4 hours ago, LordBlunt said:

I agree with almost all of your post, except for the above.

Maybe I am not fully understanding your post, but I have to say that in my experience, deck building is the most important factor in card games, and sufficiently so with FFG LCGs. I mean, I just can't see how a finely-tuned deck, in the hands of a newb (for example) wouldn't give that player a strong advantage against a moderately built deck in the hands of an experienced player.

Am not trying to pick a bone with you here, however in my experience, deck design (overall design, availability of cards for that given theme, combinations within the deck, being able to play pretty much anything that you draw, etc) is key and at times out performs the player using it, as I have seen in my gaming history.

Overall, a solid post!

PS: I don't know how I missed this thread before.

Thank you!

I explained myself poorly. Please consider my limitations with the language. What I was trying to say is:

In a game full of details, with continuous and important decissions and factors, and quite difficult to master, the skill of the player can balance the meta choice or the deckbuilding in some measure. This gives room to other factors like, for example, clan loyalty, or thematic excitement, to influence the building decissions of a number players that actually want to win the tournament, but also want to have fun, or want to play their clan.

I consider this an advantage for the competitive play because it will allow those factors to influence deeper the meta, and produce a wider spread of archetypes.

I have seen tournaments where the dominant archetype was played by more than half of the players who where going for the win. That generates a poor experience, even for themselves. But it was the logical consequence of an archetype having a huge advantage over the rest. The high importance of the playing skill in a game mitigates this.

Deckbuilding and meta choices will always have a huge impact. But mitigating that impact is a good choice for a designer, imo. Making a complex game full of decisions is a way to do it. For example: a player who knows well how to play his favorite archetype and has experience doing it may feel that he has more options doing so, than building the meta-dominant deck of the season. Good.

3 hours ago, Mirith said:

For the CCG, I would agree that deck building was probably a more important component than player skill.

I'm not convinced. If newer players started complaining about the veteran's bigger card pools, I would offer to swap my tourney crushing Unicorn decks with whatever they threw together. Had they accepted the challenge, I'd typically win and help them diagnose their play errors. Basically they weren't ready for the strategies and tactics that are baked into a tuned deck.

That's when I would suggest they net deck and try to figure out why each card was in the deck and play it until they mastered it. A serious L5R deck had a reason for every card over every other card. It was my way of helping them realize they should be separating the skills of deck building and deck playing and should focus on one or the other. My personal philosophy here is that someone can't really build a good deck until they have good enough play skills to know what a deck should be doing.

Skill over deck building. This seems like a reasonable claim to make about every title of game in this gaming category, IMO.

4 hours ago, Iuchi Toshimo said:

I'm not convinced. If newer players started complaining about the veteran's bigger card pools, I would offer to swap my tourney crushing Unicorn decks with whatever they threw together. Had they accepted the challenge, I'd typically win and help them diagnose their play errors. Basically they weren't ready for the strategies and tactics that are baked into a tuned deck.

That's when I would suggest they net deck and try to figure out why each card was in the deck and play it until they mastered it. A serious L5R deck had a reason for every card over every other card. It was my way of helping them realize they should be separating the skills of deck building and deck playing and should focus on one or the other. My personal philosophy here is that someone can't really build a good deck until they have good enough play skills to know what a deck should be doing.

Skill over deck building. This seems like a reasonable claim to make about every title of game in this gaming category, IMO.

It may simply come down to circumstance as well. A few card choices can hamper skill in certain matches. For example, Player A makes his Unicorn deck to fare better against a more honor driven meta while Player B decides to make his Unicorn deck against an military or personality heavy meta. Against a field either player may find themselves doing better pending on their opponent's deck. So I'd definitely say that deck construction is important and might overcome skill in some matchups*.

Luck could also play a small part too! Take this from someone who has been mana screwed/flooded numerous times. L5R players may prefer gold screwed, gold flooded, or whatever term they like.

* This is assuming that players have a compared player skill and/or are playing their decks competently.