@everyone Sorry, I don't wanna tag everyone but I genuinely don't know how else to go about this XD I just got into L5R recently (as in 3 days ago) and started with the War of Currency set. I realize FF bought the game and whatnot, so finding older cards has been a bit difficult. All of that was absolutely irrelevant but I wanted it as preface solely so everyone knows that I have SOME knowledge regarding this. The question: is there a unified database ANYWHERE? And how should I be determining what cards can be played, what is not technically part of the "core" game, and all of that? I'm looking at the channels and besides gathering those are different eras of formats and major rules changes, I have NO idea what it means XP halp
Sun and Moon #rules-questions
Messages from the Sun and Moon #rules-questions Discord channel, copied for Oracle of the Void. Players' names are left out; the rules officials are named. Rulings are as they stood on these dates; later rulings and the rulebooks may differ.
Best db: https://oracleofthevoid.com/
You've got a legality drop down along the left side. Theres like what, 10 archs? Kempy has a dropbox containing decks and rulebooks. I'm sure if you reached out to him he'll set you up with the link.
Oh I actually just found that! Thank you so much, this is super helpful! Any recommendations for a newbie?
What clan are you going with, and do you know anyone who plays? I'd pick an arch that a friend knows. If not, then I'd recommend Ivory/20F. Game was dulled down a ton to make it easier for new players to learn.
Also I found this gem for jade ex decks: https://web.archive.org/web/20000607231050/http://www.cowell.org/~andy/cgi-bin/decks/list.pl
Some old school decks. Perhaps for a later project once you get the gears rolling.
Honestly it's been very hard to find what each of the clans do in a coherent, mechanical way. Lots of lore, not lots of simplified explanations (I've been spoiled by MTG). I'm just learning with my partner atm, so I'll look into Ivory! Thank you so much for the help! I love the game so far, the complexity is awesome but it's still fairly intuitive
Hmm well themes changed each arch for each clan. Ivory and 20F were mostly dual bugged, but every clan got a new theme in 20F. What themes do you like? Honor, dishonor, military? Politics, duels, might?
Enlightenment too, get all 5 rings into play.
I liked the premise of the rings, but I also enjoyed the unique win conditions, like the Black Scrolls, the wall one, and Iweko Miaka
Unless I'm missing something, duels seem not superb unless a challenge forces the duel. I haven't seen many reasons to accept a dual if you know you won't win?
duel
I hear you on unique methods. I had a M'Rika deck in emperor. Theme was to dig for her, bring her in, kill her, and raise her from the dead and repeat. Gained honor each time she entered play. Some duels have no consequences. Theres good cards and bad cards. I believe there used to be ruling that if the duel didnt specify a loss condition it was a kill, and if it didnt specify the ability to refuse it was couldn't be refused. Depends on the arch. I did well with crane in emperor, and spider in 20F.
They gave pretty much everyone a dueling theme in 20F.
Ah then it's a consequence of me attempting to reconcile numerous rules from different arch haha, okie. Yeah I enjoy the unique wincons, same with MTG. I'm a fan of jank, and since I'm not playing this competitively, I'm thinking more along those lines
Gotcha. I'll think on that, been some years. Ashigaru was a janky theme when ivory first launched. Emperor had way more to offer off the top of my head. Ronin was nothing but janky. Dueling kensai tacticians. My favorite deck outside of spider paragon.
On the note of jank, I'm seeing like 3 different sets of rules text on the same Ring depending on its printing. How....how do I determine which one to abide by?
MRP? If so, does that mean those previously god-awful-to-meet conditions are no longer the correct ones? Or does that depend on which arch I'm playing in?
The latter.
I'll also note that the game had some pretty vast rule changes toward the end, on the AEG side.
Note that the FFG version is incompatible with the original AEG one, and not liked that much, so it's basically never talked about here, and Sun and Moon (and Oracle of the Void, etc.) don't use any of those cards.
Anyhow. The Ivory Arc (and somewhat Emperor Arc before it), play pretty differently. They're a lot closer to MtG, in that everything has a keyword now, and there's some pretty strict mechanical and wording templates in use.
Personally I found that really annoying - if I wanted to play Samurai with MtG-like functioning, I would have gone to draft something Kamigawa-related.
Because the game had 20 years of life, it's really grown and changed, so I can only imagine how strange it must all seem being new to it.
I had some of that when I left it for about a decade, and tried to get back in just as Twenty Festivals, the last core set, came out. Most of the gameplay mechanics had been changed, all the Clan mechanics were updated/tweaked/changed, core rules had been redone, and so on. It was almost a new game.
If you look at the first maybe 5-7 years or so, so arguably from inception until they changed the card backs because the International Olympic® Committee™ forced them to, you have mostly concise and cliché Clan roles.
After that, Clan "themes" and such started to be a thing, so it got weird and kind of annoying.
Oh man I've really gotten myself into something here XD yeah I was having trouble finding a good chunk of some of the OG cards, and had heard the FFG version wasn't very liked, though that's the only version I currently have
The FFG one is overly complicated. It's kind of like a board game with cards.
