Yes this is a tired old topic, but while the game rules remain the same, with honor and dishonor competing over the same resource it is never going to go away. Much about L5R is great, in particular how 3 of the victory conditions interact, but that red headed step child that has grown up to be it’s own win condition is a problem. Now I’m not going into that with suggested changes, instead I’m going to talk about the Dead of Winter commentary in the latest Herald and what it says about the dishonor vs honor game.
“The Dead of Winter also changes how dishonor plays against honor. Presently, these games are time consuming, tedious, and leave both players generally unhappy. The Design Team has made a conscious effort to rectify this by purposefully designing cards to change how this matchup functions.”
Ok so far so good. I’m not going to disagree with these ideas. I’ve done too many grueling games against dishonor while playing honor to do otherwise, and seeing more dishonor enter the environment just makes that even more important.
“This matchup will now favor dishonor if both decks attempt to pursue their normal victory condition.”
Wait. You mean the single most directly meta’d victory condition now has an intentional loss built in. What the?
Both victory conditions already have problems, and dishonor has always had the edge (once it became viable) in the match up, but now it is designed to win!
Why on earth is the most control heavy victory condition with the shortest path to victory getting the advantage?
“Honor decks will certainly be able to slow a dishonor deck’s clock, but they will not be able to completely reverse it.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but this has been my experience for at least 3 arcs now. So are they really saying that things are going to remain the same? If so I don’t see how that rectifies anything.
“Honor decks will therefore have to switch to an alternate victory condition. Some decks will be able to switch to dishonor, but most will switch to military. To support this move to military each of the main honor clans is receiving a personality that supports their honor victory condition, but can help the honor player make an attack against a dishonor deck.”
Hey that must be Dojo Shikatsu.
Ok let’s stop and take a look at this Crane struggles to put together a competitive deck that averages 3F per personality. The sort of deck Shikatsu fits with struggles to have 2F per personality. Crane honor is supposed to use cards like Shikatsu to push their force up so they can attack.
This is doomed to failure.
Dishonor, like honor, must be able to defend it’s provinces effectively against the 3 basic military decks (blitz, strong & steady, build & crush). Those military decks are already chewing up card resources therefore in an honor deck. The rest of an honor deck is generally devoted to making it win, with the best cards being able to do multiple jobs (eg stop attacks and help win).
Now design apparently believes that in a come from behind race on force, and card pool, Crane honor decks (at least some of them) should be able to mount an effective offense. This is doomed to failure.
The alternative is that Crane honor should change gears and go dishonor vs a dishonor deck. Now the problem with that of course is you need to dilute your honor running or military defense to achieve that, that us a loose loose situation as well.
Now one of our themes for EE is revealed, honor with archer support. If that honor us shugenja based as implied then it is doomed going into the dishonor game in a loosing position. If shugenja (and monks?) are just flavor like in CE it is still fighting an uphill battle unless the basic design of ranged attack cranes starts to look just like Mantis, 3 & 4F doing non-bowing RAs on defense and offense. Somehow I don’t see that coming because building that means building a Crane military deck based on RAs as well, which eats into Mantis thematically.
I think it is reasonable to expect us to get a dishonor/honor theme as well, and should that happen my advice is build for dishonor. Crane can honor run on Personal Honor and a few holdings. If you get dishonor working you win, if you are struggling you still have an honor clock to run with to force the opponent’s hand into attacking. Because it has always been harder to switch to dishonor than to switch to honor, so at least then you have a chance vs that Scorpion or Crab dishonor deck.
Ultimately if the Dead of Winter foreshadows the future of Dishonor vs Honor games then Crane honor is in a bad place when it runs into a Dishonor deck unless the Design Team fundamentally changes the approach to Crane design it has used since Diamond. That to me is a bad thing.
I know I posted in that original thread, but I thought I’d point something out here. Excluding EE, just looking at the current environment post-TDOW, Nearly every competitive Crane deck (and there’s a surprising number of them) has the means of beating dishonour more times than not.
Stuff like this doesn’t make me any more eager to get back into CCGs, and L5R in particular. I still love the basic design philosophy behind the game, but it seems like it’s always off-kilter somehow.
As Dare points out Crane as it stands now (and I note our top decks are apparently honor dueling splashing dishonor for extra control) can beat dishonor. So overall the situation is fine.
However my concern is that the IH comments about design direction prove true that there will be a real problem in EE. I don’t want to see Crane players struggling for another 2 years because of a design direction that can still be affected now.
It isn’t dire, but it is a concern worth noting. Just like it was worth noting the change in Dynasty flow at the start of CE was going to favor blitz and dynasty based decks heavily. It isn’t irreparable over time but could make the start of EE problematic for a lot of people given the control nature of most dishonor decks.