Yes, I know there is not enough info about the game rules released, yet, but I wanted to talk shop about strategy speculation. We do know that there is no hand size limit and the card draw mechanic is controlled by the player. We have seen one card spoiler that increases the card draw by 1 so far. That has the potential for 6 cards per turn! This could be higher based on a deck designed to draw cards.

Since this game seems so different from anything currently on the market, does anyone think that decks ignoring honor could dominate the meta by drawing more cards and controlling the board with more units?

I doubt it. I believe such decks will exist and work, but they will still be limited by how much Fate they have (having a bunch of options doesn't mean you can play all of them). There's also a limit to how low you can go on Honor, and there may be ways the other player could unexpectedly cause you to lose some, costing you the game. In fact, the link between more cards and dishonorable tactics makes me suspect that we'll be seeing some cards that will allow you to punish your opponent for having too many cards (maybe something like, "Your opponent loses X Honor, where X is the number of cards in his hand minus 5").

Having a lot of cards in your hand does sound like a fun and perfectly valid way to play, but I'm sure the design team also made sure there are ways of keeping it from absolutely dominating.

10 minutes ago, Badmojojojo said:

decks ignoring honor

You lose with 0 so no one is going to be ignoring it. It will be a constant give and take while trying to do their thing while not losing by surprise dishonor. Also, unless all your hand costs 0, you are going to need some fate. Which you will not be using to create presence in the table.

Once the cardpool grows then maybe...

I don't think so because I think characters in the conflict deck are going to be fairly rare, we've only seen one so far. I think actions are going to be more common in the conflict deck and most of the board control is going to come from it, from either bowing characters or discarding characters, removing fate, and buffing character with attachments. You would also have to pay for all of these cards which with the limited fate isn't going to be possible unless you don't spend anything early in the game. I also think taking high honor bids in the game will be fairly dangerous since only a few turns being greatly underbid will leave you in a losing position, 11/12 honor isn't a wide margin to ignore.

If you bid 5 (+1) three times, your opponent would sit at 25 honor unless you manage to dishonor and remove a couple of his characters and he doesn't honor a few before they leave play.

Ok, that's good if you destroy 4 provinces in that time frame.

I think honor decks will want to try and keep their bids as low as they feasibly can while maintaining just enough defense not to die. I could easily see building a conflict deck full of big, expensive cards with mighty effects, the intention being to only draw 1-2 at a time but have each one matter.

I'm looking forward to seeing how Scorpion dishonour works when the Clan description says they focus on big honour bids, and those are just going to give your opponents a chunk of honour...

1 minute ago, Fumo said:

I'm looking forward to seeing how Scorpion dishonour works when the Clan description says they focus on big honour bids, and those are just going to give your opponents a chunk of honour...

They will come with a bag of tricks to deny honor gains, do redirections and who knows what else. But until we confirm those, we are safe.

Yea this talk about "can you afford it?" I'd the only thing that has been changing my mind about holdings.

Right now the only thing I am very unhappy about is that holdings stop character production.

This is from the mindset that we are producing out of all 4 provinces every turn. But I really wonder how likely that will be. Assuming 2 cost dudes, buying them all would 8 fate, which is more than any stronghold we have seen so far and no neutral fate production yet. Plus! They only stay for 1 turn this route. Plus! That leaves nothing to play cards from your hand.

I don't really have a point here. I am just trying to speculate how much money we need to be able to justify producing characters out of every Province consistently while having a hand.

Board state is hard when everything changes every turn ><

45 minutes ago, Badmojojojo said:

Yes, I know there is not enough info about the game rules released, yet, but I wanted to talk shop about strategy speculation. We do know that there is no hand size limit and the card draw mechanic is controlled by the player. We have seen one card spoiler that increases the card draw by 1 so far. That has the potential for 6 cards per turn! This could be higher based on a deck designed to draw cards.

Since this game seems so different from anything currently on the market, does anyone think that decks ignoring honor could dominate the meta by drawing more cards and controlling the board with more units?

Oh I already mentioned that topic in another section.
As @Winterson mentioned, no one should be able to blatantly ignore honor.
Honor is no longer kind of non-interactive clock you play against.

