I know we havent seen the first expansion packs yet, but does anyone have some kind of read on the power level of the core set?

Netrunner came out with a really powerful core set and it gave people a solid foundation to build competitive decks for a long time even though you might not want to buy every pack along the way.

L5R seems to encourage triple core set buys because of very little overlap. I would be very eager to get 3 if I felt the cards would be a good investment far into the game, but I guess there is no way to tell at the moment...

I have a feeling that a bunch of the neutral conflict cards at least are going to be deck staples for a long time.

Probably no way to tell right now, but many of the cards feel like they will be 3x staples. I can't see making a Crab deck without 3x Kaui Envoy or Reprieve for example. Right now it feels like the majority of the card are good with a few being either under the power curve or situational. Many of the neutral conflict cards feel like essential tools for particular deck strategies. By contrast almost all the dynasty neutrals feel underpowered so I can definitely see some things in the core falling out of favor. That said some cards that feel underpowered right now like Rebuild or Mantra of Fire will become more useful if their respective card pools give them more support.

Yeah I think there are definitely really strong cards for every clan in the core and neutrals as well. Some conflict cards are Way of the Crane, Way of the Scorpion, Let Go, Spyglass, Display of Power, Watch Commander, Ready for Battle, Court Games, and Charge just to name a few. I think getting 3 cores would be a solid investment if you plan to play competitive.

things like crowd control or interrupt are unlikelly to ever be bad. Pacifism and let go are pretty good examples.

Speaking with my limited experience with Phoenix, one deck's binder fodder is another deck's staple. We have a pretty solid split between courtiers and shugenja, and likely as not when more cards released players will focus decks on one or the other. I've even seen discussion on dropping our clan champ as soon as the first pack comes out, since it was revealed we're getting a 5-cost shugenja to bolster a shugenja deck theme. Only time will tell.

Judging from other LCGs, there are cards that have a pretty high powerlevel and are very versatile. I don't think that cards like Banzai, Court Games, For Shame, Agasha Swordsmith, Lion's Pride Brawler, Kitsu Spiritcaller, Let Go, Miromoto's Fury etc. will go away anytime soon.

I never really played the old CCG but it seems to me that FFG has solved many of the classic card game issues like Resource Screw (or mana screw from old magic the gathering days for those of you that remember or still play), card draw issues (with the honor system), "no option" dead ends (aka, you almost always have something you can, no "nothing turns"), dynamic results (with the ring system), this is great as it solves the old issue of "I won a fight but got nothing out of it and of course my least favorite, I have nothing to fight with because last round you killed everything.. aka the classic I've lost and this is all just a formality issue.

With all those problems solved with clever design it opens the game up to pursue "design" basic mechanics as opposed to the more typical, lets fill the gaps with cards approach. You can already see that in the core set where each cards has a purpose that supports a particular range of strategies and as such much like Game of Thrones 2nd edition, the value or power of a card is really dependent on expanding different potential strategies. Some cards might not be really strong now, but may become key later as a result of other cards that are added. Its something that happened in Game of Thrones and it was largely due to the fact that the game doesn't suffer from a lot of those old school design annoyances.

My guess that the Core cards will prove to be strong but not super powered. I think this because they designed this Core with their Netrunner experience in mind, where they had a number of Core cards so powerful they were OP and distorted the game - and recently those cards were disposed of by a "soft ban" utilizing Rotation and not including them in the Revised Core Set.

I would not call it a stretch to say that the game is essentially unplayable without using Core Set content.

Too many 0 cost conflict cards that do good things were made in the core set. It's going to create issues long term where cards will need to be broken AF to justify playing. The previewed crane card that costs 1 mana and makes your province basically unbreakable for a turn is a good example.

Dynasty decks are pretty balanced. Plenty of room to add new stuff when it comes out.

Coming from Game of Thrones and Netrunner core boxes carry some of the best cards. In both games there are cards that months/years after release some of the core cards are consistently in just about every competitive deck seen around. Also FFG following trends some cards seem like absolutely junk till a few packs later where the rest of the cards that share synergy/combo start coming out and they are the best card of the faction.