First of all, congratulations to all those who made choices for Clan Roles for making top in clan. The Scorpion player stated in a post that you had reasons for Seeker of Void. Would you elaborate those reasons please. I had only a few reasons to be disappointed in not getting to use Backhanded Complement. The art, the name and the fluff text are so well tied together.

4 hours ago, Molinext said:

First of all, congratulations to all those who made choices for Clan Roles for making top in clan. The Scorpion player stated in a post that you had reasons for Seeker of Void. Would you elaborate those reasons please. I had only a few reasons to be disappointed in not getting to use Backhanded Complement. The art, the name and the fluff text are so well tied together.

Do we really need another one of these?

I don't know all the details, all I know is this was posted by a guy on reddit and seems to answer your question. This isn't my post, it was made by "evilgm" on the l5r subreddit:

There are a lot of posts going around about how Mark Armitage, the man who chose the Scorpion Role at both Gencon and Worlds, specifically chose Seeker of Void to screw over the Scorpion by denying them Backhanded Compliment. This is absolutely not the case- Mark has made several comments about it in various Facebook groups, and his mostly flavour one referring to that motive is the only one people have paid attention to.

Mark finished Top of Clan on the Friday of Gencon, earning the right to choose the Role we would play until Worlds. As he was playing a deck I built, he allowed me to make the choice. When choosing the Role at Gencon Seeker of Void was the Role we intended for Scorpion to get at Worlds. We thus chose Seeker of Air, so that Void would be available, but Air was still good enough that we were confident that we would be in a position to choose it at Worlds. Obviously Backhanded Compliment was a card that made Keeper worth considering, but overall Mark and I (and others) still felt that Seeker of Void was the right call.

Brad Emon really didn't want Scorpion to get Backhanded Compliment, as he felt it might damage the game. Thus he entered Worlds as Scorpion, giving up his position as Dragon Hatamoto to do so. Mark agreed that Brad's concerns were valid.

When it became clear that Mark would once again be the person making the call for Scorpion, he consulted several people, the majority of whom were happy to stick with Seeker of Void, which we legitimately believe is the correct choice for Scorpion going forward. There is no doubt that BHC is a strong card, but Seeker enables consistent options that no single Conflict card can do.

TLDR; Seeker of Void was not chosen to screw over the Scorpion or save the game. It was chosen because it was the best option.

EDIT: This might actually be more of what you are looking for, by the same author: http://dojooflies.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=23959#p23959

Seems like a genuine question, and while it's getting frustrating explaining the same thing over and over, I'll give it a shot one more time!

Couple of very important things to get clear straight away. I'm the person who made the pick, and I also made the pick for Scorpion at GenCon where I topped Swiss on the Friday, meaning I picked before anyone else. My deck in single core ran Seeker of Void.

The Dragon Hatamoto who surrendered his Hatamoto status because he felt strongly that Scorpion with Backhanded Compliment would be something that would negatively impact the game for the next twelve months is Brad, and he was willing to shoulder a considerable amount of abuse by trying to take top Scorpion so he could pick a non-Keeper Role.

I've only met Brad at tournaments, but man, he's a seriously cool and friendly guy. So much so that he sought me out when I arrived on Thursday to make sure I wasn't angry or upset with his plan - I absolutely wasn't, because one person willing to take on every other Scorpion player present because of his desire to make the game a better experience...man, that's absolutely epic. I understood where he was coming from with his concern - Brad is a highly skilled and talented card gamer, so he wasn't just pulling this stance out of thin air. I clarified with him that he just wanted to take a non-Keeper, and asked that if he was in a position to make the selection, he would at least pick the best Seeker possible for us. He was happy to do this.

