Now that we've got an idea on how the game will expand, what would you like to see in the clan packs?

For Crab, incentive or capacity to win on defense would be nice. Thematically, expanding on the Kaiu would be nice; if 6-cost characters are a trend, then maybe have an actual siege engine "character"? It seems likely that Scorpion will get a shinobi theme. For Unicorn, I'd like to see more characters that trigger off of other friendly characters, like Utaku Infantry.

An effective way to win by honor for crane

Even better question. What will the abilities of the new Strongholds be for each clan in their clan packs?

4 minutes ago, Swordbreaker said:

Now that we've got an idea on how the game will expand, what would you like to see in the clan packs?

For Crab, incentive or capacity to win on defense would be nice. Thematically, expanding on the Kaiu would be nice; if 6-cost characters are a trend, then maybe have an actual siege engine "character"? It seems likely that Scorpion will get a shinobi theme. For Unicorn, I'd like to see more characters that trigger off of other friendly characters, like Utaku Infantry.

Personally I'd look to sub themes that were less explored in the core set.

Crab - You covered above and I agree a siege engine would be nice. Other choice could be Berzerkers and the Damned as a subtheme.

Crane - Duelist/Daidoji expansion. Right now its mostly honor tricks so a push of the duelist and the military arm of the Crane might be nice. For a large "creature" type release I'd go with Kakita Toshimoko, show why he was the most feared duelist in the Empire or a Foxwife spirit could work.

Dragon - Expand the Monk theme, and more tattoos seems fairly obvious. Monster could be Togashi Hoshi.

Lion - I'd go with Ikoma "honor" and Kitsu Spiritualism as we've seen the swarm military so lets see a little more of the political arm of the clan. Monster could be a true Kitsu or you could make an Ancestral Hero card back to lead the clan to glory.

Scorpion - Bitter Lies Swordsmen - Bayushi Tangen must live on. In all seriousness I would look at the Scorpion military as an option. They didn't have the biggest army but they were a competent one. The Shinobi theme is already being pretty well covered by the Expansions but you could incorporate it in the scout aspect of the army.

Unicorn - The cavalry horde. Seriously they dropped the ball on this one and the Unicorn just need their primary shtick to be brought up to speed with the rest of the clans.

More dueling options for Dragon plzkthx.

A good stronghold and a lot of decent cavalry characters for unicorn would be great..

7 Clans in 7 Weeks. Honestly, I thought the 6 packs in 6 weeks to make everyone on even ground and get a lot of content out there. If they don't do this in a short amount of time, I could see an unbalanced game environment. I'd rather they do the 7 Clans in 7 weeks then stagger the 6 cycle pack in monthly releases. Doing 6 in 6 then 7 in...3 months apart(unconfirmed rumour?) seems like completely backwards.

I'd like to see a shadowlands clan pack with corrupted characters from all the clans and a stronghold that allows me to play them all in the same deck.

The balance is not issue if clean pack includes counter ”spells” to new features the clean gets. And so it seems to be based on Fenix pack. So no worry in there so one pack in month is just ok. Economically it would be the best way of doing it. Any faster and l5r will be the most expensive Lcg to follow and that is no good to player count!

the only problem seems to be Unicorns that seems to require two clan packs to get even with other Clans...

Maybe unicorn get upgrade pack and then normal unicorn clan pack... not likely but we can always hope...

Well, I'm holding out hope for a Wasp Clan Pack.

Though seriously, one of the previews does give us a hint of how archery may be represented, with characters able to contribute to a conflict without participating (and therefore without needing to bow afterwards). I'm hoping this is a foresign of Tsuruchi's impending awesomeness!

1 hour ago, Hannibal_pjv said:

the only problem seems to be Unicorns that seems to require two clan packs to get even with other Clans...

I don't think this is necessarily the case. From what I've seen, the Unicorn don't really have more bad cards than any other clan; they just don't have the supremely good cards. If the Unicorn Clan Pack includes the right cards, we could easily find the cards they already have to be plenty strengthened to be on par with the other clans.

2 hours ago, Hordeoverseer said:

7 Clans in 7 Weeks. Honestly, I thought the 6 packs in 6 weeks to make everyone on even ground and get a lot of content out there. If they don't do this in a short amount of time, I could see an unbalanced game environment. I'd rather they do the 7 Clans in 7 weeks then stagger the 6 cycle pack in monthly releases. Doing 6 in 6 then 7 in...3 months apart(unconfirmed rumour?) seems like completely backwards.

