I played Scorpion for many years in the CCG, and I'm now trying to pick it up again in the LCG, but I'm struggling a little with bidding strategies.

It seems plain that the design intention is for the Scorpion to bid high, draw a lot of cards, give honour to the opponent, and then slightly recoup it with the Stronghold. Lots of cards (such as I Can Swim) play into that. However if you want to try and inflict honour pressure on the opponent (which the card pool also seems to support, e.g. Way of the Scorpion), then you want to bid low, and take honour from the opponent.

How do people juggle these two things? Are they two different strategies? i.e. Some decks want to bid high, operate on low honour, and try to win a province destruction victory, while other decks want to bid low, take honour and work by honour pressure? Or do am I too much stuck in the past, and I should be leaving dishonour victories to the Crab?

Any advice welcome.

You're not stuck in the past. In fact. I think you got it exactly right - there's more than one strategy. If you're trying to put dishonor pressure on your opponent, you're probably not bidding too high and can use your deck to put lots of pressure on. Your stronghold ability will only be useful early game in that case. On the other hand, you can go the other way (or switch midstream) and start pulling cards and breaking provinces politically. In that case, especially if you're spending honor, you can use your stronghold to recoup it.

2 minutes ago, Hituro said:

I played Scorpion for many years in the CCG, and I'm now trying to pick it up again in the LCG, but I'm struggling a little with bidding strategies.

It seems plain that the design intention is for the Scorpion to bid high, draw a lot of cards, give honour to the opponent, and then slightly recoup it with the Stronghold. Lots of cards (such as I Can Swim) play into that. However if you want to try and inflict honour pressure on the opponent (which the card pool also seems to support, e.g. Way of the Scorpion), then you want to bid low, and take honour from the opponent.

How do people juggle these two things? Are they two different strategies? i.e. Some decks want to bid high, operate on low honour, and try to win a province destruction victory, while other decks want to bid low, take honour and work by honour pressure? Or do am I too much stuck in the past, and I should be leaving dishonour victories to the Crab?

Any advice welcome.

I myself think that the two strategies mentioned are definitely for two different deck types. I myself personally play a super low cost Conflict deck (34 zero costs, 3 one costs, and 3 two cost cards) and invest heavily into my Dynasty characters. My bidding strategy is usually the middle ground at 3 for the bid. This still gives you a healthy amount of cards to start with and it will cost you little honor if your opponent went for the 1 bid (unlikely though). I do not use I Can Swim as the conditions to trigger it are a lot to ask, although it is a massive swing at an opponent if it goes off. I tend to find mid to late game that I am bidding 1 or 2 as other card draw effects supply my hand perfectly (3 Imperial Storehouse's, 3 Favoured Niece's, 3 Bayushi Liar's, etc.). I usually find myself in a weird position with having a significantly higher honor advantage than my opponent (17 vs 4 in one game) which makes my stronghold pointless. One should never ever build a deck towards a dishonor win, Scorpion naturally tend towards this with the cards they have (Way of the Scorpion, Court Games, For Shame, etc.) which whittles away at your opponents honor during the game. Only go for the dishonor victory if you know you can once your opponent is super low on it ( 5 or less). Card advantage is a huge part of my deck (Spies at Court, Policy Debate, Earth Ring Victories, Miyako going off etc.) which can put a massive amount of pressure on your opponent to bid higher for the card draw and you can low bid still.

My best advice is never bid 4. It will bring misfortune upon you.

Step one: Touch a radioactive meteor

Step two: Develop your superpowers, specifically x-ray vision

Step Three: Bid 5 anyways!!!!!

The general school of thought is to bid a little higher at the beginning of the game, in order to establish some hand advantage. If you can gain cards without sacrificing honor, then it's never too early to start the honor pressure, just keep in mind that some of the scorpion cards care about what your dial shows and some care about what you actual honor is. It's a delicate balance but a fun one for sure.

I started by using the honour dial to apply really obvious honour pressure, but I stopped doing that pretty quickly. I hated how quickly I got locked into bidding 1. After all, we need our tricks.

Usually I start high at the beginning, especially if I have a Manipulator. The honour factor is minimal since your opponent will also bid high.

In the body of the game I find it’s more about feel. I tend to stay at more middle bids, varying them based on the game state. Like if I have a Favored Niece and a Storehouse, I’ll take that opportunity to bid one. The middle bids also mean the damage is less if you make a mistake.

