replies to May 23
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.
Most balanced personality?
Which personality in the game is the most balanced?
Shiba Katsuda got my vote for a long time, though he's crept further and further below average as the average has climbed.
replies to the 20 May digest (very long)
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.
I take it that by 'shuffling poorly' you mean 'cheating' ;) ?
To be honest, no, I didn't mean that. Not this time. I suppose I should have used a different phrase.
You shouldn't have a gold scheme that performs more consistently the fewer holdings your deck has.
A gold scheme with far fewer holdings than normal will perform more consistently on turn one under such a rule. After that, if you've only got seven holdings in your deck (one of which is now in play) you could be waiting a long time before you see another.
I just did the math. With 7 holdings in a 40 card deck, you've got a 36% chance of drawing none on turn 1. If you discard everything and play a holding from your deck, you now have a 45% chance of getting screwed again on turn 2. Total chance: 0.36 * 0.45 = 16%.
What's the chance of choking on turn 1 with a typical holding mix? With fifteen holdings, it's 14%. That's awfully close to the 16% figure above, and far, far preferable once you consider you'll also have 6-8 gold instead of the 3-4 from your lone Stronghold.
An eighteen-holding deck chokes on turn 1 only 8% of the time. Now it's questionable which strategy is better. We don't know yet how many holdings a "typical" Gold-legal deck is going to include.