1) When is this planning to be released?

2) Is this a typical card game ala Magic, Pokemon, and other stuff coming out? Basically, are there packs and sets to buy or is it an all in one thing?

3) Will any of the new stuff work with the old stuff?

9 hours ago, Asrial said:

1) When is this planning to be released?

2) Is this a typical card game ala Magic, Pokemon, and other stuff coming out? Basically, are there packs and sets to buy or is it an all in one thing?

3) Will any of the new stuff work with the old stuff?

1) Outside of GenCon we have no solid dates. I expect mid-September at the earliest.

2) This is a Living Card Game. We will see monthly packs at around $15 and every six months or so a deluxe pack for around $40.

3) No, the old cards will not interact with the game.

31 minutes ago, Mirith said:

Whoooops. Thanks Mirith!

Thanks for the info!

I didn't see the FAQ thread. Can it be stickied?

20 minutes ago, Asrial said:

Thanks for the info!

I didn't see the FAQ thread. Can it be stickied?

Nope, sadly. FFG Forum mods have to do that, and I believe they probably actively don't read the threads except for complaints.

Have they mentioned why you need three copies of the base set in order to play the game?

It has been confirmed that there will only be 1 of each Clan card, and 2-3 copies of every Neutral card, so if you want to build a fully legal deck, you will need a minimum of 2 Core Sets, 3 if you want to be competitive and access to all 3 copies of staple in-Clan cards.

9 minutes ago, Hida Kurogane said:

It has been confirmed that there will only be 1 of each Clan card, and 2-3 copies of every Neutral card, so if you want to build a fully legal deck, you will need a minimum of 2 Core Sets, 3 if you want to be competitive and access to all 3 copies of staple in-Clan cards.

At this point, yes.

8 hours ago, Isawa Tsuke said:

Have they mentioned why you need three copies of the base set in order to play the game?

Why should they, when you don't?

They have discussed numerous times about how many core sets will be needed if you feel you need a playset, but that's an entirely different criteria than "in order to play the game."

Just now, Mirith said:

At this point, yes.

Thanks for clarifying yes, as more chapter packs and deluxe boxes get released, the Core Set staples will fluctuate to 2-ofs, as per GoT LCG lists over the years, so no need to purchase something like 6 Core Sets just to have everything for multiple decks.

2 hours ago, Hida Kurogane said:

It has been confirmed that there will only be 1 of each Clan card, and 2-3 copies of every Neutral card, so if you want to build a fully legal deck, you will need a minimum of 2 Core Sets, 3 if you want to be competitive and access to all 3 copies of staple in-Clan cards.

I've been an L5R player since the very beginning, but I'm relatively new to the "living card game" concept of L5R. Could you point me to some articles or videos that explain this in more detail? I'm not clear on why, if you can play the game with one core set, you need two or three to build a legal deck or to be competitive. Doesn't it sort of abuse the concept of a living card game to require multiple copies of the core set to make a fully legal deck?

11 minutes ago, Isawa Tsuke said:

I've been an L5R player since the very beginning, but I'm relatively new to the "living card game" concept of L5R. Could you point me to some articles or videos that explain this in more detail? I'm not clear on why, if you can play the game with one core set, you need two or three to build a legal deck or to be competitive. Doesn't it sort of abuse the concept of a living card game to require multiple copies of the core set to make a fully legal deck?

This question comes up a lot with people new to the format. It is addressed in the FAQ above, but I'll try to summarize the information.

All expansions (small and large) include a full playset of all released cards. For dynasty and conflict cards this is 3. At present I'm not entirely sure about province and stronghold cards. The only parallel I'm familiar with is heroes in Lord of the Rings or investigators in Arkham Horror LCG. In both cases, you are only given a single card. Point is, you will only need to buy each expansion once.

The core set is different specifically because it includes so many more cards. And by this I don't just mean a higher total number of cards, I mean card diversity. If my memory serves, there are 213 different cards being released in the core set. This is a significantly larger than one of the small expansions for the old game (A Line in the Sand had 156 cards). This is the minimal number of cards that FFG thinks is needed to support 7 distinct clans. Anyway, rather than sell you 3 copies of all 213 cards at a fairly high price, FFG has chosen to sell 1 copy of most cards with 2 or 3 copies of some neutral cards at a lower price ($40) so that people can try out the game with a lower financial barrier to entry.

