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Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

HidaO-Win posted:

L5R for example had a good long run until 2015 as a CCG and was never a very expensive game to play, most rares were cheap. However it never really got the whale market.

Probably thanks to people maining one clan/faction. I knew a lot of guys who were serious into the kotei scene who wouldn't even bother buying packs, just the cards they needed online.

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Deviant
Sep 26, 2003

i've forgotten all of your names.


Dawgstar posted:

Probably thanks to people maining one clan/faction. I knew a lot of guys who were serious into the kotei scene who wouldn't even bother buying packs, just the cards they needed online.

a bunch of the old school l5r players i know that tried the new game refused to play any other clan and took offense to the concept

because they are fuckin weird

PaybackJack
May 21, 2003

You'll hit your head and say: 'Boy, how stupid could I have been. A moron could've figured this out. I must be a real dimwit. A pathetic nimnal. A wretched idiotic excuse for a human being for not having figured these simple puzzles out in the first place...As usual, you've been a real pantload!

Deviant posted:

a bunch of the old school l5r players i know that tried the new game refused to play any other clan and took offense to the concept

because they are fuckin weird

Clan loyalty was always the greatest strength and weakness of L5R. Everyone was heavily invested in their clan story and theme, but yeah if you came from a Magic background and wanted to play different clans all the time you were a weirdo. You also, as mentioned, had to get stuff online because some cards that went in every deck nobody would trade, or if you were playing the same clan as someone else you'd be fighting that person to get your clan rares.

I always describe the early-mid 2000s L5R scene akin to a women's shelter; it's a group of people who have escaped an abusive relationship with Magic the Gathering and now look for warning signs that their current game or players may be Magic. These include overly competitive play, playing decks outside whatever clan you told them you main, and playing Crane.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
I don’t describe card games like women’s shelters, I’m different though

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

L5R was a fantastic game in those early-mid 2000s years. I came across it in the late 90s at the local card shop around when Time of the Void was new, and it was a really fun multiplayer game to participate in with the shop crowd but it took me a few years to really get into it myself (after quitting MTG and the Decipher Star Wars game). I had a deck of every clan (except rats) because I wanted All The Cards, but my favourite was Crane because I loved the dueling mechanic along with the idea of one badass chopping down a whole army by himself (Doji Hoturi XP2 never forget) and I also loved the Imperial Favour and the concept of using politics to do battle.

I hosted big weekend sessions of it for years and I can still remember my crew. The highly skilled min-maxer who played Ninja (or Scorpion) and locked down the whole table until everyone inevitably got sick of his poo poo and ganged up on him. The Lion player who built a big army every game and had it chipped away every time by dirty tricks. The Crab player who always played Crab no matter what (and always packed Kharmic Strike because he knew the table well). The other Crane guy who, unfortunately for him, didn't own To Do What We Must, and then me playing some kind of honor rocket and having everyone gang up on me near the end of every game.

L5R had some really unique mechanics and to this day I haven't played a multiplayer card game that was as much fun. The dueling, the dual decks, the provinces, the multiple versions of the unique personalities. Playing a super expensive character with huge stats (or your Clan Champion) felt incredibly satisfying, like you just scored a huge power spike. That version of Yoritomo that let you actually gain a province... so many memories.

I quit it a couple of times and picked it back up in a different town where nobody really did those sprawling multiplayer games, and the game was still fun in a more competitive environment, but I ended up drifting away from it again a couple of years before they sold it to FFG. I had high hopes for the LCG version but it just didn't feel like L5R and I could never get over the way all of your personalities were temporary. They really nailed the art, though.

PaybackJack
May 21, 2003

You'll hit your head and say: 'Boy, how stupid could I have been. A moron could've figured this out. I must be a real dimwit. A pathetic nimnal. A wretched idiotic excuse for a human being for not having figured these simple puzzles out in the first place...As usual, you've been a real pantload!

Golden Bee posted:

I don’t describe card games like women’s shelters, I’m different though

People react to abuse similarly regardless of the source of that abuse; apologies for making a hyperbolic comparison to a very serious issue in making that point.

Kalko posted:

I quit it a couple of times and picked it back up in a different town where nobody really did those sprawling multiplayer games, and the game was still fun in a more competitive environment, but I ended up drifting away from it again a couple of years before they sold it to FFG. I had high hopes for the LCG version but it just didn't feel like L5R and I could never get over the way all of your personalities were temporary. They really nailed the art, though.

