I've been struggling to really wrap my head around what the designers may have been thinking when designing stuff for the Scorpion, as the most successful decks seem to be working hard against their own themes in order to be successful!

Anyone else notice this?
Consider these cards:

•Adept of Shadows (honor cost)
•Backhanded Compliment (when played on yourself for card draw)
•Bayushi Manipulator (can only raise the bid for honor loss, and won't alter the dial - ie does not combo with I Can Swim/Misinformation)
•Calling In Favors (self dishonor; honor loss)
•Court Mask (self dishonor; honor loss)
•Forged Edict (self dishonor; honor loss)
•I Can Swim (requires higher bid; honor loss)
•Misinformation (requires higher bid; honor loss)

That's a lot of potential self-inflicted honor loss, and your only avenues to offset it are:

•City of the Open Hand (stronghold honor steal of 1 point)
•Blackmail Artist (1 point steal with Pol victory)
•Soshi Illusionist (spend 1 Fate to discard 1 Dishonor status)
•Ring of Air (strongly limits your Ring choices when you need to call Air to offset your own cards)

Once you throw Assassination into the mix (and you're crazy not to - too many really really good 2-costers out there!) you're asking to hit 0 just by playing your cards as designed. To be successful, you have to keep your bid low as often as you can which makes Manipulator, ICS, and Misinformation significantly less attractive/viable.

Don't get me wrong, Scorpion cards are wonderfully thematic! I just wonder how they "came to be" mechanically.

Dishonor is basically Scorpion's only weakness at this point. If those effects didn't cost honor, I don't even know how you beat Scorpion consistently out of several clans haha.

The Stronghold is the most powerful in the game by a wide margin and helps offset the costs of your cards as well.

The whole clan is actually extraordinarily cohesive in that its design helps cover its only weakness with, as you said, the Soshi Illusionist, stronghold and Blackmail artist. Not many clans have this many ways to come back from being in honor trouble. And you see it in how comfortable Scorpions are even when they're sitting at 2 or 3 honor. For most clans, that's "danger zone, I'm about to lose" but for Scorpion it's kind of just..."eh. Don't waste your honor, but you don't need to bid 1 yet if you don't want to, since you can always just steal your opponent's honor anyway."

I was actually thinking this thread was going to be "how did they design a clan that was so strong with so few weaknesses" so I'm amused that it's the exact opposite :P.

4 minutes ago, Joe From Cincinnati said:

The Stronghold is the most powerful in the game by a wide margin and helps offset the costs of your cards as well.

In my experience, my Stronghold tends to be a coaster since I end up with more honor, on the regular, than my opponent.
But, again, I do that by fighting the design uphill, lol.

32 minutes ago, Bayushi Tsubaki said:

In my experience, my Stronghold tends to be a coaster since I end up with more honor, on the regular, than my opponent.
But, again, I do that by fighting the design uphill, lol.

The Top Scorpion players I've seen use those dishonor cards to intentionally drop below their opponent so that they can combine their honor pool and your honor pool into a "shared honor pool."

For example, If the scorpion is at 7 honor and their opponent is at 6 honor, they can use assassinate to go down to 4 honor and then use the stronghold to make it 5 to 5 honor. They spent 2 honor and 1 of their opponent's to play the assassination.

Almost all Scorpions I know of bid 5 on turn 1. Because then two options exist: 1. their opponent bids 5 with them, which is fine and they can keep bidding high and drawing more of the best conflict deck in the meta right now. 2. Or their opponent bids between 1 and 4 and the Scorpion stronghold immediately becomes active, essentially allowing the Scorpion to spend their opponent's honor in order to play those honor costing actions. If they bid 5 and their opponent bid 3, they lose 2 honor to go to 12 to 8. Stronghold makes that 11 to 9. Meaning they got 2 more cards and only spent 1 more honor.

Things like that.

I don't think it's strange at all. Scorpions players have all the tools they want and take their opponent in the mud with them.

When their opponent is at 10 honors, the stronghold read : "take 1/10th of its honor". When he's at 3, it's 1/3rd of its honor". The lower both player are honor wise, the stronger the stronghold becomes. It's really scary how strong the scorp pool is. x)

4 hours ago, MrMenthe said:

I don't think it's strange at all. Scorpions players have all the tools they want and take their opponent in the mud with them.