I'd like a lull for a 2-3 months optimally at least so we can explore what we already have currently. Then in March or April dump 7 clans in 7 weeks. I think that would be pretty exciting. We need the lull because 1. peoples wallets can only withstand so much abuse and 2. I know I'm not the only one overwhelmed by the constantly rapid pace at which the card pool was changing during the Imperial cycle. I agree if they stretch out these clan only packs out over 7 months (or worse) you still get that issue other LCGs struggle with where a subset of the clans have way more options. After that if they want to do a deluxe introducing Mantis or some other subtheme I think most people will be satisfied with the size of the card pool for the core clans. We'd have optimally another role per clan, 2 strongholds per clan, maybe another province per clan and hopefully at least 2 ways to play each faction to reasonable results. That would jump us right into a mature and interesting card pool.

I don't agree. The one pack per week has hurt the local scene, I think. We had people who were interested, but not with that quick an investment - the price of an LCG was part of the appeal. Now, these people are still willing to play and borrow decks, so I have hope that with a decent rest here, they may yet buy in. But if there's another cycle of 1 pack per week, that just won't happen. There's no way for me to tell how representative my experience is, but I'm hoping for return to 1 pack per month, whether dynasty packs or clan packs or whatever else.

I suspect that the loss of people from another big expense like this would be greater than the loss from giving some clans a temporary boost / discouragement.

If there's a lull between these rapid releases it potentially could work out to a wash (if they pace it correctly) considering even in the other LCGs like AGOT and LOTR we were seeing Deluxe expansions being released currently with cycle packs.

In my experience the opposite can cause as much or more harm. Meaning an underdeveloped and imbalanced card pool sticking around for too long can also attrition players due to boredom or frustration. That was certainly a thing in Conquest.

I do agree though that these rapid releases can look scary for the casually interested. I think I'd prefer if this was just a series of big boxes since it would make it easier to track down all the product, keep it in stock and hopefully be cheaper in the process (I believe the deluxes worked out to a cheaper per card price). That said splitting everything out to packs like this means a thrifty consumer could pick and choose their purchases based on what decks they wanted to play. There is certainly a wealth of options for online platforms to deck build and play. Also the box contents are very easy to identify so there's no mystery about what you are buying. The consumer can make a fully informed decision about their purchases.

This is where FFG's policy of always releasing content for each faction in every box works against them since I think it would be way more new and casual player friendly if they could pick and choose their boxes based on the factions they are interested in playing. Though that model is not without it's downside. Consider a situation where Unicorn packs never sell and are cluttering up FLGS shelves while Lion packs are flying off the shelves and retailers can't keep them in stock. Also consider the scenario where FFG now has an economic incentive to not support Unicorn in favor of pushing more Lion releases. Not an easy problem I think. FFG continues to play it safe on the box content distribution, but I wonder if they are making the right choice for the long term health of the game and it's player base size.

4 minutes ago, agarrett said:

I don't agree. The one pack per week has hurt the local scene, I think. We had people who were interested, but not with that quick an investment - the price of an LCG was part of the appeal. Now, these people are still willing to play and borrow decks, so I have hope that with a decent rest here, they may yet buy in. But if there's another cycle of 1 pack per week, that just won't happen. There's no way for me to tell how representative my experience is, but I'm hoping for return to 1 pack per month, whether dynasty packs or clan packs or whatever else.

I suspect that the loss of people from another big expense like this would be greater than the loss from giving some clans a temporary boost / discouragement.

I would agree with this view, part of the appeal as you've said for the LCG format is ease of adoption with a limited fixed card pool to start.

Flooding the market in the early releases will set a bad precedent of to much product to get started that can turn off a casual player who is looking to get into the game. I think a quarterly release cycle for Clan packs along with a return to a monthly cycle for story packs may be the better route to go as it ensures you get a fairly broad mix of clan packs out in a short enough time that most won't feel too behind the ball (especially if each clan actually has something they can use from the majority of the packs and you leave the stronger clans like Scorpion, Lion and Crab till the later releases and focus on the Clans that were behind the curve, like Unicorn and to a lesser extent Phoenix, first) while keeping the release cycle spread out enough that players aren't feeling bombarded with more product than they can keep up with.

But didnt ffg say the one per week release was just for the first cycle? That would make sense as the clans needed more variety for deckbuilding choices than the core set provided.

I would prefer 1 pack per month for normal cycles. But wouldnt mind a two per month or soemthing similar for clan packs.