This was a pretty interesting idea but it took them a while to get a balance of going wide and tall. The concept itself was almost as despised as the pod system from Star Wars though. It's interesting that for all the hate Magic gets, games that try to deviate from the basic concepts of Magic, get even more hate. Same goes for D&D as well; people don't want to play D&D but you introduce a system that uses non-D20 dice or different stat/skill systems, and players hate that. One of the things that people tried to sell me on with FAB was that it was "like Magic" and maybe that's part of the reason it's doing well is because it doesn't deviate too much from how Magic plays. I remember not being able to get a couple friends into L5R because they didn't like the two deck system.

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

I dunno, L5R personalities always felt pretty distinct from MTG creatures in a lot of ways, like they were unique individuals (Legends don't really compare) and not really expendable since removal was much less abundant in L5R. In MTG it's a fundamental aspect of the game that creatures are easy to remove, so the player is never really expected to form an attachment to them.

Taking away their implicit permanence did more to damage the 'feel' of the CCG than any other aspect, I thought, but the other thing I remember about it is that it took an enormously long time to play and most of the actions you took didn't feel particularly meaningful, with the battles especially feeling lackluster. But maybe it improved later on? I never went back to it after bouncing off it hard at release.

Thirsty Dog
May 31, 2007

That was the biggest problem for me with the LCG; it took absolutely forever to play and the general nature of conflicts with the back and forth of playing cards just made everything feel like a slog.

CitizenKeen
Nov 13, 2003

easygoing pedant
IIRC, it was SUSD’s Quinns who said that the LCG version was a really good game, it just wasn’t fun.

PaybackJack
May 21, 2003

You'll hit your head and say: 'Boy, how stupid could I have been. A moron could've figured this out. I must be a real dimwit. A pathetic nimnal. A wretched idiotic excuse for a human being for not having figured these simple puzzles out in the first place...As usual, you've been a real pantload!
I played the LCG from start to finish and I'd say it was on the higher end of difficulty because learning where you went wrong was often not as clear as in other games. old5R in particular had a very bad snowballing/standoff problem, where as L5RLCG was a lot more small gains pushing you over the victory line(at least in the highest levels). Games were pretty slow but honestly coming from Netrunner and Old5R I didn't really feel that was a problem. Compared to a lot of other games, yeah it could be quite slow particularly in the beginning as you were really learning how to read the board.

Kalko posted:

I dunno, L5R personalities always felt pretty distinct from MTG creatures in a lot of ways, like they were unique individuals (Legends don't really compare) and not really expendable since removal was much less abundant in L5R. In MTG it's a fundamental aspect of the game that creatures are easy to remove, so the player is never really expected to form an attachment to them.

Taking away their implicit permanence did more to damage the 'feel' of the CCG than any other aspect, I thought, but the other thing I remember about it is that it took an enormously long time to play and most of the actions you took didn't feel particularly meaningful, with the battles especially feeling lackluster. But maybe it improved later on? I never went back to it after bouncing off it hard at release.

Not sure I can agree on that first point. Battles were always lethal for one side, Dragon/Crane/Phoenix/Scorpion dueling was almost always lethal, there was usually some limited phase kill with Hired Killer or Kolat Assassin, then there was Mantis/Phoenix/Unicorn unleashing lethal spells and ranged attacks. It's funny because in the old game you had to track which people were killed/discarded and in the new game nobody ever actually died, so you get rid of an opponent's unique and they could reappear the next turn.

I think the whole mechanic was "too smart" for it's own good though, not to say that Old5R players were dumb but the depth to which I found most of them engaged with the game at a tactical level was quite low. There were plenty of decks that required complexity and skill but they were spread across the clans. In L5RLCG the game itself was already at a mid-tier complexity Scorpion deck in the old game. The card The Way of the Crab is the best example of this. A clan that has literally been about "play big dude and smash" suddenly became very concerned with it's small dudes and manipulating the board state into being able to trade your cheap guy for their expensive one. The old game, the rules were sort of a loose frame work for allowing your cards to do things to make it interesting, and the LCG flipped this by making the game mechanics themselves more important than most of the cards. To put it another way, in old5R you played the cards, in the LCG you played the mechanics. If you had a deck of cards that were all blank text boxes, you could still have an interesting game of L5RLCG, and that can't be said of Magic or old5R.

