5 minutes ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

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.

That's why (along with the description of the Scorpion gameplay by FFG "While playing the Scorpion Clan, you’ll want to make high honor bids in order to draw extra cards") I am speculating that the Scorpion Stronghold will have some Honor loss mitigation ability.

It's pretty plausible speculation as far as speculation goes. Maybe something like :

reaction: when you would give another player honour, bow this to reduce the amount by 1

21 hours ago, Kubernes said:

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

I hope we dont see that haha... a dynasty deck with no personalities that is.

On 4/28/2017 at 8:51 PM, Kubernes said:

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

How would this work, exactly? At the moment, the only cards in the Dynasty deck are personalities and the occasional holding. I don't see how a deck full of holdings would be very effective, at least with the information available to us at this time.

1 hour ago, twinstarbmc said:

How would this work, exactly? At the moment, the only cards in the Dynasty deck are personalities and the occasional holding. I don't see how a deck full of holdings would be very effective, at least with the information available to us at this time.

Not exactly sure how it would work for this game. But with a greater card pool decks like that become more of a possibility. I just don't like playing against those type of decks. For Game of Thrones, I have played a couple games against choke decks with a ton of locations, board clear, and no personalities. They were slow and not too fun to play against. Sorta just playing solitair. If that became a viable deck in L5R, I would be disappointed. Nothing against those who would enjoy that, I just like the conflict and the back and forth.

On 4/29/2017 at 8:01 AM, Eugene Earnshaw said:

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.

Yeah, I've been predicting for a while now that Scorpion will have some self-loss mitigation. There is no other way I can see consistently bidding high as the devs has said we will be doing. I wouldn't be surprised if it were built into the stronghold.

(edit: I saw your later post and C3gorach's after writing this. What you posted above is almost exactly what I predict, except I guessed reduce by 2 honor.)

15 hours ago, twinstarbmc said:

How would this work, exactly? At the moment, the only cards in the Dynasty deck are personalities and the occasional holding. I don't see how a deck full of holdings would be very effective, at least with the information available to us at this time.

Because there will be Personalities created during conflicts. Question is if there will be possibility to announce attack without anyone at the board.

I'm guessing it may be as simple as if you are playing against a Scorpion player, draw minimal cards. I'm sure that won't be foolproof, but I'm sure it's a good starting strategy.

On 4/29/2017 at 8:01 AM, Eugene Earnshaw said:

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.

Why would they have 8? I would think 9 or 10 is more likely. The high honour clans have 11, the others have 10, then the low honour clans have 9.

I'm skeptical that Nu5R will allow for dynasty decks without personalities to be viable. From what we've seen the game will revolve primarily around the conflict phase. If you don't have personalities to go to battle with you likely won't be able to be successful in conflicts.....heck you may not even be able to declare a conflict without having a personality. We'll have to see all the rules to know for sure. I suspect there will likely not being anything from preventing it but I would doubt that it would be a viable approach to winning.

In Old5R you had several separate phases and card types that allowed for characterless decks to be viable and sometimes successful. With holdings now preventing future production out of the province it's attached to and the only way to win rings and break provinces coming through the conflict phase it would forces a characters player to win solely on honor bids and non-conflict actions......I just don't see it, but, I'm.sure there will be someone that tries it, unless it's forbidden by the rules.

49 minutes ago, Radix2309 said:

Why would they have 8? I would think 9 or 10 is more likely. The high honour clans have 11, the others have 10, then the low honour clans have 9.

It is all speculation, of course, but it seems to be likely that they will keep the same relative rankings as before. In the CCG there was a very consistent relative order of how honourable the clans were. Lion was higher than crane was higher than dragon was higher than unicorn was higher than crab was higher than scorpion. There was some variation between strongholds, but it would definitely have a wierd feel from an old school perspective if the Crab and Dragon had the same starting honor, or Unicorn and Scorpion. We already know that Lion has 1 higher starting honor then crane, which is consistent with the old rankings, and suggests they are not slotting in all the 'honourable' clans at the same value. I would expect Dragon at 10, unicorn at nine and a scorpion at eight at the highest. A bit more traditional would be Crab at 8 and Scorpion at 7.

could be totally wrong, of course, but if they are keeping the relative family honor rankings from the ccg, that's what we would get.

I'm pretty sure the original order from Imperial Edition was

Lion 7

Phoenix 6

Crane 5

Dragon 4 / Unicorn 4

Crab 3

Scorpion 0 (first stronghold released in Shadowlands expansion)

Based on the story reset Scorpion could very likely be a little higher on chart as they have not yet attempted their coup.

Scorpion is the clan most potent at dishonoring personalities and making you lose honor. So the Scorpion can start low without too much trouble.

And I don't think you will see honor loss mitigation during the dial phases. Instead, you'll see more text like what is on the Bayushi Manipulator card : bonuses when dialing.

On ‎28‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 7:27 PM, Wintersong said:

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.

I'm betting there will be a card along the lines of "Your excess honor tokens do not go to your opponent If you bid more honor than your opponent."

Edit: you will still lose thr honor wich is good because Scorpion seems to have cards that work if they are less honorobale than their opponent., but at the same time ensures taht your opponent can't benefit from you betting a lot of honor.

23 hours ago, twinstarbmc said:

How would this work, exactly? At the moment, the only cards in the Dynasty deck are personalities and the occasional holding. I don't see how a deck full of holdings would be very effective, at least with the information available to us at this time.

The primary way could simply be a personality creating one. There could also be new types of dynasty cards (events or another new card) that do something and do not fill up the province. The only other way a full holding deck could "work" may be just to use the holding and discard it at the end of the turn.

