Onyx Lives #rules-questions

Hi, can a sparrow "three can alliance" player use Way of the Mantis? I think not because it isn't consistent with the comprehensive rules under "clan alignment"?

Thanks, I can see your point. I guess I was getting confused by the Way of the Mantis saying "if you are a Mantis Clan player". It seems there is a Clan Player idea that is the same as the Clan Alignment idea, which I am OK with

If I am defending, if I use a battle ability do I gain the honor? or can this ONLY be used while attacking?

You can

comma and or in sentence

can get force while You attack or honor while You defend

I think that's wrong, because of the "then" in the trait.

You'd have to actually gain the +F on an attacking Personality but if you're defending, you have no attacking Personalities

does the "then" apply even if you are unopposed? or does the 1 honor require opposed?

Thats what I thought but I wanted to make sure.

Thank you.

oh thats quite good will it be better than Your ussual Jonny? 😛

we tend to fortet that Lion is actualy honorable in this game, then can gain honor by breathing and i suppose by farting too ;P

at last if it is a battle action xD

If there is no causality, then why not phrase it to avoid the confusion? "After your Battle action resolves, once per turn, give your attacking Personality +1F, or +2F if they are opposed, and gain 1 Honor."

This is more confusing to me... really the honor gain should come first... After your Battle action resolves, once per turn, gain 1 honor, then give...

but ultimately I can also ask and macbeth will give me their thoughts lol

I thought about putting the honor gain first too but I kept the order to maintain continuity between the versions.

typical for me... just seeing if I needed to take it out of my honor deck

Wait, so you gain 1 honor from taking the Honesty action too?

stil an action

Thank you

Wind-less should be a Wind

Why?

It seemed like a weird area like the unaligned neither having the same or different clan from another.

You can count that as one of advantages of being Windless.. and there is not enough of them if You'd ask me.

meaning that Regent does not work against You, thought it is logical You still have to bow a personality to lobby. no cheesing.

Perhaps the other winds should be errata'd in the next arc to require that you bow to Lobby. That might make it more worth playing Windless.

hahaha thats the main selling points of winds - alternative way of Lobbying

and that is kind of reality that it would be way easier to follow a wind than to stick to old Iweko bureaucracy

whiuch will be with time less and less stable and more fragmented (but yjats prolly for another server section)

Honestly I'm pretty new to the game, however outside of requirements for sensei, the honor decks I've been playing have had little use for winds as a method for favor.

Maybe they should just make it so that lobbying for the favor doesn't require bowing a personality at all, regardless if you have a wind or not.

It does feel quite unbalanced that the no-wind player doesn't get a harpoon, recursion, or improved dynasty flips, and also has to bow to take the favor, which, everyone else can do too.

It just kinda seems like a "rules for thee but not for me" situation.

I'd like to see the options balanced out a little more.

I definitely feel that. Typically the decks I've played work better with the honor condition than with the winds conditions. There may have been a reasoning behind this. I'm extremely new to the game so haven't been around to see meta shifts. I was told winds are essentially mandatory with ShE format, however I've never been able to use one due to honor being the primary focus.

House of Suikihime is ok for honor decks

That's what I've put in the decks for lack of options. It just hasn't been useful thus far. The honor option has been consistently usable where the wind has not. As I said, I'm new to the game, so it could be poor deck design on my part that I'm struggling to have more cards in hand.

Wind-less just seems like a massive penalty rather than an actual choice and if you want to actually support it, categorizing it as a Wind would be a good first step.

The Favor Open action on Hantei XL can be a pretty useful control piece in a deck. It was rather heavily used in my Crane Courtier Favor control deck (where I also often had to do a classic Lobby because courtiers don't really have the Force for Kanpeki's Wind Lobby)

Having a wind does not preclude you from being able to use the standard lobby action.

it does preclude you from being able to use the standard Favor actions though, so there's that.

But, Suikihime let's you do to your Dynasty what the standard favor lets you do to your Fate. Kanpeki let's you harpoon enemies, letting you pick off opposing units opportunistically, which can give you some serious honor gains depending on what kind of towers your opponent has. And Kano Alliance gives you access to recursion on attachments, a previously unheard of ability. Though, only if you're willing to go to battle.

I mean, I can definitely understand the normal favor actions being more consistently usable, but the ability to lobby without bowing is a pretty massive plus to me, and playing Crane, I tend to have access to a lot of lobby bonus.

I'm guessing part of the issue is my newness to the game, but typically I'm not even getting the favor as 1. I'm only meeting the honor condition, and 2. I can't spare someone to bow. What I can do with the favor is mostly irrelevant at that point. The bow can be a huge drawback, but it's consistent through rules, so I'm not sure it should change.

you could play Shigekawa's Court, which let's you straighten a personality who lobbied.

you could also play the several ways to just take the favor without bothering to lobby, like The Ivory Courtroom

Fair, it does require space for other things though. I think I definitely need to get more games in to really lean into what I want to do. I've only played a couple at this point and dialing in my first self constructed deck. I started with some crane myself, but am currently working on a mantis dishonor. I'm fond of both so far.

I looked them up when you mentioned them. I should probably try to playtest them and see how it works for me. Do you run either in Crane?

if it's a Favor focused deck, both

I at least run one or two Shigekawa's Court. If I'm concerned about taking the favor at all, I'll also play Ivory Courtroom. But if you're in Crane, you also have access to another trick that's worth running.

Kharmic AND Duty, and take the Favor whenever he's discarded.

Fair enough. Hadn't even considered that. In my first build of mantis I used a lot of honor discard, but ran into a severe lack of cards lol. I'll have to look into those options. So far I have mostly liked Crane and Mantis with some interest in scorpion and spider. Crane was definitely the first to grab my attention.

Crane had a pretty good dishonor game in Onyx Edition, but most of the cards they used for that fell away in Shattered Empire.

There was a whole Crane Jester thing that fell off when OE went away.

oh, and then there was the sensei.

I kinda want to play ShE/OE extended now...

That would have been perfect for me. Lol. I really wanted a crane deck that played both honor and dishonor, but wasn't finding enough of what I needed in ShE.

They had a pretty good theme for that at the end of Celestial edition, too. But it only lasted a couple months before EE came about.

I'm very new to the game. There was some local play in the 90s, but it died when they changed the card backs. I'm just now getting into it. I played some Legend of the Burning Sands after playing Romance of the 9 Empires. Found this project and decided to give it a real go. I'm absolutely loving the game and theme so far.

TIL that they really made cards of R9E available to actually play the game! 😱😱 I thought it was pure fictional for the Gamers.

Nope, it was available through AEG!

Yeah, it was LCG release. Main box and a later add on. Loved it so much.