I appreciate the attempt of the L5RLCG but it should definitely be a valuable lesson in the history of card games.

HidaO-Win
Jun 5, 2013

"And I did it, because I was a man who had exhausted reason and thus turned to magicks"
OldL5R and NuL5R are an interesting contrast

OldL5R was very much about army building. The fun of assembling an every growing giant board of dudes, with their own items, followers and spells. On of the main skills in L5R was in deploying, maneuvering and winning battles with those armies without getting outmaneuvered. I played Crab, I was very good at that part of the game by necessity and its an obscure bit of skill to have, but it makes combat stuff in must other CCGs pretty simple in comparison. The rest of the game was close enough to other CCGs to be equivalent skills, but mastery of battles was a bit different.

NuL5R originally was a lot less like L5R apparently, got a redesign to make it more familiar. Shares some DNA with the original in battles, but the army composition and lack of simultaneous battles made it different in play. NuL5R also had a lot of euro boardgame flourishes which made it a game with a lot more going on during the turns. It was significantly more cognitive load to play initially as you are juggling a lot of stuff. Also, the rules were great, the cards, particularly when they basically made an intern lead designer were not. They also ballsed up the easiest layup in CCGs of getting to do the Day of Thunder again as a giant prestige event.

Basically the cool bit of OldL5R was the battles, the control and army building and NuL5R had more back and forth gameplay, where you won more gradually.

long-ass nips Diane
Dec 13, 2010

Breathe.

CitizenKeen posted:

IIRC, it was SUSD’s Quinns who said that the LCG version was a really good game, it just wasn’t fun.

This is how I felt about it. I stuck out through a couple of cycles because it was pretty conceptually interesting but most people just drifted off and I didn't feel like the game was going to get much better so I bailed too.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
AGoT 2.0 had a similar issue. Last game board states in a 2p match would seemingly have more cards on the table than big multiplayer commander games of MtG. Add to that the mental load of planning for attacking and defending three different types of battles and it was one of the most overwhelming games I've experienced. We still have all the big boxes and a good bit of the chapter packs and enjoy it casually, but the game was too complicated for its own good despite being really well designed.

The other issue with Lot5R LCG was that you never really felt like you got your engine or deck up and running thanks to the decay mechanic. You never felt like you were winning or doing well, just losing less. I only played 3 or 4 times in the first cycle, so maybe that changed but the issues felt fundamental enough that I doubt it. The redesigned causal rule set did seemingly fix a lot of that and looked really good, but I never grabbed some cards to try it.

JazzFlight
Apr 29, 2006

Oooooooooooh!

Bottom Liner posted:

AGoT 2.0 had a similar issue. Last game board states in a 2p match would seemingly have more cards on the table than big multiplayer commander games of MtG. Add to that the mental load of planning for attacking and defending three different types of battles and it was one of the most overwhelming games I've experienced. We still have all the big boxes and a good bit of the chapter packs and enjoy it casually, but the game was too complicated for its own good despite being really well designed.

The other issue with Lot5R LCG was that you never really felt like you got your engine or deck up and running thanks to the decay mechanic. You never felt like you were winning or doing well, just losing less. I only played 3 or 4 times in the first cycle, so maybe that changed but the issues felt fundamental enough that I doubt it. The redesigned causal rule set did seemingly fix a lot of that and looked really good, but I never grabbed some cards to try it.
I only played the tutorial game of AGoT 2.0 with the sample Stark vs. Lannister small decks and was struggling a bit to understand the strategy of when to attack or hold back characters for defense each turn. I felt like I needed someone pointing out why I should be doing the things I was doing. I ended up buying the core set plus the pre-built house decks so that I could just have a simple finished "board game" instead of having to deckbuild.

PaybackJack
May 21, 2003

You'll hit your head and say: 'Boy, how stupid could I have been. A moron could've figured this out. I must be a real dimwit. A pathetic nimnal. A wretched idiotic excuse for a human being for not having figured these simple puzzles out in the first place...As usual, you've been a real pantload!

