As for other significant story prizes over the history of the game...

Oni no Okura : The redeemed Oni came about largely due to the efforts of various corrupt Lion players.

The Kitsu Tombs: Was a direct result of David La winning Gencon with a Lion deck containing Oni no Akuma

Having various cards credited to the winners of various events. In the later days of the game, these credits appeared on the cards themselves. Here are the cards for Aaron Barto and Chris Russell (on which they hilariously misspelled his name) who were part of my local gaming group.

The Rain of Blood thing, which was referenced above, was also a pretty cool concept in my opinion. AEG printed out a long list of currently living characters. The way it was advertised was that the winner of each tournament could choose a member from the list and that person would either be sent to The Imperial Court or Daigotsu's Court. Half way through the tournament season, the list was updated with a bunch of new names. What this really meant was that tournament winners got to decide who on that list would be saved, and who on that list would be tainted and turned evil. There was a lot of sparring over characters (Bayushi Kwanchai was saved by a matter of hours, which seems appropriate) and I, at least, thought the whole thing was a lot of fun.

See also http://www.jadehand.com/tourneys/

5 hours ago, JRosen9 said:

As I never played 7th sea, what was this disaster?

During one storyline, one faction was going to ended up "marked for death" and removed. The way the were deciding which faction was going to be removed was based on the results of only 2 US sealed deck tournaments. The faction that ended up being removed was Gosse's Gentlemen, a fairly popular faction. Having their faction killed based on luck really didn't make people happy and pretty much killed the game.

Its one thing to slowly phase out an under-performing or unpopular faction. Its a completely different thing to kill of a popular faction.

AEG's plan for the "loser" of Race-for-the-Throne was to give the playerbase roughly a year and a half to determine if the faction was going to continue to exist and then another 6 months to phase them out.

On 07/06/2017 at 5:42 PM, Bayushi Bajie said:

( Scorpion hated them back then )

"Back then"

The hate is very much alive. Don't let the current nonexistence of the Spider fool you.

I remember European Championships 2002. Top Scorpion player (3rd place and incidentally also last ranked player in our zone) had to choose who to experience. When Rich came to ask him, we all started asking for "Bayushi" Voitagi (best peep in his deck). Some minutes later, while talking to him, Rich at last knew who Voitagi was and voided the choice. So, logically, we asked for "Shoshuro" Uragirimono, who was also voided. At last, he settled for Bayushi Sunetra.

During the Race, if the Scorpion won, they would dissolve the runner-up, which led to the Dragon rallying cry "Thronin' or Ronin!"

Thronin' or Ronin, I like that!

It seems that the storyline prize mechanism made for some tense and fun moments, even if, from what I gather, it failed to deliver a fair few times.

There was also a nasty habit- particularly in larger/longer running storyline plots- of the rules periodically changing.

And at least once, key metrics weren't revealed until after the fact...