While I am a newcomer on this forum, I am not a stranger to L5R although I have not played the CCG in years. I have extensive CG knowledge, being a competitive Magic player for a little more than a decade and a casual L5R ccg player for about five years before picking up Magic.

What draw me to this new game initially was nostalgia, because it was the first card game I ever played. All the recent spoilers, from mechanics to cards, have piqued my interest and although I will not drop magic for this, I will probably get everything FFG puts out for this game and devote quite a lot of my card game time to it.

I am liking most of the things we have seen so far, although the Crane fiction could have been better.

For now the clans I am most excited to play are the hands of the Emperor, left, right and under with fire chickens coming right after .

4 minutes ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

Not back when I was playing -- there were some people who played whatever, but some of the most successful players were completely clan loyal at major tournaments. I played from Gold to Samurai 2002 -2007, and if I am remembering right almost all of the Gen Con and Euro Championship winners in that period were Clan loyal players, the exceptions being the Ratling wins.

Good players with clan loyalty that could win tended to stick with that clan... good players that realized their clan could not win cause the deck was just not good enough, sometimes swapped to a tier 1 deck. All I'm saying is that you definitely saw an increase in tier 1 decks during tournaments, regardless of clan.

I am not complaining I am just saying that people who want to win are not going to be perfectly clan loyal. Which is ok, some players (like myself) will always play phoenix first no matter what, but then I am unlikely to ever get an opportunity and I don't have the ability to win a big tournament.

19 hours ago, Bazleebub said:

I know this doesn't really apply to you as you actually know all these words, but on ImperialAdvisor.com we are annotating the stories (at least we did the first one and plan to do more). For example, we went through Her Father's Daughter and linked any of the words like -san and Hai that we thought would be strange to new players. We also added some info on the family and place names that would have significance to an experienced player but would mean nothing to someone new. For the absolutely brand new we have an Introduction to the background article that hopefully will ground new players in the basics.

There definitely is a gap, but I'm pretty confident the players can fill it.

I did see that, it's great that you guys are taking the time to do that! As I've only taken the introductory Japanese courses so far, I'm sure it'll be helpful even to me (your descriptions for the background info certainly were).

I'm totally in... I love the LCG model but feel I am a little behind for the others, except perhaps Game of Thrones. I play with family who don't watch it so it means nothing to them. L5R seems to have an interesting theme and we're getting in on the ground floor and riding it all the way up!

On 6/1/2017 at 10:46 AM, Hurdoc said:

I'm totally in... I love the LCG model but feel I am a little behind for the others, except perhaps Game of Thrones. I play with family who don't watch it so it means nothing to them. L5R seems to have an interesting theme and we're getting in on the ground floor and riding it all the way up!

Ironically enough it does seem easier to get people onboard with something that doesn't have a globally acknowledged IP.

My "local" meta thinks that the SWLCG is in the best place balance wise since release. It's part of the development of the game.

21 minutes ago, DarkTemplars said:

My "local" meta thinks that the SWLCG is in the best place balance wise since release. It's part of the development of the game.

I feel like that game consistently had balance issues.