Since maho is dishonorable I thought this mechanic might work.

The First Black Scroll

3 cost

Spell Maho

Bow a friendly to put this card into play. When this card enters play, place four of your honor on it. When this card has no honor on it, discard it.

Action: Remove an honor from this card - Look at the top card of any deck. You may put it on the bottom of its deck.

The problem I have with cards that cost gobs of honor is the only clans that can afford to play them are the most honorable. It creates a clear dissonance between setting and mechanics.

Although this is "the" stereotypical specialty of the Phoenix, and even though we are technically one of the more honor-driven clans in the game, I'm afraid this doesn't really tempt me. Maybe with a more powerful ability, but even then the honor cost is really high. It's basically the equivalent of bidding 5 on the first round, which already proved to be pretty dangerous at Gen Con.

Not to say I don't appreciate the ingenuity behind the idea.

4 hours ago, player2636234 said:

The problem I have with cards that cost gobs of honor is the only clans that can afford to play them are the most honorable. It creates a clear dissonance between setting and mechanics.

Exactly - I would rather see restrictions like Blackmail has, "Play only if your honor is lower than your opponents" on some of the cards to limit them to being played by someone who is already dishonorable. Both options have to work together, some which lose you honor, and some which require lower honor. This way they can allow people to play dishonorable, but they also have to have some commitment to it. They can't just gain a bunch of honor and spend it for extra power freely.

The Black Scrolls were really important in the old game's story but it might be more troublesome to straight up copy them from that game seeing how we have vanishing characters and no chi. Instead, I'd rather see them as a new type of card to denote the importance behind them but also the fact that they were around for so many centuries and passed around a few times. It could also help create new victory conditions (i.e. get X amount of scrolls to resurrect Fu Leng and you win).

The Wasting Disease (unique) - Cost 2 or 3

Black Scroll

Corrupting (When you play this card, add a corruption counter to a character you control. If you can't, lose 1 honor)

Action: Bow a Shugenja you control and choose another character - give that character a corruption counter.

The question becomes "what should a corruption counter do?" It could potentially just force the removal of fate on the character but that has very little impact. Another could be a negative penalty to skill which could affect almost anyone. There's the possibility of adding an additional line that a character is discarded when their skills hit 0 to be somewhat aligned with the old card.

There are other ways to create the scrolls like the original attachment, or even like the two legacy Dragon attachments.

On 9/10/2017 at 4:05 PM, player2636234 said:

The problem I have with cards that cost gobs of honor is the only clans that can afford to play them are the most honorable. It creates a clear dissonance between setting and mechanics.

Not necessarily true. Two wins of air ring conflict and you got your four honor back. You are dealing with a forbidden magic here.