Bottom Liner posted:

The other issue with Lot5R LCG was that you never really felt like you got your engine or deck up and running thanks to the decay mechanic. You never felt like you were winning or doing well, just losing less. I only played 3 or 4 times in the first cycle, so maybe that changed but the issues felt fundamental enough that I doubt it. The redesigned causal rule set did seemingly fix a lot of that and looked really good, but I never grabbed some cards to try it.

There were definitely some decks that had "engines" but overall I think the design actively tried to stay away from looping engines in favor of one shot big interactions. Even the concept of approaching the game wanting to build an engine is really the opposite of what the game/designers wanted you to do.

The mechanic of cards losing fate was that competitively was more or less solved/learned by the second cycle I'd say. The "real" problem of the game was that honor was never something that casual players understood and would just ignore mostly because that's kind of how it worked in the old game. Back in Old5R either you were going to win or lose due to your opponent manipulating honor and if you were a military deck you just tried to rush out the victory before that happened; in L5RLCG they actively tried to give military players more ways to interact with honor but this interaction was really lost on the casual community who looked at the dial and just saw a thing to draw 5 cards every turn, then would ignore the air ring right up to the turn when they'd actually lose from honor loss.


Bottom Liner posted:

AGoT 2.0 had a similar issue. Last game board states in a 2p match would seemingly have more cards on the table than big multiplayer commander games of MtG. Add to that the mental load of planning for attacking and defending three different types of battles and it was one of the most overwhelming games I've experienced. We still have all the big boxes and a good bit of the chapter packs and enjoy it casually, but the game was too complicated for its own good despite being really well designed.

AGoT 2.0 multiplayer games were tremendous fun. Well, they were as long as your group agreed not to run Valar Morgulis and Wildfire Assault, then the games could actually end at a reasonable hour.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

JazzFlight posted:

I only played the tutorial game of AGoT 2.0 with the sample Stark vs. Lannister small decks and was struggling a bit to understand the strategy of when to attack or hold back characters for defense each turn. I felt like I needed someone pointing out why I should be doing the things I was doing. I ended up buying the core set plus the pre-built house decks so that I could just have a simple finished "board game" instead of having to deckbuild.

Yeah the Rock Paper Scissors like challenges of intrigue/power/military combined with the potential need of both attacking and defending for all three each round is a huge hurdle to get into even basic strategy with the game. The different houses and combos would stack all kinds of bonuses and abilities onto those which further complicated the combat math every turn but it was really the rest of the game that got complicated beyond belief. The power creep in later cards made for some truly degenerate decks that something like Netrunner could only dream of.

With the core set (+ starters) it will be a pretty solid board game experience and arguably a better experience for 90% of players.

I still find it hilarious that it's my wife's favorite game given that she mostly prefers lightweight and party games because it's almost too much mental strain for me to play even casually. I also made thee mistake of making her a pretty strong dragon deck that I literally can't beat but she doesn't want to give it up :lol:

The plot deck is one of the best card game designs I've ever seen though. Determining the basis of your economy, hand size, what you win from battles, and special round powers all in one set of 7 cards was really great, and the deck building of those 7 cards and how you used them was almost more important than your real deck. Almost everyone ran a board wipe and even if you were winning when the game went to round 7, welp, you gotta wipe your own position off the board!

Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Aug 16, 2022

CitizenKeen
Nov 13, 2003

easygoing pedant

Bottom Liner posted:

The plot deck is one of the best card game designs I've ever seen though. Determining the basis of your economy, hand size, what you win from battles, and special round powers all in one set of 7 cards was really great, and the deck building of those 7 cards and how you used them was almost more important than your real deck. Almost everyone ran a board wipe and even if you were winning when the game went to round 7, welp, you gotta wipe your own position off the board!

:emptyquote:

PaybackJack
May 21, 2003

You'll hit your head and say: 'Boy, how stupid could I have been. A moron could've figured this out. I must be a real dimwit. A pathetic nimnal. A wretched idiotic excuse for a human being for not having figured these simple puzzles out in the first place...As usual, you've been a real pantload!
Agreed on the plot deck. It reminded me of the old WWE Raw Deal game, which also had a selection of "prematch cards", but with a much more refined/important focus on what it meant for the game. I don't know if it was strictly influenced by that game but when I first started playing that was one of the things that came to mind.