I find honour evaporates pretty quickly with air ring, fire ring, court games, blackmail artist and uncontested conflicts. Bidding is just one of those tools. And it has a pretty negative effect on yourself.

I’ve found losing duels to be a pretty sweet tactic though!

I started my journey by bidding 5 early and making sure I used the stronghold to keep honor involved and from that point on bid mid to low but think of honor as a fuel for my tricks.

At L5RHonored I met Jon Butler, played him round 3, and truly learned the Way of the Scorpion.

Then it was all 1, all day. But doing THAT, while effective for the rest of my Stronghold Winning games(people didn't know that Assassinating a scorpion was against The Rules...), effectively rendered the Stronghold completely blank. These days I bid 2, then I nick 1. I keep honor pressure on at all times, but if you have them pushed down to 1, you can let yourself bid 2 and potentially just take the honor back.

But yeah, as a dishonor player, I want to bid low forever.

Between Secret Cache, Favored Niece, Seeker Initiate, Earth Rings etc, there are plenty of ways to draw and stay up on cards while hurting the honor cause you back all that up with hand discard...

7 minutes ago, Daigotsu Steve said:

Between Secret Cache, Favored Niece, Seeker Initiate, Earth Rings etc, there are plenty of ways to draw and stay up on cards while hurting the honor cause you back all that up with hand discard...

Small nit pick: Niece is not card draw as she does not increase the number of cards you have.

Scorpion dishonor is quite different from Crab/Phoenix. Crab and Phoenix have to bid 1. Sometimes those other decks will be bid 5 turn 1 and then bid 1 from that point forward. Other times they come out bidding 1 and never stop. But no matter what they have to be bidding 1 fairly early in the game.

Scorpion doesn't actually need to bid low until the late stages of the game. Their stronghold allows you to always level the honor pool. Games start with 20ish honor on the table. So if in the first 2 turns as scorpion you play 2 assassinations, 1 banzai, have 1 dishonored guy leave play, and slip in 1 unopposed attack you've drained the total honor pool by 9 honor. This doesn't even factor that they may get unopposed hits on you, that they may want to play assassination, or that they have cards like banzai that cost honor. All you really care as scorpion is to get the pool of honor drained quickly. Once that happens you can then dominate political attacks to ensure you win fire/air and close people out.

Sometimes this honor drain happens really fast and both players find themselves at like 3ish honor by the end of turn 2. Othertimes it takes 3-4 turns for the total honor in the pool to get down to the point where both players are in danger of losing via dishonor. But the fact that your stronghold will always level things out over the course of multiple turns means it doesn't matter if you bid 1 or 5 in the early stages. It also doesn't matter what your opponent bids either. The pool will be drained one way or the other.

TBH, Phoenix is better than Scorpion at getting someone from 3 down to 0. But Scorpion is much better at getting people down to 3 in the first place. Even in cases where both players are at like 3, scorpion can always dishonor their own guy to go down 2-3 and then steal an honor.

The big downside of bidding 5 early as far as dishonor is concerned is that it becomes much harder to drain the pool if someone low bids against you. If you bid 5 and they bid 1 on the opening turn you can't play assassinations with abandon and dishonor yourself left and right just for the sake of draining the pool. You're going to have to spend a little more time protecting your board and buying turns to allow you to use your stronghold to level out the honor totals.

Thanks for all the responses, and fascinating to see how varied the bidding strategies are amongst the replies.

It looks like it breaks down into three strategies:

1. Bid high on turn one (4 or 5) to draw cards, then subsequently drop to lower bids (1 to 3) to keep turnover, but pressure the opponent's hand
2. Bid low on all turns (1 or 2) to apply honour pressure immediately and rely on other means to draw cards, don't use "I Can Swim"
3. Bid middle of the ground (3) most of the time, even on turn one, expect to use fewer conflict cards

It actually sounds like I Can Swim is quite divisive in these choices of strategy. Strategy 1 or 3 can make use of it, strategy 2 cannot.

I've been doing something like 1, bidding 5 on Turn 1 to draw cards, then bidding lower, but I find that I am often too low on honour to be able to afford Assassination or dishonoured people. I've been mainly playing Phoenix, though, who are taking my honour.

1 minute ago, Hituro said:

2. Bid low on all turns (1 or 2) to apply honour pressure immediately and rely on other means to draw cards, don't use "I Can Swim"

It actually sounds like I Can Swim is quite divisive in these choices of strategy. Strategy 1 or 3 can make use of it, strategy 2 cannot.