Think of it like a Hollywood TV series revival 20 years later, that then gets cancelled after one season.
It's just not the same as the original, and then starts to get trite and bomb.
Hahaha yeah that's the vibe i got from a couple of the folks who played. As much as I appreciate the clean layout of the cards, I REALLY like the very difficult to decipher and look at old cards. So much art and flair and I love that, even if it's not technically optimal XD
If you want to easily get into the game, try and find/buy a collection of old Clan Wars Era stuff. The cards had very little templating, so almost everything is explained on them, and Kempy has PDFs of the old rulebooks available, as well as copies of all the rulings and clarifications.
The game was more accessible then. More broken, too, but it made it entertaining to play casually.
Over the latter years, things got cleaned up, and it would take a lot more card knowledge and pool to make good or fun decks.
I'll definitely look into that, thanks! I have the rulebooks and stuff from kempy, but wasn't aware they were all meant to played separate, so I read a good chunk and was trying to use them all XD
A roommate of mine says that he disliked the FFG version of the game for the purpose that it removed so much of the underlaying strategy, complexity, and thought-provoking moments that the AEG version had, which from what I've seen, does ring true. My household has 4 people who play it, and we generally play modern, (kinda like MtG's EDH format) and our games normally go for around 40 minutes, and come down to the wire. Very few times have I seen stomps, or even easy victories. Every match is a reed threatening to be snapped by the wind, and who is the reed and who is the wind can literally change on any single given decision. It's nerve-wracking and wonderful, but exhausting for a card game.
God that sounds so fun thoughhhh! Love me some commander
if you want to learn L5R i suggest to stick to specific ruleset and cards from that era. Then expand into other editions or Legacy. Learning Legacy first in case of L5R is a bit risky.
Check Strange Assembly blog by CCG tag, they got many articles from Emperor and Ivory(Twenty Festivals) era. Including such ones:
https://www.strangeassembly.com/2013/l5r-newbie-corner-attack-pt-1-offense
[L5R Newbie Corner: Attack!! pt 1: Offense.]
https://www.strangeassembly.com/2013/l5r-newbie-corner-attack-pt-2-defense
[L5R Newbie Corner: Attack!! Pt 2. Defense]
https://www.strangeassembly.com/2014/l5r-newbie-corner-attack-pt-3-tempo
https://www.strangeassembly.com/2013/l5r-newbie-corner-when-to-flush
[L5R Newbie Corner: When to Flush]
https://www.strangeassembly.com/2014/l5r-newbie-corner-on-the-subject-of-gold-schemes
[L5R Newbie Corner: On the Subject of Gold Schemes]
Thank you so much! This is super helpful! I'll look through these! I'm considering Modern as a format because it seems similar to Commander in MTG, and I love that
Modern is also a type of Legacy, it covers cards since Samurai edition to the end. And uses Twenty Festivals ruleset as core + tweaks for pre-Ivory mechanics.
Twenty Festivals is a second part of Ivory.
There's is another "highlander" format in L5R - Big Deck. It uses Emperor ruleset as core, decks are 80/80 and it covers all cards printed (except format bans of course)
Did they not include pre-Samurai solely because it's so complex and powerful?
Modern's creator was Spider clan fan 🙂 and Spider arrived in the end of Lotus, but it worked well since base Samurai. Anyway, intentions was to keep reasonable card pool.
The ironic thing about (old) L5R is the huge slippery slope factor: if you start losing provinces, you can get behind very quickly, so it's important to stay at the top of the slope, so to speak. A lot of games end up being decided by one big battle, which can be very tense, as it's a case of "Who has that last meaningful action?"
The problem was, the FFG version took that as "Battles are great", and made the game all about battles.
But there were too many battles for the same tension to exist.
Yeah that was my experience even with the FFG starter version. I was Crane and my partner was Mantis. I stumbled on finding good defense, and there was just NO way to stabilize, let alone get an honor victory XD
Every single one of my Strategies centered around moving home from a battle, or reducing their force by like 1. It was untenable haha
military battles in LCG 😉
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two great force derping cards
[attachment: printing_60_1_select.jpg] [attachment: printing_8096_1_select.jpg]
probably two of my favorite cards, and great in Battle Maidens.
Both were also played in Tier1 Lion military/honor switch from Vigilance Keep (Samurai).
Oh see those are both GOOD though. The starter deck doesn't have powerhouses like the first one haha
I assume there are but don't know enough about the game to begin to search by text: cards that cheat Rings into play?
Oh perfect! Is that the only way? No returning them from the discard or anything like that?
Okie cool! So i'd be looking for "put Ring" and then maybe "play or hand." Awesome, thank you!
Well... Note that some arcs had a rule that Rings had to be played by their own text to count for Enlightenment.
An important note that has been duly noted!
