1 hour ago, blackheartz said:

With the current cardpool in the playtests we do against dragon you will be losing two provinces per turn if you do not invest in conflict cards. Crane have too much power in the conflict deck to avoid drawing. You need as many WotC, Shamefull Displays, Stewarts of Law, buff cards, splash cards like Reprieve and cards to feed to the duelists as you can. You do not need to draw five every turn but one is not cutting it either. Also the Air and Earth rings are the two weakest. The other three affect the boardstate too much to be ignored most of the time.

At this point there is not enough support to run an honor victory strategy and I do not believe that the rest of the core set will change that. I mean we have already seen the most two honorable clans and they cannot pull it off even when the opponent is somewhat greedy. Fingers crossed that this will change with some deluxe expansion.

I don't know...I kind of get the feeling that Honor and Dishonor are meant to be secondary win conditions, setting boundaries to prevent wildly broken strategies, rather than primary win conditions to be a deck's main goal. Personally, after all the solitaire decks in the CCG, I'm rather hoping they stay that way (though admittedly, if the decks required a bit more interaction rather than simply setting a clock for the opponent to play against, I suppose they wouldn't be that bad).

1 minute ago, JJ48 said:

I don't know...I kind of get the feeling that Honor and Dishonor are meant to be secondary win conditions, setting boundaries to prevent wildly broken strategies, rather than primary win conditions to be a deck's main goal. Personally, after all the solitaire decks in the CCG, I'm rather hoping they stay that way (though admittedly, if the decks required a bit more interaction rather than simply setting a clock for the opponent to play against, I suppose they wouldn't be that bad).

Oh I agree with you on both counts. Honor/dishonor are and should remain secondary win conditions and solitaire is a terrible playstyle to fight against. The thing is that we have played about 50 games and there was not one honor victory or dishonor loss, except in a game where we actually went for the 1-5 bid vs Lion on purpose. From what I am seeing at the various podcasts there have not been any honor wins there either. I think that secondary win conditions should be achievable at some percentage of the games, like 10-20% of all matches. Right now it is next to impossible.

Interesting, very different play styles. Over a third of my games have been honor or dishonor victories though Province victories are more common.

4 minutes ago, Reiga said:

Interesting, very different play styles. Over a third of my games have been honor or dishonor victories though Province victories are more common.

Honor or Dishonor? What do you think are the primary factors that drive up (or down) honor quick enough to win by it?

The problem with trying to win thru honor is that if your gameplan is to bid 1 each round it's really easy to counter. Just bid 5 the first time and then start low bidding yourself. 4 honor by itself will not win the game for anyone. But 4 extra cards can. So you can just sit on the card advantage and win. You'd have to be pretty dumb to let someone actually win thru honor.

42 minutes ago, shosuko said:

Honor or Dishonor? What do you think are the primary factors that drive up (or down) honor quick enough to win by it?

About even probably a bit more dishonor than honor - often due to aggressive bidding on the part of the beatdown deck.

While being the attacker has definite advantages it's not overly difficult to stall out a game, in which case the honor deck (or control deck in most other games) has the advantage.

Honor / Dishonor is definitely a secondary win condition and it feels good the way they've implemented it imo. The most effective honor decks still threaten a province victory and put the opponent into a real bind.

One more thing - honor decks generally want their honored characters to get out of the game quickly and only add fate to setup or power pieces like Kitsu Spiritcaller, LPB, and Toturi. Lion is a straightforward example: Ikoma Prodigy, Akodo Gunsou, and Venerable Historian are all cards you want in play, honor, leave play.

48 minutes ago, Reiga said:

About even probably a bit more dishonor than honor - often due to aggressive bidding on the part of the beatdown deck.

While being the attacker has definite advantages it's not overly difficult to stall out a game, in which case the honor deck (or control deck in most other games) has the advantage.

Honor / Dishonor is definitely a secondary win condition and it feels good the way they've implemented it imo. The most effective honor decks still threaten a province victory and put the opponent into a real bind.

One more thing - honor decks generally want their honored characters to get out of the game quickly and only add fate to setup or power pieces like Kitsu Spiritcaller, LPB, and Toturi. Lion is a straightforward example: Ikoma Prodigy, Akodo Gunsou, and Venerable Historian are all cards you want in play, honor, leave play.

I agree with you on your other points but I want to talk about these two bolded sentences.

In my experience it is very difficult to take the last honor of the opponent with the tools we have now. Because even when someone falls at five honor(which will be at the end of the second round most likely) and you manage to claim both fire and air every round you still need three rounds to push him to dishonor(Two with a champion). During that time it is much more likely to win by province breaking because your opponent starts to not draw cards or lose because you are too far behind because of the low bids. So honor is more like a tool to play mind games with your opponent and force him to make bad decisions rather than a true win condition.

10 minutes ago, blackheartz said:

I agree with you on your other points but I want to talk about these two bolded sentences.

In my experience it is very difficult to take the last honor of the opponent [...] So honor is more like a tool to play mind games with your opponent and force him to make bad decisions rather than a true win condition.

I totally agree it's a secondary win con. The game is designed as such, I just think it can't be totally discounted as previous posts have suggested. Asami, air, fire, and honor bids (draw and duel) all provide ways to steal a couple honor.

Of the two dishonor is definitely more opportunistic and less reliable but oftentimes if you're close to the dishonor W you're also close to the honor one.

In these games we also value Earth ring a lot higher than usual as it produces 2 CA. Mitigating the 5-1 scenario and erasing the gap of 3-1, 4-2 etc.

By no means do I mean to say honor or dishonor will replace Province breaking but I find completely ignoring them extreme.

19 hours ago, blackheartz said:

In my experience it is very difficult to take the last honor of the opponent with the tools we have now. Because even when someone falls at five honor(which will be at the end of the second round most likely) and you manage to claim both fire and air every round you still need three rounds to push him to dishonor(Two with a champion). During that time it is much more likely to win by province breaking because your opponent starts to not draw cards or lose because you are too far behind because of the low bids.

Winning unopposed can also make your opponent lose 1 honor. We are also still missing some neutral events and provinces, and most importantly the Personalities. If some of those give you or make your opponent lose honor it will make either of those viable.

14 hours ago, Mig el Pig said:

Winning unopposed can also make your opponent lose 1 honor. We are also still missing some neutral events and provinces, and most importantly the Personalities. If some of those give you or make your opponent lose honor it will make either of those viable.

It feels a little doubtful we will see printed honor loss on anything other than a unique. Not impossible, but I find it unlikely.

As for the usefulness of duels in crane, I can say that they prove to be fairly effective in both Dragon and Crane. This is good, its accessible by everyone. I don't think splashing in a duel will be a poor choice in other clans.

And on the whole honor/dishonor wins, I think you will normally only see honor/dishonor winning due to aggressive bidding and mistakes, not as a typical win condition.

I hope they never print cards that just adjust honor without requiring you to do something involving the other player to trigger the effect. It seems like they want to funnel everything through conflicts, and smartly so in my opinion. You need to give the opponent some way to counter your strategy. It needs to feel like you are actually playing the game together and not just racing to each other's victory condition. An easy way to trigger negative player experiences is to allow non-interactive decks to become too viable.