I would agree except for the advent of these clan packs. The faction specific deluxe boxes are problematic (though admittedly exciting since it's a huge dump of cards for a faction). Ask Netrunner Anarch fans how much it sucked until they finally got their big box like 2+ years into the game's life. I think I'd prefer to not see these clan packs be release at all or release them all quickly and equal out the card pool. Since I can't have the first...

In the Lion Clan pack, just to mess with them (well, the new Chicken stronghold as well I suppose.).

Kuni Undead Hunter

"Cards cannot be played or put into play from discard piles."

I'd gladly give up Keeper Initiate for that.

Though if they instead of launching a new cycle released a clan pack a month until all 7 were released that would be a reasonable middle ground and less torturous than a clan pack each quarter. Good luck waiting 2 years for you clan pack unlucky faction that's last in line.

What I'd like to see:

Crab: Either Pro-win through defense cards or Yasuki politics. 6 cost- an entire Nezumi tribe

Crane: Harriers and Iron Crane (Daidoji Uji please)

Dragon: Togashi Mitsu

Lion: Matsu Tsuko and Death Seekers

I want to see all the Clan Packs out before Gen Con.

4 hours ago, RafaelNN said:

But didnt ffg say the one per week release was just for the first cycle? That would make sense as the clans needed more variety for deckbuilding choices than the core set provided.

I would prefer 1 pack per month for normal cycles. But wouldnt mind a two per month or soemthing similar for clan packs.

My issue is that if Clan packs were in the pipe already, then maybe those would have been a better consecutive weekly release than the cycle packs that we just finished receiving. If Clan packs were the biggest hurdle to go through, releasing them weekly would have been better to be done with quicker THEN release the cycle packs (the one that was just released weekly) on a monthly basis. Despite the cards being usable by any Clan (so long they splash into that Clan in the Clan pack), it's a bit more palatable for people to only buy the Clan that interests them when released this quickly than a block of varied cards that come with every pack.

At the moment, the weekly releases alienated some of the crowd that wasn't too keen spending too much (an understandable point). Now that clan packs have been announced, it's a bit of a no-win situation on their hands. Either they are released monthly or quarterly at the strain of the competitive scene or they repeat what they did once more, which strains the crowd who aren't looking to sink a lot in a short time. Personally, this isn't going to stop me from being packs because I love the game but I do wonder how many might call it quits here.

I can't personally believe they'll rush or shotgun the clan packs, and am optimistically hoping for one every three months, which is still painfully slow in my opinion. This is probably the most disappointing way to increase content I can think of. I agree with the above, though, it would have been cool to have the Core Sets + clan packs as the starting option. "Get three core sets, and then check out the clan packs of what interests you for more options." Then do regular cycles after that. It gets the expanded card pool out there, and also lets people skip buying all three core sets if they want, because the Clan packs reduce the need to have triples of everything.

Too late for that now though. I just hope they still have Deluxe boxes, because that would mean they could focus on story events in those, and have well-rounded content.

2 hours ago, Hordeoverseer said:

My issue is that if Clan packs were in the pipe already, then maybe those would have been a better consecutive weekly release than the cycle packs that we just finished receiving. If Clan packs were the biggest hurdle to go through, releasing them weekly would have been better to be done with quicker THEN release the cycle packs (the one that was just released weekly) on a monthly basis. Despite the cards being usable by any Clan (so long they splash into that Clan in the Clan pack), it's a bit more palatable for people to only buy the Clan that interests them when released this quickly than a block of varied cards that come with every pack.

I agree 100%

13 hours ago, RafaelNN said:

An effective way to win by honor for crane

I feel that as a clan with honoured condition requirements crane should have more ways to honour it's characters it almost feels like other clans are better some times

3 hours ago, AradonTemplar said:

I can't personally believe they'll rush or shotgun the clan packs, and am optimistically hoping for one every three months, which is still painfully slow in my opinion. This is probably the most disappointing way to increase content I can think of. I agree with the above, though, it would have been cool to have the Core Sets + clan packs as the starting option. "Get three core sets, and then check out the clan packs of what interests you for more options." Then do regular cycles after that. It gets the expanded card pool out there, and also lets people skip buying all three core sets if they want, because the Clan packs reduce the need to have triples of everything.

Too late for that now though. I just hope they still have Deluxe boxes, because that would mean they could focus on story events in those, and have well-rounded content.

I think 1 every month is still to slow for clan packs