24 minutes ago, Joe From Cincinnati said:

Maybe the most reliably powerful stronghold available?

I feel like it's only as reliable as your draws, meaning that perhaps reliable is not the best way to describe it. Plus there may be times when you can't trigger it. It's card advantage on a stick, which is awesome, no doubt, but I'm not sure I'd say it was reliable. Conditionally powerful?

This is going to make playing against Scorpion veeery interesting, especially that first honor bid. You're thinking "They want to bid higher than me, so I'll just bid 5", at which point they flip over a 1 bid and put you at 6 honor. One or two dishonored characters and an unopposed challenge later and you're really starting to sweat. It's interesting that they can totally go both ways, depending on how you want to play.

Scorpion vs Scorpion matchups are going to be brutal.

While I like it both in mechanics and flavor, I'm not sold on it being the best stronghold or even particularly stronger than any of the others.

It's somewhat add odds with itself and really isn't something that can force a consistent stream of honor loss. While it might get you that last point of dishonor your need, the real swing in honor is when scorpion low bid at the right moment

Scorpion will generally bid high to keep themselves under their opponents honor total, so they are giving honor to their opponents to do so, then getting 1 of it back....that alone won't force dishonor. While it will slow and maybe prevent and honor victory, while also keeping you from dishonoring yourself out.of the game, that probably won't be all that relevant right at the beginning since province destruction is mostly what people will be going for, while working within the limits of the sliding honor scale.

If the Scorpion bid low, then they get ahead on honor, turning off the stronghold ability and a couple of their other tricks. A well timed low bid with the stronghold and any other honor loss effects might be enough to pull out a dishonor win but it's going to take some help from the opponent. I wouldn't look at this stronghold and just automatically think that I will be able to construct a dishonor deck because of the stronghold ability.

That being said, I like this stronghold quite a bit.

Clan appropriation much?!The Open Hand has always been an Ide thing.

I think the stronghold is pretty well balanced with the other strongholds, which is as it should be. As I kind of guessed would be the case, Scorpion (at least in the core set) isn't really about winning by dishonor, but rather manipulating honor/dishonor through high draw and effects that allow them to remain less honorable than their opponent, but avoid dishonoring themselves out of the game. I would expect with all the honor manipulation effects in play that a lot of matches with a Scorpion involved will likely end with BOTH players at lower than average honor.

The stronghold is mainly designed to "soften" the impact of going dishonorable and to put forward the basic idea of the clan. For what it's supposed to be the card is perfectly find to build upon in future sets.

Do I think it's the kind of stronghold to base dishonor victories on? Compared to the others, yes. On its own, without seeing the other dishonor victory tools, I'd go with a no.

2 minutes ago, Kubernes said:

The stronghold is mainly designed to "soften" the impact of going dishonorable and to put forward the basic idea of the clan. For what it's supposed to be the card is perfectly find to build upon in future sets.

Do I think it's the kind of stronghold to base dishonor victories on? Compared to the others, yes. On its own, without seeing the other dishonor victory tools, I'd go with a no.

If we are looking at full constructed out of just the base set? The best dishonor deck is looking like phoenix, with the ability to trigger Air reliably and dishonor with their Asako while splashing Watch Commander.

But no one should be building political decks yet, the support is so terribly narrow at the moment.