My best friend recently gave me his old collection. ~800 cards, circa 2005. What percentage would you say are still compatible with Ivory/Onyx? Are there any notably valuable cards from this era?
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Circa 2005? Look at the symbols at the bottom cornors of the cards. Ivory edition came out in 2014 and Onyx is after that. These are the ivory symbols. (They had two when they tried to make extended life for cards.)
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Yeah, these cards are mostly Diamond. Some are Dual-bugged Lotus. A few are Jade.
Are any of these cards still playable?
A few.
Well, nothing is "incompatible" per se. Oracle of the Void has all cards' text updated to Emperor-era or Ivory-era wordings. And playing under Ivory Rules means that all the Personalties cost about 2G more than they would, because "Clan Discount" was removed in Ivory. And some of them have been "reprinted" in Ivory/Onyx base sets, which make them completely legal in those environments.
I think the clan holdings are good
Clan Holdings were removed in Onyx, though. 😛 But Onyx and beyond are digital only, because the game was sold at the end of the Ivory arc.
Hence why I put quotes around "reprinted" when referring to both Ivory and Onyx base sets.
So it sounds like I should assume they are purely decorative.
You likely couldn't make a legal deck out of them for the current Onyx/ShatteredEmpire or last-current-printed Ivory/20Festivals environments, no. But people play arc-simulation and Legacy formats too.
Oh good lol, I never thought they were exactly good design 😅
Cards like Silver Mine or wackier stuff?
When people say "Clan Holdings", they generally mean generic the "cost 2, produce 3 if you're [X] Clan" ones. There have been some other Clan-specific usually Unique Holdings that "will only enter play if you are [X] Clan" and did thematically appropriate things. There was one of each of those for each Clan in Onyx.
Depends on what format you want to play.
These days, it seems common to play arc formats, so if you can find someone who wants to play Diamond Arc, you'd probably have some good games there. The Jade cards are probably cards that were reprinted in Diamond Arc if there's only a few of them. (I recall being very happy to get the oldest edition of whatever cards I could because I liked the card faces of Imperial to Jade)
They'll also all be viable for playing in Obsidian Hand Legacy, though you'll probably want to proxy some other cards if you want to play them.
If you want to play a different arc, there won't be enough reprints to make for a viable deck, unless you proxy a stronghold and a bunch of other cards, including most of the personalities.
Modern is Samurai forward, so that format won't work.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with just building decks out of what you have and playing them with friends. Though, it's worth noting, that there will be a significant number of cards that you'll probably want to include in many decks, so I'd still recommend proxying things like Sneak Attack, high value holdings, and there's always those few cards in every arc that find their way into virtually every deck because of just how much better they are than anything else, and they're always impossible to get more than enough for one deck, like Superior Mobility for CE. (well... every military deck anyway)
Basically, if you're trying to build enough functional decks to play with other people out of one collection, you'll probably have to proxy a few cards.
But there's good ways to do that.
download the card images from Oracle of the Void, or from the Sun & Moon card image packs, and use a program to print them up to 9 cards to a page. Make sure they print at approximately 2.5" x 3.5" (There's a more accurate millimeter measurement I can never recall), then save it as a pdf, and send it off to a local print shop (Staples or FedEx if you don't have a local business that does it). Around here in California, they usually charge between 40 and 75 cents per sheet for color copies.
Then get some sleeves, and use other L5R cards as backers for the proxies. You'll have to cut them out, and try to avoid having any white showing from the edges.
If you really want to make them look nice, double sleeve them first with side-loading inner sleeves (L5R cards don't fit well in the top-loading ones... heck, they're not great in side-loaders either, but it's better) then you can slip the proxy into the inner sleeve, and it'll never show out the top.
Color prints from print shops are just about always gonna look better than what I can get from a home printer. Your experience may differ, but I like to leave that kind of work to the people who do it professionally, and 70 cents a sheet at the upper end is much cheaper than what it costs for me to buy and maintain my own inkjet printer, and MUCH cheaper than a laser printer, and home quality laser printers never seem to have the quality that professional prints do.
Oh, and if you want to play with the Onyx Lives format, just about all the cards are print-and-play anyway. So, proxies will be required if you're playing in person.
can you name a brand of side loading inner sleeves that will fit L5R cards?
Dragonshields tend to be slightly oversized compared to others, but it's really hit or miss, and can depend on the batch.
I have found side loaders have a better chance of working, but they can still bend slightly.
Japanese sleeves usually work well, as they tend to be 1-2mm longer.
If you login into Oracle of the Void and build a deck there theres also option to make output 9-cards-per-A4-page pdf, ready to print. Don explained it in video tutorial that is available from Oracle website.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBR9rTYdKUYSwEAmShJyjDw
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