Just read the news release that covers AGoT and I’m very much intrigued with the variant being discussed for tournament play which allows players to pre-select 12 additional cards to take with them to a game and, upon learning who (which House) their opponent is going to game with, swap cards into their plot and draw decks prior to the stat of the game. (my apologies if I’m not accurately describing the Rookery variant)

My question is; Would something like this work for L5R?

Sideboarding? I'm not a big fan of it myself, I get the reason and tactics behind it, but I'm of the opinion that you build your deck in a way to have a counter for anything you're likely to face. Admittedly, my way works best in this still limited cardpool that we're in, but I've always felt that you should be ready for anything at any time with your base deck.

22 minutes ago, LordBlunt said:

Just read the news release that covers AGoT and I’m very much intrigued with the variant being discussed for tournament play which allows players to pre-select 12 additional cards to take with them to a game and, upon learning who (which House) their opponent is going to game with, swap cards into their plot and draw decks prior to the stat of the game. (my apologies if I’m not accurately describing the Rookery variant)

My question is; Would something like this work for L5R?

Define "work."

Can it be done, sure. Should it be done and will it be effective......unknown.

By allowing a sideboard in this game you run the risk of creating a "superdeck"

Let's take the current "king of the hill" Scorpion/Dragon deck. While it's arguably the strongest deck in the format, it is not without it's weaknesses. So players cannot simply bandwagon into the deck and expect success as there is real risk of someone playing a counter meta deck and cutting through all those bandwagoners.

This is good because it should naturally evolve the metagame.

By allowing a sideboard you give that top deck a chance to cover it's weaknesses and continue dominating and driving a stale metagame.

It's up to design to provide is with the cards that allow us to discover these predator - prey match ups and self govern the metagame.

On 4/7/2018 at 8:52 PM, Ishi Tonu said:

Let's take the current "king of the hill" Scorpion/Dragon deck. While it's arguably the strongest deck in the format, it is not without it's weaknesses. So players cannot simply bandwagon into the deck and expect success as there is real risk of someone playing a counter meta deck and cutting through all those bandwagoners.

This is good because it should naturally evolve the metagame.

By allowing a sideboard you give that top deck a chance to cover it's weaknesses and continue dominating and driving a stale metagame.

On the other hand, the counter-meta may be weak against other clans so they will beat the meta, but lose to everyone else. A side board would allow people to run a few counter cards without weakening their other matchups.

I don't have enough experience to know which is more likely, but I can see both sides of the argument.

In theory that's what sideboarding does, but in a game like this, where the gap In card quality/options between the top decks and the bottom decks is currently rather large, sideboarding does little to improve overall parity and balance.

If I'm not playing a top deck, I'm already going to build a deck in a way that I feel gives me the best chance to beat the top decks. Little to nothing in my sideboard will improve my match up vs the top decks because that is naturally who I should be trying to build around. I can improve my match ups vs weaker decks, but what's the point?

Sideboarding works in some games. In not sure it will in L5R. As it stands now, I'm doubtful it would have any positive impact. The card pool is relatively small so I'm not convinced that a sideboard could even be filled properly as the decks that are being built are already pretty tight on space. Maybe later when there are more cards?

Rock Paper Scissors approach to deckbuilding is more fun than everybody playing ULTIMATE DECK SUPREME.