Embracing the Modern Family
L5r has never done right by eternal formats. Legacy and War of Honor have degenerate decks that dominate so quickly it is rarely a game was played except by the person who won. Big Deck has the headache of constructing and managing two 100 card decks without running more than a single copy of any card. All of them suffer from l5r’s history of significantly changing the rules of the game.
Things worked out for Doji Tanaka, right?
The fact that Modern as a format exists at all is a testament to the players. There is a real desire for people to play in large expanded card pools. To be able to revisit old characters from the past, to test them with the rules of the present, and interact with strategies from the future.
WTF is Modern?
Modern is a constructed eternal format, or if you prefer, a legacy format. It allows players to play with their older cards in new and interesting ways. The larger the card pool, the more intriguing decks and interactions that are possible.
What are the rules?
The rules of Modern aren’t simple. No eternal format for l5r is going to be have that luxury. L5r rules are complex by default, and to make the older cards work in any meaningful way, the rules have to be warped, twisted, and amended. Some things must be added while others ignored.
Here is a *ahem* brief summary of Modern rules.
It is exactly the same as the Ivory ruleset, except not at all.
Never used any other legacy holding. Why? 3x Hired Killer in every deck.
Modern retains the Legacy holding rules from Samurai Edition. Will the Legacy holding rules switch to the Ivory Legacy ruleset when it rotates into legality? I have no idea, please don’t ask me.
The fun we had together with open seppuku.
The Emperor Edition era ability of open seppuku remains. It is a function that probably won’t come up much because turning your opponent’s dishonor effects into kill effects is rarely a good idea. The Blood Money rule (ignore honor requirements by paying two more gold over printed) is also around, but with the absence of built in clan reductions, it is going to be a hard rock to get stuck under if you drop your own honor. Thankfully, the ignore honor requirements if your opponent causes the loss is still here as part of the ruleset, so Blood Money-ing a guy is going to be a real corner case. I suspect there is a busted dishonor deck in Modern. There are probably a lot of busted decks, it is part of the charm of eternal formats.
There can be only one, yet somehow there were 5 movies, a tv show, and who knows what else.
Deck size is 50/50 and with the highlander stipulation, which means that you are only allowed a single copy of any card, regardless of its uniqueness or text (take that Bandit’s Sanctuary). Does this mean decks will feature a whole lot of unique personalities. It does. Uniques are often more potent and aggressively costed, factors that were previously balanced by their uniqueness. Though honestly, decks would be filled with loads of uniques even if the highlander rule wasn’t in place. People like impactful personalities.
The highlander stipulation is important for gameplay reasons. Without it, the speed and consistency of degenerate decks is overwhelming. It brings a bit more variance to the games themselves, which will be important for the format to last.
The 50/50 also serves as a maximum, though in a delightful display of dissonance, this can be overriden by card text.
Legal in Modern. Who will stop him?
Modern is an eternal format that isn’t actually all that eternal. It starts with the first Samurai Edition bugged cards (Khan’s Defiance) and carries through to the current set.
Was this a real card? Was it all some fever dream like Emperor’s Underhand pre-errata?
There are a couple of banned cards, mostly the Border Keeps and draft cards. As a rule, if you want to play a card in Modern, it has to have been legal for a constructed kotei at some point in the past. It is still a monster card pool, and while it lacks the most powerful cards ever, there are still some heavy hitters.
How to beat to Jesse; play this card, and wait….
Forgotten Legacy is legal after all.
What about costs versus targeting versus reactions versus interrupts?
Does this card do anything anymore? The End Phase no longer exists.
I don’t know, please don’t ask me. There are going to be some cards that don’t work the way you want them to, and a few interactions that do work and are improvements. It is a growing format. If a weird technical interaction creeps up, and it is problematic, it will get knocked down. That doesn’t me there isn’t value to hunting out the exploitable, but do so knowing that you aren’t ever going to get to pull a Paneki’s Mask. Modern isn’t an officially supported format. One day, perhaps, if there is enough player interest, but for now, AEG is stretched pretty thin on formats. 3 choices for a kotei is enough, even if it is only 2 in reality.
Can we get to the fun part now?
Knowing now how to play the game, it’s time to dive in and start thinking about building a deck. With such a large card pool, though, there is a strong disincentive to just pull up Crane personalities and start skimming. The time commitment to pour over all the available cards is daunting. As an added headache, the various search engines for l5r don’t have a Modern setting, prepare for a slog.
