I've played card games for years, including old5r, and I must say that I've never seen a game come out of the gates with such great variance on deckbuilding and playstyles with such a limited card pool.

I mainly play Dragons and after quite a few games with them and getting pretty decent, I decided to try a few other clans out. I learned quickly that what works for one clan doesn't necessarily work for another. Each clan has a new playstyle to learn and a new deck to tweak....and I absolutely love it.

Dragon is definitely my main, which I'm sticking with, but I'm learning to play everything in casual matches...there is no better to know your opponent's strengths and weaknesses than to walk in their shoes.

Love this game. It's chess, while other card games are checkers

I like that the variety of play styles still have to interact with one another. For example: Honor running in the old game was largely non-interactive. You race to 40 honor before your opponent can crush your provinces, and then fight one big battle hoping to hold on for the win. In the new game, honor running isn't quite as viable as the other two win conditions, yet, but, if you are going to pursue a win condition that is not focused on breaking provinces, you're still going to have to participate in the conflict phase. The game was redesigned with a focus on interaction and I think that's what makes the diversity of playstyles enjoyable.

To be honest, the core set only environment was pretty bland IMO. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed every moment of it, but, mostly that was because I was playing L5R again. The format was solved pretty quickly and luckily it ended without a ton of time being spent on just the core cards. The 6 packs in 6 weeks really helped solidify each clan's identity and open up a variety of options. It's a very diverse metagame with only 300ish cards in the card pool.

That being said, I am a little concerned that we may be in the "Policy Debate era" of the meta game. Most competitive decks I'm seeing are built to either abuse this card or try to stop it. While it is a challenging wrinkle to build a deck within the constraints of "how well does it use PD or how can it stop PD?" it can be a little bit frustrating to have to build with that limitation in mind anytime you want to play a competitive deck.