PaybackJack
May 21, 2003

You'll hit your head and say: 'Boy, how stupid could I have been. A moron could've figured this out. I must be a real dimwit. A pathetic nimnal. A wretched idiotic excuse for a human being for not having figured these simple puzzles out in the first place...As usual, you've been a real pantload!
FFG has previewed the Marvel Champions next hero, Wolverine.

He looks cool. Nothing broken but seems like he's going to be fun to play. Maybe the best thwart hero card we've seen in a while though.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
High risk high reward. Precision attack can even-out a lot of aggression heroes who don’t have the ability to do big overkill.

The Black Stones
May 7, 2007

I POSTED WHAT NOW!?
Wolverine looks pretty solid. I think he leans a little on the “probably a bit OP” side but that’s fine because if they screwed up Wolverine like they did Hulk heads would roll. Being able to just plop down aggression events at the cost of damage will feel really good and if you can keep allies out to take hits for yourself you can probably push some great damage.

Overall the mutant cycle right now I think might be looking like one of their best cycles. I think the Web-Warrior cycle could have been exceptional as well if they didn’t get knee-capped with only defence and Justice.

DLC Inc
Jun 1, 2011

Wolverine looks loving sick. Most of the cards I'd want to play for free are around 2 cost anyway and then just getting that health back next turn is awesome, not to mention just how high-damage his cards are. I suppose you could really gently caress yourself badly if you take 3 or 4 damage and then have a bad turn when the villain activates, but for the most part he's going to be basically a less luck-based Star Lord and with more control about when and how you let it rip.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

The Black Stones posted:

Wolverine looks pretty solid. I think he leans a little on the “probably a bit OP” side but that’s fine because if they screwed up Wolverine like they did Hulk heads would roll. Being able to just plop down aggression events at the cost of damage will feel really good and if you can keep allies out to take hits for yourself you can probably push some great damage.

Overall the mutant cycle right now I think might be looking like one of their best cycles. I think the Web-Warrior cycle could have been exceptional as well if they didn’t get knee-capped with only defence and Justice.

wait, what's considered wrong with Hulk? He's a massive beat stick that does exactly what you'd expect.

And what do you mean by knee-capped with defense/justice? A lot of the strongest web-decks are leadership based from my experience.

Losem
Jun 17, 2003
Slightly Angry Sheep
Personally I don't think anything is wrong with him, but the community is super down on him. Low hand size in both alter ego/hero, forced discard in hero form, expensive hero cards, one of if not the toughest nemesis. It also doesn't help that they basically nerfed him last minute without really play testing him.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
Yeah, I view him as almost glass canon-like in his one trick style. He's just all gas all the time and I've seen some nasty turns from him. Probably one of the weaker solo handed, but absolutely smashes at 2+.

CitizenKeen
Nov 13, 2003

easygoing pedant
A lot of people play 1-2 handed and evaluate heroes almost exclusively on that axis.

Failboattootoot
Feb 6, 2011

Enough of this nonsense. You are an important mayor and this absurd contraption has wasted enough of your time.

Bottom Liner posted:

wait, what's considered wrong with Hulk? He's a massive beat stick that does exactly what you'd expect.

He sucks at it. Like yeah, his events do great damage for the price. Too bad he has no ramp to actually play these expensive events, just 2 limitless strength. Sure, if you draw limitless strength, hulk smash, and crushing blow as 3 of your piddly 4 cards you will get to feel like a god that turn, but every other turn you probably aren't doing much. And even that isn't all that impressive, I've had iron man turns kick out more damage than that combo.

He's unique in that he has nothing of value to really be working towards so he kinda just starts the game throwing big swings around. Unlike everyone else who pretty much just spends the first 8ish turns jerking off getting permanents out while triaging threats then going hard on events the 2nd time through their deck. But this just means that your partner better be a god of thwarting or else you're going to lose.

In was, he's just like she-hulk If you draw an avengers mansion in your opening hand you will probably have a fine game. If you don't you're not going to amount to much without some lucky draws.

Also special shout out to bruce banner who is in an absolute sense tony stark but inexplicably worse for no apparent reason.

The Black Stones
May 7, 2007

I POSTED WHAT NOW!?