There are a few posted decklists that to crib from, but with only a few dozen people actually playing Modern, it is a little early to start thinking about netdecking, and worrying about metagames. Those things come in more solved and combed over formats. Modern is the exact opposite. There is a real freedom here. Permission is given to stick your head in the sand and just build the best Modern deck you can. Spoiler, it will probably turn out to be pretty terrible.
Surprising that Modern only has 2 legal Hida Kuons.
A little direction is called for to get started. Think about the faction or strategy you want to play. Is it something that has been around for a while? If it hasn’t. Then you are going to be in some trouble. Something like Crane dueling is going to be a safe pick. Crane have always been dueling, they’ve also always been good in every arc from Samurai onward. Similarly, Crab, Unicorn, and my beloved Spider have frequently fielded decks built around the biggest and baddest personalities. Those decks may be a little slow, but running mighty personalities is a good place to start.
Brandy, you’re a fine girl. What a good wife, you would be.
While predicting the best decks is a suckers game, there are some elements the top tier will likely contain. There will be some measure of consistency. Either it will be accomplished through redundancy, pulling a number of similar cards from across the various legal arcs; or it will happen by utilizing a suite of deck search/draw/manipulation effects. The best decks will incorporate new cards in a way that compliments (or are complimented by) the old. Something like Mantis scouts with Shika Sensei out of Seven’s Seas Port. There are a lot of Mantis scouts, so the sensei gives you a pseudo fifth province, and the recon insures you have above average force efficiency.
But my life, my lover, my lady, is the sea.
Why not Kalani’s Landing? That’s stronghold is insane, right? Especially with the possible rules technicality and how it interacts with Legacy holdings? Maybe. Attention must be paid to the environmental context in which a card preformed. In the totality of of the card pool how many Peace and Govern the Land type effects are there? I can think of Peace and Govern the land. If that’s it, if that’s the list, then the deck is going to need something else to make it work. How many Paid Off type gold cost strategies can get crammed into a deck as a single copy? Is Sudden Blockade a good card if you are only ever promised to play it once, and your odds of drawing it are dramatically reduced?
Of course, Kalani’s Landing was eventually banned as a stronghold, which is as clear an indication as any that it is a safe place to start for building a good deck. Attention should be paid to any card that was ever banned.
“Story reasons.”
Another good option? Unaligned personalities. Look for the Mokkus, Pokkus, Glukkus, and Shukkus of the world to shine in some Modern military decks. Onis and ronin operate in a similar sphere. Design to cost exactly what they cost, these kinds of personalities are paragons of value. Speaking of banned cards, Wrath of Kali-Ma lumbers back to the fold. Celestials, super events with super effects, will be a part of every deck.
Goes first, 5 gold with pooling, could be really good.
One of the easiest ways to approach a new format is to use templating. Looking at past successful decks from similar formats and reconstructing it. No personality honor decks have been a part of l5r from Dark Journey Home’s Ninja Stronghold, to Gold’s Kaiu Walls, to Emperor’s Journey’s End Keep Experienced.
How did those decks work? All the honor producing holdings and defense that a deck can muster. With 4 arcs of cards to pull from, a reasonable option can probably be assembled. Of course, rocket honor might be an actual construct to be worried about.
Or maybe with stronger options I can finally make that P’an Ku deck happen. What about Enlightenment?
7500+ cards. An unexplored format. An unknown metagame.
Christmas came early.
Modern has brought spark back into once bygone players and once worthless cards. It is definitely something to try!
As you’ve mentioned before, I think AEG needs to be careful supporting too many formats at once. To make any legacy format playable (rules) and balanced is going to take a massive amount of dedication and resources.
Except that AEG has done nothing to make legacy formats playable. All legacy decisions are made by third parties (the Legacy Council and Shiro Big Deck). I think part of the long-term viability of Legend of the Five Rings is to implement an official legacy/eternal format so people stop feeling like their cards are worthless after a couple of years.
Maybe I should have said “sanction” instead of support. Regardless it is still someone’s responsibility to rewrite cards, manage an a new comprehensive rules set, issue errata / bans, etc. It’s also my opinion that these legacy formats promote a schism in the playerbase between card hording veterans and others. I think digital tournaments (such as the Modern Untap) are much better medium for playing these formats than level events where proxy limits are enforced. Your basically telling a large chunk of the playerbase that if you weren’t around during Samurai / Celestial, your S.o.L. As much as the Philly guys have tried of the years to get me interested in Big Deck, I will never feel part of that “group.”