You can draw even 8 or 9 cards, but you need fate to play those. You will not have both - board and card advantage (true card advantage = number of cards available to play which you can afford to play as well)
As one of the DT - Nate mentioned : you will find yourself switching from board adv through card adv and honor advantage turn by turn.

There is still a difference between looking at an opponent with 4 fate and three cards in hand, and looking at an opponent with 4 fate and eleven cards in hand. The second guy is much more likely to be able to have the perfect card to mess with your plans.

21 minutes ago, BayushiCroy said:

Yea this talk about "can you afford it?" I'd the only thing that has been changing my mind about holdings.

Right now the only thing I am very unhappy about is that holdings stop character production.

This is from the mindset that we are producing out of all 4 provinces every turn. But I really wonder how likely that will be. Assuming 2 cost dudes, buying them all would 8 fate, which is more than any stronghold we have seen so far and no neutral fate production yet. Plus! They only stay for 1 turn this route. Plus! That leaves nothing to play cards from your hand.

I don't really have a point here. I am just trying to speculate how much money we need to be able to justify producing characters out of every Province consistently while having a hand.

Board state is hard when everything changes every turn ><

I had the same feeling about holdings blocking the province.
I am quite content now, after some serious thoughs. First of all - yes there is no province destruction so you dont lose your flips from loosing a conflict, which is fine, you may lose some flips in exchange for some nice ability/defence/even card cost reduction though and its up to you how you will balance this, so at the end of the day - its not that bad really, lets just hope FFG will give us strong reason behind giving up those flips (strong holdings obviously)

I would guess that 1 holding and 3 flips are a steady character spawning grounds and you have some fate to move around conflict cards etc

9 minutes ago, BayushiCroy said:

Yea this talk about "can you afford it?" I'd the only thing that has been changing my mind about holdings.

Right now the only thing I am very unhappy about is that holdings stop character production.

This is from the mindset that we are producing out of all 4 provinces every turn. But I really wonder how likely that will be. Assuming 2 cost dudes, buying them all would 8 fate, which is more than any stronghold we have seen so far and no neutral fate production yet. Plus! They only stay for 1 turn this route. Plus! That leaves nothing to play cards from your hand.

I don't really have a point here. I am just trying to speculate how much money we need to be able to justify producing characters out of every Province consistently while having a hand.

Board state is hard when everything changes every turn ><

I don't think we will produce out of 4 provinces in a turn. I think it will be difficult to produce out of 2 and have anyone actually last. Dudes might cost 2-3, but if you have to invest fate in them as well so they stick around, that adds up to 4-5 if you want it to stick around for 2 turns. If we produce 7-8 (They mentioned somewhere (AMA Maybe?) that you might up fate production by 1 or 2), that is at most 2 bodies a turn. Out of 4 cards, losing one is less bad. Still less options, but if the holding helps you do something good (defend a province, etc), it sounds like a good trade-off to me.

On the honor cost discussion, I have to wonder how often the Scorpion is going to be able to draw 5 cards. It will depend highly on board state, but without any external honor gains, With a starting honor ranging from 8-13 like we've seen and estimate, you can only draw between 7 and 12 extra cards than your opponent (2-3 turns of bidding high), before you drop to 1 honor and risk losing the game from your opponent calling your bluff on a draw. However, that is also a 7-12 card difference between you and your opponent as well. And a lot of the events cost 0 (that we've seen). So maybe it will be enough, at least early on, to bid high and then sit back and bid one each turn.

If I were to make a wild guess I would say that the Scorpion Stronghold will have an Interrupt: ability that will lessen the honor you lose/give from one of your actions/dial by a little once per turn...

Just thinking that honor/dishonor decks will be rarely ones. In a game where even average honorable courtier with 1 or 2 glory will have 3-5 attacking force most games will be resolved just in crushing provinces.

8 minutes ago, C3gorach said:

If I were to make a wild guess I would say that the Scorpion Stronghold will have an Interrupt: ability that will lessen the honor you lose/give from one of your actions/dial by a little once per turn...