If you are really concerned about the price, let's compare to the old CCG. If you buy at MSRP, you spend $120 on the LCG to have a complete set of all 213 cards. If you bought the same value in boosters, you would have 43 total boosters (36 came in a box for $100-ish, and $3 per booster after that). That means that you will have pulled a total of 43 random rare cards. The trouble is that the set includes 50 different rare cards, so even if you have no duplicates, you won't have them all, and you certainly won't have a play set of any. You are pretty unlikely to even have a playset of the uncommons. And again, the core set is the ONLY time you will ever have to purchase more than one copy of a single product. So you are saving quite a bit of money by sticking with the LCG model.

TL;DR: Having core sets with fewer copies gives new players a way to "test" out the game without making a full investment. No expansions require duplicate purchases. LCG model is great for your wallet.

2 hours ago, Mauziz said:

All expansions (small and large) include a full playset of all released cards. For dynasty and conflict cards this is 3. At present I'm not entirely sure about province and stronghold cards. The only parallel I'm familiar with is heroes in Lord of the Rings or investigators in Arkham Horror LCG. In both cases, you are only given a single card. Point is, you will only need to buy each expansion once.

To work with this, I'm personally expecting the Netrunner and Game of Thrones path here; even though a playset of Identities (for Netrunner) and Agendas (for Game of Thrones) is 1, they still provide three in the packs (a playset of Plots for A Game of Thrones is 1 to 2, depending on the individual plot, but they also provide three in all packs).

7 hours ago, Mauziz said:

This question comes up a lot with people new to the format. It is addressed in the FAQ above, but I'll try to summarize the information.

All expansions (small and large) include a full playset of all released cards. For dynasty and conflict cards this is 3. At present I'm not entirely sure about province and stronghold cards. The only parallel I'm familiar with is heroes in Lord of the Rings or investigators in Arkham Horror LCG. In both cases, you are only given a single card. Point is, you will only need to buy each expansion once.

The core set is different specifically because it includes so many more cards. And by this I don't just mean a higher total number of cards, I mean card diversity. If my memory serves, there are 213 different cards being released in the core set. This is a significantly larger than one of the small expansions for the old game (A Line in the Sand had 156 cards). This is the minimal number of cards that FFG thinks is needed to support 7 distinct clans. Anyway, rather than sell you 3 copies of all 213 cards at a fairly high price, FFG has chosen to sell 1 copy of most cards with 2 or 3 copies of some neutral cards at a lower price ($40) so that people can try out the game with a lower financial barrier to entry.

If you are really concerned about the price, let's compare to the old CCG. If you buy at MSRP, you spend $120 on the LCG to have a complete set of all 213 cards. If you bought the same value in boosters, you would have 43 total boosters (36 came in a box for $100-ish, and $3 per booster after that). That means that you will have pulled a total of 43 random rare cards. The trouble is that the set includes 50 different rare cards, so even if you have no duplicates, you won't have them all, and you certainly won't have a play set of any. You are pretty unlikely to even have a playset of the uncommons. And again, the core set is the ONLY time you will ever have to purchase more than one copy of a single product. So you are saving quite a bit of money by sticking with the LCG model.

TL;DR: Having core sets with fewer copies gives new players a way to "test" out the game without making a full investment. No expansions require duplicate purchases. LCG model is great for your wallet.

Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense. I guess when I think of a living card game, I'm thinking of something like Marvel Legendary or the DC Deck Building Game, in which buying the core set gives you everything that you need to play (and the core set is around $60), then further expansions just add on to that.

And while I can understand this format being good on your wallet in the long run, with the old game you just bought one starter which gave you a playable deck, then you could buy one or two boosters individually for $3 each, which was easier in the short run. As it is, I can only order one core set each couple of weeks because my budget won't allow me to buy more (and shipping and handling seems to be quite a bit more expensive than other sites I buy cards from).

5 hours ago, Isawa Tsuke said:

And while I can understand this format being good on your wallet in the long run, with the old game you just bought one starter which gave you a playable deck, then you could buy one or two boosters individually for $3 each, which was easier in the short run. As it is, I can only order one core set each couple of weeks because my budget won't allow me to buy more (and shipping and handling seems to be quite a bit more expensive than other sites I buy cards from).

But the quality you would get from combining two Core Sets, replayability and all, is enough for two players. And Core Set cards would never rotate out as they are always part of the LCG metagame.

EDIT: The cost, I think, is very much worth it Besides, we get a release date of late-September or early-October. A lot of time to save.

7 hours ago, Hida Kurogane said:

But the quality you would get from combining two Core Sets, replayability and all, is enough for two players. And Core Set cards would never rotate out as they are always part of the LCG metagame.