Bottom Liner posted:

wait, what's considered wrong with Hulk? He's a massive beat stick that does exactly what you'd expect.

And what do you mean by knee-capped with defense/justice? A lot of the strongest web-decks are leadership based from my experience.

Because Hulk sucks rear end? You can’t plan anything because you’re constantly tossing your hand so being able to get a good damage turn going relies way more on luck. Sure you can flip a lot but then you’re relying on your other partners to basically pull your weight in taking on the extra threat. Because Hulk’s biggest attacks rely on him exhausting for an attack he’ll be functionally useless unless you can play an attack event first but whoops you’re the Hulk and you have a turd hand size. Can the Hulk function and do good against a villain? Yes, it’s not impossible. Are you going to have a better and easier time with literally any other hero? Yes.

Yes, you can create a good Web Warrior deck in a different aspect but you’re handicapping yourself with a lot of the cards they added that synergize with the Web Warrior trait. Want to run Web of Life and Destiny to get extra card draw? Please only play defence or Justice. You can run some basics sure, but it works a lot better if you run an aspect where you can load up. I’m not saying you can’t do it, I run a Spider-Ham leadership that works incredibly well, but that Team building exercise I run would be a million times better if I had a bit more web warriors I could use it with.

Like, I’m not saying “you absolutely can’t run these decks as it’s strictly sub optimal.” That’s clearly not the case but if I want to play with the full potential of the web warrior trait, defence or Justice is the best aspect for it and the trait is definitely hurt playing something else. Also, leadership in general is just plain strong because allies are strong.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
Web-warrior leadership is a lot of fun with Spider-Man*. Clarity of purpose and Aunt May are made for each other. Combine with his alter ego resource, your only real problem is THW. You are near invulnerable and draw cards for your team like a maniac.

*Like everyone, I houserule that he can swap Avenger for web warrior at the start of a game.

PaybackJack
May 21, 2003

You'll hit your head and say: 'Boy, how stupid could I have been. A moron could've figured this out. I must be a real dimwit. A pathetic nimnal. A wretched idiotic excuse for a human being for not having figured these simple puzzles out in the first place...As usual, you've been a real pantload!
So apparently if you mulligan into Wolverine's Claws you can't play them because they hosed up the wording on the setup and didn't include "hand", just "deck and discard pile".
Lol, whoops!

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
They should’ve just been set up permanent.

Thirsty Dog
May 31, 2007

PaybackJack posted:

in L5RLCG they actively tried to give military players more ways to interact with honor but this interaction was really lost on the casual community who looked at the dial and just saw a thing to draw 5 cards every turn, then would ignore the air ring right up to the turn when they'd actually lose from honor loss.

Hmm, my memory of this is different - casual players wanted to interact with the dial, but it was the hardcore competitive ones who made it clear that 5 cards every turn was the best choice in 90% of cases. Am I just misremembering?

All the AGoT2 talk makes me want to get those premade decks together...

PaybackJack
May 21, 2003

You'll hit your head and say: 'Boy, how stupid could I have been. A moron could've figured this out. I must be a real dimwit. A pathetic nimnal. A wretched idiotic excuse for a human being for not having figured these simple puzzles out in the first place...As usual, you've been a real pantload!

Thirsty Dog posted:

Hmm, my memory of this is different - casual players wanted to interact with the dial, but it was the hardcore competitive ones who made it clear that 5 cards every turn was the best choice in 90% of cases. Am I just misremembering?

Kind of. Scorpion, although not always *winning* tournaments was a constant presence and threatening dishonor. Phoenix, Crab, and Crane, could also do dishonor/honor. Bidding 5 even against Lion near the end of the cycle of the game was also very risky. If you were playing a military deck you *wanted* to bid 5 every turn and against a lot of clans could.

Casual players usually build decks and just try to implement their strategy and don't play around whatever their opponents are doing, meaning that honor was usually something that was completely disregarded by casuals and they'd get utterly run over. Either because they did bid 5 and lost 4 honor, or because they'd try to punish an opponent's 5 bid when their deck wasn't built around dishonor or switching (which only really Scorpion could do). If both players were playing military there would be pretty much no reason not to bid 5 as your just be losing card advantage while extra honor was never useful. Because competitive players knew the decks in the meta they were much better equipped to know if someone could be threatening honor and also would actively contest the air/fire rings if they were; most casual players would just try to control the void/earth rings because those played into their strategy.