17 hours ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

It is all speculation, of course, but it seems to be likely that they will keep the same relative rankings as before. In the CCG there was a very consistent relative order of how honourable the clans were. Lion was higher than crane was higher than dragon was higher than unicorn was higher than crab was higher than scorpion. There was some variation between strongholds, but it would definitely have a wierd feel from an old school perspective if the Crab and Dragon had the same starting honor, or Unicorn and Scorpion. We already know that Lion has 1 higher starting honor then crane, which is consistent with the old rankings, and suggests they are not slotting in all the 'honourable' clans at the same value. I would expect Dragon at 10, unicorn at nine and a scorpion at eight at the highest. A bit more traditional would be Crab at 8 and Scorpion at 7.

could be totally wrong, of course, but if they are keeping the relative family honor rankings from the ccg, that's what we would get.

In the story, as of now, we do see Scorpion enjoying a favored position within the Imperial Court. This could lead to a higher starting honor than we are used to seeing. Having the story guide the mechanics would bode well for allowing the story to guide - or at least influence - the card design.

1 hour ago, SoulSteel said:

In the story, as of now, we do see Scorpion enjoying a favored position within the Imperial Court. This could lead to a higher starting honor than we are used to seeing. Having the story guide the mechanics would bode well for allowing the story to guide - or at least influence - the card design.

Consider that, has cards appearing in the Core set, they will be always legal, independent of what's happening "right now" in the storyline. Also, they have made a point of making an explicit dutiful/honorable split between the clans, with Crab and Scorpion belonging to the high duty/low honor end of the scale.

Between gambling honor for card draw and using fate to purchase personalities and deciding for how long at the time of purchase, I think FFG has certainly succeeded as creating a game where the actual mechanics are fairly simple but the strategy is well... headache inducing.

I think within the previous L5R, it often felt that the strategy given the cards you had on the table was very straight-forward... but the mechanics could be so complicated and there could be so many moving pieces on the board that it could be difficult to remember to do everything. One had to check everything on the board multiple times a phase to make sure they weren't forgetting one of their honor gain/loss sources or forgetting to generate one of their tokens or any other number of things that could be happening with the 10 holdings and 5-8 personalities sitting on your board.

8 minutes ago, Mon no Oni said:

Consider that, has cards appearing in the Core set, they will be always legal, independent of what's happening "right now" in the storyline. Also, they have made a point of making an explicit dutiful/honorable split between the clans, with Crab and Scorpion belonging to the high duty/low honor end of the scale.

Good point, I forgot about the eternally legal Core expectation.

On 4/28/2017 at 1:24 PM, 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...

The description says they need to balance big bids, to get more tricks vs losing all their honor - While playing the Scorpion Clan, you’ll want to make high honor bids in order to draw extra cards and surprise your opponents with potent tricks and traps. Yet you must always maintain your deepest loyalty, lest you lose all honor and the game. - its a balance for them (for all clans really) not a strategy.

Also, dishonoring a character is a big control element of this game. When they talk about Scorpion dishonor they seem to be indicating that Scorpion will use that control option more/better then other clans. - Dishonor is also a powerful tool when turned against your foes to keep their skill low and their hopes of beating you in conflict even lower - It doesn't seem like the CCG concept of a dishonor deck is exactly the same in the LCG. It doesnt mean the Scorpion will aim to win by dishonoring their opponent - looking at the rules I think dishonor is more of a threat to keep players from betting high every turn, and someone you can try to push if/when you see they are in a bad position.

They can use descriptions for various things they want the clans to do but I need to see the cards before I can decide whether or not it's actually viable for a Scorpion deck. Maybe we'll get a reprint of Marries A Barbarian or maybe something weaker/more situational.

52 minutes ago, Kubernes said:

They can use descriptions for various things they want the clans to do but I need to see the cards before I can decide whether or not it's actually viable for a Scorpion deck. Maybe we'll get a reprint of Marries A Barbarian or maybe something weaker/more situational.

The first thing I thought of when seeing Shameful Display was Marries a Barbarian.

We'll have to see how they handle variable differences in same faction strongholds. For example, when comparing two Lion strongholds, what variables can change? In Netrunner, the abilities change, and the min deck size and max influence can also change. It is entirely possible that two strongholds for the same faction have different abilities, honor, fate, and influence. Typically, they use this to balance the abilities. Great ability, crap stats. Crap ability, great stats.

16 hours ago, slowreflex said:

We'll have to see how they handle variable differences in same faction strongholds. For example, when comparing two Lion strongholds, what variables can change? In Netrunner, the abilities change, and the min deck size and max influence can also change. It is entirely possible that two strongholds for the same faction have different abilities, honor, fate, and influence. Typically, they use this to balance the abilities. Great ability, crap stats. Crap ability, great stats.

It wouldn't surprise me if most of the clan strongholds keep most of the variables the same, with the major difference being that text box. With the three numbers (honor, influence, and fate) influence will probably be the number that changes the most since a difference in a few points really only needs a small number of cards.

Card draw in card games can and often is directly related to win rate. Games like Magic tend to be looser with draw but also with discard.

For instance, I play a deck called 8-Rack, the whole idea is to cause the opponent to discard and empty their hand. When they have 2 or less cards in hand with this deck they will take damage. Sometimes 9 points a turn.

OTOH, there are blue combo decks that pretty much all they do is stall the game out and get extra draw until they draw their game winning combo.

IME with FFG LCGs, there never seems to be that sort of disparity. Generally speaking FFG LCGs are specifically designed with the effects of card advantage in mind.

Not that there won't be decks that have card advantage over others but there will be a drawback to having it.

In AGOT cards that have a draw ability generally cost more to play and you can always try to win an intrigue challenge to help negate some of the advantage.

I believe in L5R the major limiting factor is going to be honor.