When their opponent is at 10 honors, the stronghold read : "take 1/10th of its honor". When he's at 3, it's 1/3rd of its honor". The lower both player are honor wise, the stronger the stronghold becomes. It's really scary how strong the scorp pool is. x)

Another way to look at it is over a 5 turn game, assuming the Scorpion gets to use their Stronghold each turn (not unreasonable for all the reasons mentioned above) that's an extra 5 Honor. That's huge.

As Matt Light (winner of the Ireland Kotei) said in several interviews, right now the Scorpion deck has all the answers. They have meta for events and attachments, ways to negate characters, fantastic reconnaissance cards... it's just a very tight Conflict deck. That creates an enormous incentive to draw 5 each turn. The worst circumstance to be in against the Scorpion is to have no cards while they have a handful of cards and so the opponent has to draw 5 too which means you're never putting pressure on Scorpion to bid low.

Now that's an over-generalization. There are many exceptions but in general, the Scorpion deck has the answers they're looking for and other clans better find a response.

Considering the Scorpion are the closest thing to a silver bullet the Phoenix face... it's hard for me to see them as anything but "OMGWTFFTS" overpowered.

Definitely agree with all the comments about the Scorpion stronghold. I think it’s the strongest one out there as it’s almost always useable each round - and if it’s not then you are still exercising control over your opponent by forcing them to bid higher than they are comfortable with, which presents its own risks given the ease at which Scorpion can score quick (dis)honour points through dishonouring their opponents’ characters.

Don't worry about the Scorpion stronghold. The Phoenix stronghold that's coming is broken on a level that will make the scorpion stronghold look like a joke.

8 minutes ago, kiramode said:

Don't worry about the Scorpion stronghold. The Phoenix stronghold that's coming is broken on a level that will make the scorpion stronghold look like a joke.

Highly dependent on what Spell events are produced, whereas honor will always matter in every matchup.

2 hours ago, Kakita Shiro said:

Highly dependent on what Spell events are produced, whereas honor will always matter in every matchup.

Against the Waves is already one of the dumbest cards printed. That alone makes the stronghold OP. But as more spells come out that design decision will keep getting worse.

Funnily enough, Against the Waves gets a lot weaker when you can't use the stronghold to buff a single shugenja for two conflicts. I think people are going to be a bit torn, and we'll see two different deck types emerge. Current stronghold for aggressive Phoenix, new one for slower, control-style Phoenix.

12 minutes ago, AradonTemplar said:

Funnily enough, Against the Waves gets a lot weaker when you can't use the stronghold to buff a single shugenja for two conflicts. I think people are going to be a bit torn, and we'll see two different deck types emerge. Current stronghold for aggressive Phoenix, new one for slower, control-style Phoenix.

Extra glory's only a buff if you can get someone honored. Straightening is always useful.

For example Prodigy of Waves attacks Water, straightens w/ ability, defends, straightens w/ AtW, attacks again.

Or you straighten Kaede and get a second potential Void ring.

Or even just the trick where you Benten's Touch to honor yourself then straighten.

Plus there's the bow effect. Bow Yokuni, bow enemy's Kaede, bow Kitsu Spiritcaller.

Extra glory is also useful to get the favour. Also you can use the extra glory on a dishonored enemy.

1 hour ago, Baer said:

Extra glory is also useful to get the favour. Also you can use the extra glory on a dishonored enemy.

Yes, but I was specifically addressing the assertion that straightening drastically reduces in value if you can't increase the character's glory.

7 hours ago, kiramode said:

Against the Waves is already one of the dumbest cards printed. That alone makes the stronghold OP. But as more spells come out that design decision will keep getting worse.

I don't know if the stronghold will be OP, but recurring Against the Waves and the new spoilered water spell seems really nasty.

4 hours ago, Ignithas said:

I don't know if the stronghold will be OP, but recurring Against the Waves and the new spoilered water spell seems really nasty.

Which new spoilered water spell?

25 minutes ago, Baer said:

Which new spoilered water spell?

I don't know if it is true, but the leak is as followed:

1g

spell.water

Target shugenja can't be bowed by card effects and doesn't bow when resolving pol conflicts.

That seems suspiciously similar to a certain lion card. I hope it's false and we don't start seeing basically the same card for different clans. The incentive to spash different clans is already low enough (there's not too much variety of who takes what clan) as it is