In my experience, we can all use it but among my Scorpion peers round here, I use ICS more effectively than they do by far. The trick is that I can use the *FACT* that they will practically never bid more than 2 against me to my advantage. Any time I know I'm going to want to activate an ICS I just bid 3 that turn. Get myself a tasty little injection of card advantage and learn to Swim.

But yeah, I don't have experience of bidding like a mad man, but I can imagine it being harder to secure a higher bid if they're comfortable bidding 5 around you. Nobody bids 5 when I sit down =[

1 minute ago, Daigotsu Steve said:

But yeah, I don't have experience of bidding like a mad man, but I can imagine it being harder to secure a higher bid if they're comfortable bidding 5 around you. Nobody bids 5 when I sit down =[

I find that if I bid high early against Phoenix they will then consistently bid 1, because they are drawing cards from Libraries and ring effects. This means I can bid 2 and recoup the 1 honour, and still get to play ICS. However, there is the usual issue of bidding 2 meaning you don't necessarily draw ICS.

7 minutes ago, Hituro said:

I find that if I bid high early against Phoenix they will then consistently bid 1, because they are drawing cards from Libraries and ring effects. This means I can bid 2 and recoup the 1 honour, and still get to play ICS. However, there is the usual issue of bidding 2 meaning you don't necessarily draw ICS.

Indeed, which is why I feel that a lot of Scorpion players not making room for at least a single Seeker Initiate is to their detriment. Card wins games. This will be even more true when our conflicts have bombs like Kachiko and Fate Worse Than Death in it.

If the Initiate was a shugenja or courtier, I'd play him in a heartbeat. As it is, it's simply tough to find room for someone who doesn't provide a keyword I can use.

Personally, for bidding, I've found there is no optimal strategy other than be adaptable - the game contains so many variables that you just need to get a feel for what is best in any particular situation. There certainly isn't a 'right' answer to open every game with.

1 hour ago, Hinomura said:

If the Initiate was a shugenja or courtier, I'd play him in a heartbeat. As it is, it's simply tough to find room for someone who doesn't provide a keyword I can use.

Personally, for bidding, I've found there is no optimal strategy other than be adaptable - the game contains so many variables that you just need to get a feel for what is best in any particular situation. There certainly isn't a 'right' answer to open every game with.

I agree on the Initiate. I'm already struggling to be sure I always have a courtier or a shugenja when I need one. Having personalities not hang around makes it much harder to get required keywords than in the CCG.

I also agree, in general, about the lack of optimal strategy, but I guess I don't have the experience to, for example, choose wisely on turn 1

My starting hand is almost always strong enough that I can bid 1 the first turn, then I kind of go from there, depending on pacing. Most of the time I do everything I can to avoid bidding higher than that, but if I have to, I try to math it out so that they end up 1 honor ahead of me, then bink them with the stronghold to even it back out.

It doesn't seem like a lot of Scorpion players have been using Policy Debate, but it's worked out great for me so far both as another opportunity to steal honor, and to reset the dial to a higher number if I need it for something like I Can Swim.

#AlwaysBidOne!!!

As Hinomura says, it's important to adapt to the board, especially as the game progresses, but in general I will aim to bid low every turn and win by dishonour. I find that bidding 5 gives me lots of cards, but it gives my opponent just as many and that devalues the abilities I have on the board. If both players are bidding low, then Sinister Soshi is more likely to save a Province, the Illusionist is more likely to counter their only way to honour and Blackmail Artist is more likely to connect. Conflict cards are nice, but Scorpion really don't need a lot of them because of the power of our on-board abilities, and once you weather the storm of your opponent's first big draw phase you'll find yourself better positioned to win.

1 hour ago, Hinomura said:

If the Initiate was a shugenja or courtier, I'd play him in a heartbeat. As it is, it's simply tough to find room for someone who doesn't provide a keyword I can use.

Fair thoughts. My own answer to that was found in the Phoenix Splash.

Seeker of Knowledge and Display of Power plus my love of aggressive Dishonor is tooooo derrishus.

I wouldn't worry hugely about making the 'wrong' decision at this point...it's all data, and data is useful. It's easy to get analysis paralysis with the amount of decision points the game has, but just pick a course of action, plow ahead, and try to learn from it.

I usually start with 5 (and find my opponents usually bid 1 for a big honor swing, but I feel that’s a mistake on their part). That builds up my hand really quickly, allows me to use my Stronghold, and I can then adjust my bids to 1 for honor pressure. I do adjust this strategy against Dragon because their Clan Province negates the large hand advantage.