrol, etc.

Unless you were aiming for an honor victory, there was little reason not to consider the best cards regardless of clan identity, as long as they had a "-" Honor requirement. How would that be a big change for anybody except, say, Crane?

Reminds me that honor decks should have that option too.

Unless you were aiming for an honor victory, there was little reason not to consider the best cards regardless of clan identity, as long as they had a "-" Honor requirement. How would that be a big change for anybody except, say, Crane?

I understand the mechanic changed at some point and I'm not sure how (I think?), but the 2 gold clan discount is pretty significant, especially in the early turns when you're looking at who you can box, and who you can buy with your box+1 holding.

*bump*

I would love a little more freedom to mix and match and play dual clan decks, or even ignore clan altogether and build a deck that utilizes some other synergy and ignores clan alignment.

Honestly, I don't even need strongholds to be clan oriented. We could just as easily get strongholds that are designed with specific mechanical themes in mind and without any clan alignment at all.

While there are now several threads which continue to discuss the various Clans and their gaming flexibility, I thought I bump this thread up to see if there was any more focused discussion related to Clans and their associated strengths/weaknesses and such.

I chose to highlight the quote above in order to garner some more conversation, as it parallels my general thoughts as well.

Thoughts?

*bump*

I would love a little more freedom to mix and match and play dual clan decks, or even ignore clan altogether and build a deck that utilizes some other synergy and ignores clan alignment.

Honestly, I don't even need strongholds to be clan oriented. We could just as easily get strongholds that are designed with specific mechanical themes in mind and without any clan alignment at all.

While there are now several threads which continue to discuss the various Clans and their gaming flexibility, I thought I bump this thread up to see if there was any more focused discussion related to Clans and their associated strengths/weaknesses and such.

I chose to highlight the quote above in order to garner some more conversation, as it parallels my general thoughts as well.

Thoughts?

In some ways, the sensei cards helped to 'fix' the general idea of a clan reaching beyond the typical archetypes and builds. Many unique strongholds also helped to promote new ways to play the game and several were even unaligned. I hope that FFG continues that tradition but builds upon it with more support.

Much of the clans are either military or political in nature, with some emphasis on particular, individual families and their strengths/weaknesses. At a basic release, I wouldn't mind each clan getting two different avenues of victory and based on the families. For example, the Lion could have the Akodo (action and ability based attacking) and Matsu (static attacking) sides features on strictly military matter while the Kitsu (ancestors) and Ikoma (historian and maybe some politics?) focus on that honor side of things to supplement any military.

You could go down the lines and do pretty much the same thing with the other clans. Of course, as the game expands there would be enough cards for particular family-only decks.

They could always go the 40KQ route and have each stronghold come with signature cards like house guards and such. If you keep the number small enough that it wouldn't effectively pre-build your deck, but are the jumping off points that help facilitate a synergy for mono clan decks. You get a scaling bonus for staying in clan, but at the expense of using the larger multiclan "best of" card pool.

Unless you were aiming for an honor victory, there was little reason not to consider the best cards regardless of clan identity, as long as they had a "-" Honor requirement. How would that be a big change for anybody except, say, Crane?

Reminds me that honor decks should have that option too.

That's not really true in practice though. Nearly every competitive deck that I saw used primarily in clan personalities, along with a tiny smattering of cheap out of clan personalities that happened to be better at the objective than in clan people were, or a couple powerful uniques from out of clan that didn't have analogues and who cropped up in almost every deck. Unaligned personalities had to be really really good in order to see any play at all.

There were some exceptions, but they were outliers. Building true rainbow decks has never really been a competitive thing in L5R.

"True Rainbow" didn't exist largely because of how dishonor was structured. Having dishonor meta effectively printed solely on in clan peeps coupled with blood money issues, it hugely incentivized mono clan builds. That's before you even get into the F:G differential mechanics(clan discount). when personalities could overcome these issues, they were run quite often and in every military deck that could field them. Attributing "true rainbow" standards from games that never included honor mechanics isn't a fair comparison.

There were some exceptions, but they were outliers. Building true rainbow decks has never really been a competitive thing in L5R.

True, but there were also frequent cases of "who cares what Clan Alignment this clown has,he's going in my deck," especially in military decks.

Daigotsu Hotako in early Emperor, Komori Taruko pretty much any time after Emperor, Ninube Shiho,

I gather that the OP is more interested in an All-Stars deck than in splashing in one or two highly effective outsiders- not sure how I feel about it.I'd have to see how it was implemented.

If Clan-Loyal decks can remain viable against "I put all the best duelists/shugenja/ikebana-eaters I could find in this deck, let's dance!" then I have no problem with it in practice. If letting people do so means that a mono-Clan deck simply can't beat them, then I am a long way from wild about the idea.

I think I'd rather have mono Clan decks as the staple of the game, with other cards able to facilitate multi-clan and non-clan factions. I'd also rather see the removal of the whole honor requirement as we know it and see it replaced with another system.

Another way to assure a certain type of clan loyalty would be stronghold design. If your stronghold needs a personality from the own clan to work.

Let's take The Grand Halls of the Lion for example:

Battle: Give your target opposed Samurai a Force bonus equal to his Personal Honor.

If you would change it to:

Battle: Give your target opposed Lion Clan Personality a Force bonus equal to his Personal Honor.

You would need a certain amount of Lion Clan Personalities in you deck or you can't use the box properly.

So yeah you can probably put in a lot of other good personalities to archive your goal, but a certain amount of own personal is required to use your strongholds ability reliable.

And yes the honor requirement system in its current form is terrible.

Another way to assure a certain type of clan loyalty would be stronghold design. If your stronghold needs a personality from the own clan to work.

Let's take The Grand Halls of the Lion for example:

Battle: Give your target opposed Samurai a Force bonus equal to his Personal Honor.

If you would change it to:

Battle: Give your target opposed Lion Clan Personality a Force bonus equal to his Personal Honor.

You would need a certain amount of Lion Clan Personalities in you deck or you can't use the box properly.

So yeah you can probably put in a lot of other good personalities to archive your goal, but a certain amount of own personal is required to use your strongholds ability reliable.

And yes the honor requirement system in its current form is terrible.

If mixed clan decks are going to be the norm and/or encouraged through alliance effects a better wording may be:

Battle: If you control a Lion Clan Personality, give your target opposed personality a force bonus equal to his personal honor.