OTOH, other arcs had https://oracleofthevoid.com/#game=l5r,#cardid=2555,#cnprintingid=2
And, when that came out, you played Air by creating three or more "Spell effects" in a turn - ie, using the ability on a Spell, or playing a Kiho.
Man they really didn't want Rings to be easy huh? XD I suppose that makes sense thematically though
Er, that made Enlightenment entirely too easy
FETA = "Finding Enlightenment Through Air"
(Also, very cheesey 🙂 )
Well that's a phenomenal acronym. Was Air the hardest to put into play? I'm missing something, since it says it doesn't count towards Enlightenment
No, read the original text.
I linked to the original printing (Ambition's Debt, rather than Gold Edition)
The Ring counted for Enlightenment
Oh? But the original still says it doesn't count as playing a Ring. I assumed that meant it didn't count towards enlightenment
No, it just meant that it didn't trigger effects that require playing a Ring
That seems like a common example in old card games of text being fuzzy, and not working as intended as a result. The Oracle text seems much more balanced, but is the reason I said it seems to make Enlightenment hard to attain
Because by its MRP, I would wager it's not GREAT? But again, I have very little to judge it on haha
As I said, Enlightenment was entirely too easy in Pearl.
It was almost impossible in Gold.
Then they printed this in Diamond: https://oracleofthevoid.com/#game=l5r,#cardid=6389
I'm sensing it's not the most feasible plan. I really wanted to make a Modern deck around the walls of Otosan Uchi but they're not legal and that's sad :c
Again, note that the original text is rather different from the Oracle text.
Man they really neutered these cards XD that seems like a perfectly reasonable card, especially being unique?
Faber won either the European Championships or World Championships with it, at which point it got neutered.
However, given that Faber won either the World Championships or the European Championships with Ratling the following year, I'd suggest it was Faber who was brokenly good, not Rosoku's Staff.
I was gonna say, I'd need to see the player pool and how many ran the card. Because just winning with a card doesn't inherently mean it's broken haha. Yeah what's the Ratling clan/deck because I've seen stuff around and it seems like a half meme and I wanna see it haha
Faber's deck was combo honour bomb deck.
I'm assuming the 1 honor gain is happening, not the 4, yes? Or is there something about those cards that makes the dishonored?
I'm sure there was a way of dishonouring them.
The problem was, in the final, he faced a Crane dueling honour deck, that was just faster - but only if you got into duels against it.
So Faber's only way of winning was to only bring the Shinbone Packs into play (since they couldn't be duelled)
That's so cool. I'm here for it, this is awesome
... except during battles, where he could use Shinbone Tribe to fetch Shinbone Warriors to fetch more Shinbone Tribes - but only if he wasn't opposed (as then the Warriors could be duelled).
Watching the final was intense, as one mistake would mean that the Crane deck would go off, and win.
Stories like this are part of why I wanted to get into the game. It was a Matt Colville video that got me here XD
If you want stories... https://kolatinformant.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/2000-battle-at-oblivions-gate/
[2000 Battle at Oblivion’s Gate]
Note that "Round 1" was the top 32.
So "Round 5" was the final.
I'm gonna have to read that tomorrow because it's 3 am here XD thank you for all the advice and chatting, this has been super fun!!
In particular, note the question he asks on turn 2 in the final!
Just to run through that first turn....
Isawa Hochiu: Justin avatar/stage name. 0/2 0/4/2 Shugenja Air Dragon: as a result of this game, became the Shadow Dragon. 7/4 10/10/4 Shugenja Isawa Taeruko: fetches fortifications. 1/3 0/5/2 Shugenja Inheritance: Gives 5g to spend that turn.
The Sacred Temples of the Phoenix is 5/3/6, but produces 5g for Shugenjas or Spells, or 7g but permanently gives Shadowlands to the Personality.
Also, before Lotus, you could gain honour for buying multiple clan-aligned Personalities at full cost.
So... SH buys Hochiu, Inheritance buys Taeruko, taking him to 10 honour. On his opponent's turn, Taeruko fetches an Empty Crevasse.
Then turn 2, Justin can buy the Air Dragon, but has to corrupt it to do so....
It was so cool to read that he made game decisions based on how it would affect the story. That’s such an amazing premise
It is, though it got overdone/overused after a while. But for the first few years, it really was amazing.
Basically a player-interactive storyline game, with continuity over the years.
It also had a reputation locally for being known as "the game for nice players", with the implication that MtG players were competitive assholes, etc.
Which, at the time, relatively speaking, was true.
This was also before the Internet was prevalent, and that can't be understated.
No NetDecks.
Casual games and casual tourneys were actually creative and casual.
It was only in the 2000s once most people had Internet access that they started to all become competitive cloned NetDeck fests.
A situation that often worked to creative players benefit, because a deck with a well played suprise factor was often more competitive than a carbon copy netdeck. (At least after Lotus, I found)
can you bow your SH and use Shady Dealings at the same time to produce 5+ gold?
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You decide order of producing gold. So you may bow SH first and then play Dealings' reaction to produce another 5 gold.
Oracle text has better wording.
Ok