Bear with me on a couple of little tangents here. I've been friends with Jon Butler for many years. He's one of the best Scorpion players I've ever met, but he's also someone willing to put aside personal achievements in order to help run events (and indeed the Dojo of Lies forum and Loyalty of the Scorpion FB group). Although we first played against each other during the Samurai Era, Jon knows I played Scorpion back in the day (more on that in a moment), and we talked a lot of strategy and nonsense over the years. I asked for his advice before the Kiku Matsuri, and he offered not only some invaluable tips, but even gave me his deck list to run. He talked through his selections and his strategy, and I went on to do really well with the deck. We conferred about what Role I should take, and our conclusion was that even though Seeker Void was better for the deck, Seeker Air wasn't far behind and would give the clan a great chance to do well at Worlds, while keeping Void available for selection at Worlds for the next twelve months. That's what I went with, and immediately upon making the selection and receiving the Role trophy, I walked over and gifted it to Jon...he had absolutely done all the hard work, and I'd just rode that to success.

Other tangent. I'm a player of corrupt decks and factions. I bought into L5R at the tail end of Imperial, picking up the only starter deck my local trader had in, which was Phoenix. I was down with the Taint from the first moment I paid seven gold using that stronghold, and switched over to Scorpion when they became a playable faction as I like playing the bad guys. I did very well with Scorpion at a time when they weren't considered a viable faction, culminating in making the final of the Battle of Kyotei Plains at UK GenCon 1999, the biggest storyline in Europe at that time. Before the final, I approached Mindy Sherwood-Lewis, who was there running events for AEG, and asked if it would be possible to cede the tournament storyline result to the Mantis if I won...both my quarter-final and semi-final opponents were friends of mine who played Mantis, and I had two incredible games to make it into the final (the game in the last eight against Ian O'Brien remains my favourite game of cards in any system to this day, eighteen years later) - I wanted to show my appreciated and respect to them both, and felt the story team could make it work. At the time, Scorpion and Mantis were locked in battle in the story, and my request (which ultimately didn't matter as I was absolutely smashed by Darragh Long's Unicorn deck in the final) didn't sit well with some of the other Scorpion players present. No-one said anything to my face, but complaints immediately sprung up online (back in the days of the clan Yahoogroup being the main hub of activity), and I decided it would be better to just distance myself from the Scorpion playerbase at that time...I don't respond well to bullies or intimidation, and I have little time for those who put an imaginary story ahead of real world friendship and respect. I moved over to TO duties, helped run some excellent events, and spent the next few years playing pretty casually, including championing the Shadowed Tower to convince misguided Greek Scorpion players that they were the righteous path. I did return to competitive play with corrupt Phrats and concede in the final of a Kotei, but left the game during Lotus before returning with Samurai Edition with Spider after a very good friend pointed out to me that a faction had been designed that would essentially tick every box with me. It did.

Whether people consider me a 'true' Scorpion player or not is up to them. I can point at memorabilia accumulated over two decades or the fact that my online handle is my original Scorpion PC from 1st Edition, but ultimately, I have neither the desire nor the inclination to jump through hoops for others. My friends know me, and I've earned the respect of the people I care about. I'm already tired of trying to correct those with limited reading inability and a tenuous grasp of what occurred. It's 2017...most people have decided what they think happened already.

So, to try and wrap up this epic...the decision to chose Seeker of Void was made before even arriving in Minnesota, for the reasons articulated far better than I could by Jon elsewhere. Brad's decision didn't sway me, but it did definitely help solidify the choice I wanted to make. I chose to give him the shoutout when making the selection because he deserved it and I abhor bullies. I respect that others have differing views on what should have chosen, but I work in a gas station for barely above minimum wage and I sacrificed a lot to make it to GenCon and Worlds so I'd be in with a chance of making those choices, so forgive me if I fail to take the anger and vitriol spewed my way too seriously.

This decision was made with a clear conscience and with the intention of giving Scorpion the best chance to win more events going forward.

Fancy, Hinomura's post gets an extra border for being "popular"

Shivore: Thank You very much for the link. My Google Fu was severely lacking.

"EDIT: This might actually be more of what you are looking for, by the same author: http://dojooflies.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=23959#p23959 "

Hinomura: Somewhere, not sure where, I got the gist that you had made you choice before you got there and everything else just added to it. Thank You for explaining the reasons, and not assuming I was being combative.