EDIT: The cost, I think, is very much worth it Besides, we get a release date of late-September or early-October. A lot of time to save.

Perhaps. I'm just happy that another company has picked it up and is resurrecting it, as L5R has always been my favorite CCG. Unfortunately, it got even more expensive once they went the way of Magic: The Gathering and started phasing out old cards for legality in tournaments.

On their OP Twitter account they said Q3 release date. Wasn't a typo, they said this quarter as well. Looks like September.

Have they talked much about their expansion release schedule? I mean, I think they said they're planning on monthly expansions, but have they mentioned, for example, how many small expansions before each big expansion? If you could just point me to an article or a video that talks about it, that would be fine. I tried looking around for their articles but couldn't figure out where to find them.

1 hour ago, Isawa Tsuke said:

Have they talked much about their expansion release schedule? I mean, I think they said they're planning on monthly expansions, but have they mentioned, for example, how many small expansions before each big expansion? If you could just point me to an article or a video that talks about it, that would be fine. I tried looking around for their articles but couldn't figure out where to find them.

Nothing specific but we can, roughly, assume the same setup as the other LCGs - six Dynasty Packs per cycle with one per month with an aim to release a "big box" in between cycles. In reality, though, this works out to a bit closer to one Dynasty pack every six to eight weeks (month and a half to two months) with a big box expansion approximately every six to nine months (while aimed to drop between cycles, the sometimes delayed releases of packs can mean a box drops during a cycle).

6 hours ago, Isawa Tsuke said:

Perhaps. I'm just happy that another company has picked it up and is resurrecting it, as L5R has always been my favorite CCG. Unfortunately, it got even more expensive once they went the way of Magic: The Gathering and started phasing out old cards for legality in tournaments.

This is something that all card games have to do, in order to keep the game accessible for new players. Unless all cards stay in constant production, then new players will not be able to get the old cards, which puts them at a disadvantage. The alternative is power creep which makes your old cards just as obsolete as set rotation does. That and the obvious fact that rotating the sets means that the publishers can keep the lights on and keep making games.

They established for a while a price point for the core set box. They want to maintain that price to ensure that casuals and fence sitters will be willing to risk the investment of buying a single core to try out the game. L5R is really testing the limits of that core set model since you need per player 2x 40 card decks. They wanted to establish 7 clans at the start of the game and give them a reasonable starting card pool such that we have a couple subthemes per faction. At the same time they wanted the Dynasty decks to be your chosen clan only.

Only the core set requires this redundant purchase. In fairness I think there's something like 160 singletons in the core set so even that third core set is contributing quite a bit toward completing your playset. Also the redundant neutrals can be used to build multiple decks at once so the amount of waste is kept to a minimum compared to a product like the Netrunner core set (which only had a handful of singletons).

Also since each purchase benefits all the factions you don't run into the issue where the popularity of the faction is impacting the release schedule. That's not an unheard of problem in expandable competitive games. Just look at Warhammer 40k historically and see how often Space Marines received attention versus say Dark Eldar. In addition it could create an another headache for FLGSs if they have to stock an even wider range of products for one LCG.

ADD: Not an easy problem to solve even though it's a popular topic of conversation for vets and newcomers. I doubt they'll change the way they structure their LCG products because it's been a reasonably popular format so far and if it isn't broken then why fix it. They just risk making it worse and right now the redundant core set purchase is a minor issue in the life of an LCG. All expansion products after the core set don't require redundant purchase

8 minutes ago, phillos said:

Only the core set requires this redundant purchase. In fairness I think there's something like 160 singletons in the core set so even that third core set is contributing quite a bit toward completing your playset. Also the redundant neutrals can be used to build multiple decks at once so the amount of waste is kept to a minimum compared to a product like the Netrunner core set (which only had a handful of singletons).

It's a good way for a group of friends to go into the game. With three friends you each buy a core and pick a faction, plenty of neutrals to put into your decks. Only need to buy one core and can have a full play set. (What my group is doing.)

1 minute ago, RandomJC said:

It's a good way for a group of friends to go into the game. With three friends you each buy a core and pick a faction, plenty of neutrals to put into your decks. Only need to buy one core and can have a full play set. (What my group is doing.)

I think that is the best solution for people who don't mind sharing a collection.

4 minutes ago, phillos said:

I think that is the best solution for people who don't mind sharing a collection.

Well, yes. (I'm still buying a copy for my own collection, but I'm just weird) Plus it'll help those in our group who don't have the spare income to make a deck to play the game.