replies to the 20 May digest
A rules digest from the L5R CCG rules team, copied from the mailing list archive for Oracle of the Void. The askers' names are left out. Rulings are as they stood on this date; later rulings, the rulebooks and the Rules Archive may differ.
Gold Edition, 30/30 and You!
The Design Team is moving away from free gold, and the Design team is trying to eliminate 'median' personalities, personalities who are not really expensive, and not really powerful. Gold personalities
I hope that the design team realy isn't trying to do this.
The Design Team is moving away from Personalities that come out on turn one and easily kill a Province on turn 2. The Design Team is also moving away from Personalities whose costs fall too far out of line considering their stats and abilities. Applied naively, these changes would have the effect of eliminating mid- range Personalites. That's why we're going to try not applying them naively.
Gold Edition still has a fair number of mid-range Personalities (you may recognize them as the ones people point out are "too good" for Gold: Uso, Rekai, Rohiteki), and we're seriously examining Alpha to make sure there are still people between the Morito Tokei and Hida Yakamo Exp3 power levels.
Alternative mulligan suggestion
I would suggest something along the lines of the following:
[...]
I haven't had the time to playtest these rules to exhaustion, but they seem pretty solid (in my brain, at least). There might be holdings out there that allow for considerable abuse of this rule, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
The ability to bring a Holding OF YOUR CHOICE into play from anywhere in your deck on turn 1 as a reward for shuffling poorly has serious abuse potential. You shouldn't have a gold scheme that performs more consistently the fewer holdings your deck has. Any such plan would need to be considered very, very carefully, and then considered again.
There's also this: you already HAVE a mulligan in L5R. You start the game with a gold source in play. It's your Stronghold. I'd much rather solutions be based around that. That's one of the reasons it's there, after all: so you can afford to do something from the very start of the game.
I also think that the starting player should draw one fate card less at the start of the game.
Ah. Different issue entirely.