At the end of the day, the honor system was a lot bigger of a problem with mechanically and by how players interacted with it than the fate system on characters was. The fate system led to really interesting pathing decisions, while the honor system was very binary in terms of being very absurdly important or not important at all.

PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Aug 19, 2022

Thirsty Dog
May 31, 2007

PaybackJack posted:

Kind of. Scorpion, although not always *winning* tournaments was a constant presence and threatening dishonor. Phoenix, Crab, and Crane, could also do dishonor/honor. Bidding 5 even against Lion near the end of the cycle of the game was also very risky. If you were playing a military deck you *wanted* to bid 5 every turn and against a lot of clans could.

Casual players usually build decks and just try to implement their strategy and don't play around whatever their opponents are doing, meaning that honor was usually something that was completely disregarded by casuals and they'd get utterly run over. Either because they did bid 5 and lost 4 honor, or because they'd try to punish an opponent's 5 bid when their deck wasn't built around dishonor or switching (which only really Scorpion could do). If both players were playing military there would be pretty much no reason not to bid 5 as your just be losing card advantage while extra honor was never useful. Because competitive players knew the decks in the meta they were much better equipped to know if someone could be threatening honor and also would actively contest the air/fire rings if they were; most casual players would just try to control the void/earth rings because those played into their strategy.

At the end of the day, the honor system was a lot bigger of a problem with mechanically and by how players interacted with it than the fate system on characters was. The fate system led to really interesting pathing decisions, while the honor system was very binary in terms of being very absurdly important or not important at all.

Makes sense, thanks. And I think from a casual player perspective the problems mentioned earlier that it's a game of small incremental advantages a lot of the time & one where bad decisions usually only hurt you further down the line were part of why it felt like a slog to me. I've played a lot of games poorly as a newbie and taken a long time as a result but been enthused because of the decisions I'm making being interesting and impactful ones; L5R made it quite hard to recognise what the right decision was, even some time after you'd made it. The fate system was part of that, it was a very tricky thing to master without ingesting a lot of online learning.

Netrunner, Keyforge, Magic, Ashes - all games of varying complexity but all (IMO) much more open about telling you when a decision was a good or a bad one and making it clearer what your options truly are.

Thirsty Dog
May 31, 2007

Bottom Liner posted:

The other issue with Lot5R LCG was that you never really felt like you got your engine or deck up and running thanks to the decay mechanic. You never felt like you were winning or doing well, just losing less. I only played 3 or 4 times in the first cycle, so maybe that changed but the issues felt fundamental enough that I doubt it. The redesigned causal rule set did seemingly fix a lot of that and looked really good, but I never grabbed some cards to try it.

Wait, what was this?

The Black Stones
May 7, 2007

I POSTED WHAT NOW!?

PaybackJack posted:

So apparently if you mulligan into Wolverine's Claws you can't play them because they hosed up the wording on the setup and didn't include "hand", just "deck and discard pile".
Lol, whoops!

I saw that. Just put them into play regardless. It’s not like they haven’t messed up rules before.

PaybackJack
May 21, 2003

You'll hit your head and say: 'Boy, how stupid could I have been. A moron could've figured this out. I must be a real dimwit. A pathetic nimnal. A wretched idiotic excuse for a human being for not having figured these simple puzzles out in the first place...As usual, you've been a real pantload!

Thirsty Dog posted:

Wait, what was this?

They eventually adopted it officially as Skirmish mode. At least I think that's what they're talking about.

Thirsty Dog
May 31, 2007

PaybackJack posted:

They eventually adopted it officially as Skirmish mode. At least I think that's what they're talking about.

Neat. I might give that a go.

Radioactive Toy
Sep 14, 2005

Nothing has ever happened here, nothing.
For some reason tonight I all of a sudden wanted to play both the Star Wars LCG and Warhammer 40k: Conquest, both games I only owned the core sets for and sold many years ago.

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Carteret
Nov 10, 2012


Radioactive Toy posted:

For some reason tonight I all of a sudden wanted to play both the Star Wars LCG and Warhammer 40k: Conquest, both games I only owned the core sets for and sold many years ago.

Wonder what pressed that 2014 button in your brain.

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