That feels out of theme for what we've seen so far. It might be a thing on a unique personality, but as a stronghold ability, I feel like we are more likely to see some direct action, like "If you have lower honor than your opponent: Bow this stronghold to bow a personality in a conflict".

25 minutes ago, kempy said:

Just thinking that honor/dishonor decks will be rarely ones. In a game where even average honorable courtier with 1 or 2 glory will have 3-5 attacking force most games will be resolved just in crushing provinces.

First you need to get that character being honorable. Not to mention that if he passes out with 2 glory this most probably give you 2 honor... take duels into account now....
I do not believe that we will rarely see honor win/loss, just my wild speculation though

Just now, Arkhonai said:

First you need to get that character being honorable. Not to mention that if he passes out with 2 glory this most probably give you 2 honor... take duels into account now....
I do not believe that we will rarely see honor win/loss, just my wild speculation though

I think we will, but I don't think it will be the primary goal of most decks, but I think it will be an option for a lot of decks if the opportunity arises. For example, you need to take 2 more provinces, but are close enough that if you take one province, but use the ring of air, buy a guy with no extra fate and honor him out, and win that way.

Exactly.
Imho there will be less 1 victory condition focus.

Honorable/tricky clans will be able to win in at least 2 if not 3 ways.

I'm still curious if both conflict types will have the same feel, or if they'll be different. For instance, will Military conflicts involve more cards that mess with stats to try to break/save provinces, while Political conflicts involve more cards that cause honor gains/losses? I'm sure both things will be possible in both types of conflicts, but I'm hoping for slightly different focuses to give more distinction beyond just using different icons.

6 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

I'm still curious if both conflict types will have the same feel, or if they'll be different. For instance, will Military conflicts involve more cards that mess with stats to try to break/save provinces, while Political conflicts involve more cards that cause honor gains/losses? I'm sure both things will be possible in both types of conflicts, but I'm hoping for slightly different focuses to give more distinction beyond just using different icons.

My Fashionable Courtier charges into battle, I give her a +4 Force pump by equiping a fancy kimono, RAWR!

I agree it could be interesting. It will be interesting to see how the honorable/dishonorable effects work. That is actually a pretty big unknown still. It could be that it affects political battles but not military ones, or to a lesser extent.

3 minutes ago, Mirith said:

It will be interesting to see how the honorable/dishonorable effects work.

Honorable gives bonuses to Military and Political based on Glory. Dishonorable penalty based on Glory. At least I think that is what the product descript says somewhere (and mentioned in some thread too).

16 minutes ago, Wintersong said:

Honorable gives bonuses to Military and Political based on Glory. Dishonorable penalty based on Glory. At least I think that is what the product descript says somewhere (and mentioned in some thread too).

Quote

Honor — Honor plays a significant role in Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game, but fundamentally, honor effects are tied to conflicts. You will need to engage in conflicts if you’re planning to advance your agenda, whether you’re attempting to increase your own honor or dishonor your opponent. In addition, a character’s status as honored or dishonored can have a significant impact on its military and political skill. An honored character adds its glory to its military and political skills, while a dishonored character subtracts its glory from its military and political skills.

As far as the Conflict Draw vs Dynasty Draw goes it's unclear if a Conflict Card = Dynasty Card given everything we know right now. However, Tricks don't really matter unless you have targets for them so it leans a bit towards Dynasty Cards, unless there are lots of Conflict Characters in which case Conflict draw might be slightly better.

With the way the previews are looking and the focus on conflicts, it looks like board presence will be key to winning or losing. With that being said, the main focus should really be the basics behind the two resources, tempo, and card advantage.

Yes, eventually we might see some interesting types of decks like no dynasty personalities but that might be sometime in the future.

Crane has 11 starting honor. That suggests that Scorpion has at most 8 starting honor (Crane>Dragon>Crab>Scorpion). That means if Scorpion bids 5 and the opponent bids 1 on the first turn, they go down to 4 honor. IScorpion risks a loss on turn 2 if they bid 5 again.

Even for other clans, the limitation on card advantage is more likely to be dishonouring yourself out than making the other player honour out, although both could potentially matter.