That’s why Tony and I regularly bring our old cards to the store and give them to anyone interested. Tony actually made clan-based ‘gift packages’ for people in Philly and Pittsburgh once the Modern format came along.
That said, those tournaments also allow other players, who maybe haven’t gotten into Ivory for financial or design reasons, to come and play in the tournaments. And you don’t have to go back very far in the card pool to get playable decks – Modern is easily doable with EE + IvE, and Big Deck with CE + EE + IvE. I understand why someone who started in Ivory wouldn’t be too happy about a Big Deck tournament (which is why one of our level events is Arc), but even so, most of us have decks/cards to lend if someone really wants to get their game on.
If not for Big Deck and Modern, L5R would basically be dead at our store right now. I’m happy to have games to play, whatever the format.
I agree with you for the most part, but there are a lot of bombs from older sets – wanderers, events, a smattering of lotus-era actions – that make big deck pretty miserable if you don’t have access to the full pool. The fact that people are chill about proxies, though, makes all the card acquisition arguments pretty moot (as long as they are good full-color proxies – remember: the art is the most important part of the card!).
That’s a fundamental problem with these highlander formats, though. In order to “balance” degenerate decks by making them less consistent, they make the game feel really bomb-y. Wanders Revealed on 1, hit border keep. This is fun!
I can only speak for Modern, but as far as the highlander style goes, it must be this way. I tried working it out without the highlander variance, didn’t work. Then I tried it as 2X max and that didn’t work either.
But the fun thing about Modern is that there are many different cards that have nearly the same abilities in order for the decks to still be consistent, but not over-the-top powerful. For instance, you can’t make a deck completely out of limited kill, but there is enough printed in the legality to have consistency in it. Can you imagine a deck with 3X Udo, 3X Fatina, 3X Jinsei in it? That is totally bonkers! But there is enough support for that theme with just being a one of in each deck. The 50/50 deck size as opposed to the 100/100 deck size of Bigdeck is what makes the decks more consistent. There have been many games where it looked like I was gonna get stomped only to have things work out and come from behind and snatch a win. And vice versa.
Honor is strong in Modern. Expect to see good honor decks and meta accordingly. There is more than enough different forms of honor meta to run and if you include the meta, you should be in good shape.
As far as new players feeling ‘left out’ in Modern, I think Palmer hit it. You can play pretty good decks with just EE and IE cards. 20% of your deck can be proxies to get the harder to get cards. And there are singles dealers that sell old L5R cards for cheap. The good thing with the Highlander style is that you don’t need to purchase full playsets of those cards. Well, I suppose that 1 card is a playset in Modern, but you get my point. 😉
I may bug Brook about getting a Modern setting on Oracle, but for the meantime, it isn’t too hard to filter. As long as you know what you want your deck to do. Just search keywords, text, or whatever and start with SE legality and proceed to CE, EE, and IE. It isn’t as bad or hard as you think.
Anyway, I am enjoying playing Modern. It really is a fun format and I hope people give it a try before outright dismissing it. I’ve had a few people dismiss it before trying it and it took some heavy convincing until they decided to give it a try. But they did and they love it.
Enjoy!
I think Legacy is slightly different from the rest of the formats AEG is pushing right now.
Legacy formats are a sort of safety valve for when players are burnt out on the current format. The problem with Strict/Arc/Extended is that they’re all playing from the same very small card pool. What’s good in strict is basically what’s good in Arc, and once CE rotates out, the same will more or less be true for Extended. There will be some slight variations (mostly around power cards), but mostly there won’t be a lot of variety.
At the end of the day L5R doesn’t offer an enormous amount of variety from arc to arc as far as what deck we all play goes, but letting people relive their favorites keeps their interest during the quote-unquote bad times.
Humorously enough, the only game I ever lost with Razor’s Edge Dojo (and I’m a big part of why it got banned) involved resolving Wanderers Revealed t1 against a Scorpion player. He then proceeded to flip Corrupt Geisha House, Merchant Caravan and Disreputable House as his first three cards. FML.
My only real problem with legacy is the banning of the Crab Stronghold Yasuki Palaces XP. It grates that this card is banned while Kalani’s Landing gets to see play.