The single most environmentally impactful card from Twenty Festivals was one of, if not the, first to be spoiled. It was months ago, at the world championships. It received little fanfare. In part because it is hard to get excited over a single card from a set that at the time was still half a year away. Mostly, though, it is because holdings remain the least exciting part of l5r. It is a game about personalities, and the narratives they drive. Holdings are boring. Even when they do interesting or powerful things, which is rare. Unheard of in most arcs. Some of the coolest holdings of the last decade were cards like Charter of the Legion of Two Thousand and Recruitment Officer. They made personalities!

Yet development and production and efficiency and value lie at the heart of l5r as we know it today. Holdings are important. Critically so. Today we look at the card that will define Ivory and Twenty Festivals and whatever it is we are playing after that.

Legacy holdings came on the scene officially in Samurai Edition, but they have antecedents as far back as Gold Edition. It makes me feel old to say as far back, but Gold was 2001. That was a long time ago. Bryan Reese was just some guy who won an above average number of tournaments. Case Kiyonaga had yet to be declared his yojimbo and future best player in waiting. Gold Edition was a heady time to be an l5r player. Looking back the game seems barely recognizable. Koteis and kotei season started during Gold. The format featured old school all-stars like Kolat Master, Torrential Rain and Deadly Ground competing for space in decks with incredibly powerful actions like To Do What We Must and Iaijutsu Duel. Despite (or perhaps because of) all the fate side chicanery of the olden days the RallyCrys, CounterAttacks, and Iaijutsu Challenges, when you view the personalities through the prism of today, they are overwhelmingly horrible. Akodo Ijiasu sees fringe play in Ivory today. In Gold Edition he was a staple for the entirety of the arc. The best non-unique Crane personality was probably Doji Kurihito basic. While unique personalities had the ability to take over games the moment they entered play, they had to be incredibly powerful because the only way to incentivize the risk associated with their cost was to make them haymakers.

Pre-Gold, in the bronze age of Legend of the Five Rings, the standard game involved purchasing a personality on turn one. Design knew they didn’t want l5r to be a game that only featured personalities with a gold cost 6 or less. There is only so much enjoyment to be had there, and so a conscious effort was made to limit each faction’s available boxables.  Jeff Alexander and Dave Williams and company (actually, there was no “and company” yet, just Dave/Jeff more or less) wanted to know if there was a version of l5r in which players reached for a card like Doji Kuwawan and it was good idea to do so.

The answer turned out to be sort of and not really. In addition to that old efficiency chestnut there was a serious acknowledged issue that prevented players from embracing personalities with costs that exceed their starting stronghold’s gold production. A specter that haunts and ruins l5r games still today. Gold screw.

There was no cycle, no search, no Border Keep, no anything. You started the game, flipped your first four provinces (3 if you played Rating, – Loophole Man) and hoped. With the omnipresent fear of no gold on turn one, the importance of cheap personalities was magnified an unquantifiable amount. People played the inferior The Iron Fortress of the Daidoji just to get access to the original Hachi at below starting honor. In most cases not having a turn one holding was a death sentence. The power you could generate from your fate hand was such that it could rarely allow you to overcome a zero gold start. If you didn’t have turn one gold, or a turn one personality. The game was over. So came Gifts and Favors. Not the holding we deserved, but the holding we needed.

Of course its revelatory nature wasn’t appreciated. How could it have been? As a holding it was pretty terrible. 2 cost for 2 gold is acceptable, but it isn’t as good as 2 cost for 3 gold (every clan holding) or 0 cost for 2/3 gold (corrupt holdings). It was widely received as a ‘toss one in just in case’ card and move on with your life. Getting just a 2 production holding on turn one was so underwhelming. It was settling and in cases like ‘corn and Crane where an ideal turn one involved buying a Silk Works, it struck some top players as not even being worth the dynasty slot. Better to just run another Hiruma Dojo or Jade Works or whatever. Gifts didn’t feel quite as bad on turn as no gold but it didn’t feel good either.

The idea of a holding on turn one followed by two holdings on turn two? Not something on most players radar. The pace of the format was faster than that. Thanks to potential situations like: Horde player goes Take the Initiative, buy Voitagi on turn one with some free gold, and attack on turn two. Province Strengths were lower, Voitagi and Zombie Troops could get it done, with a Charge! any province was crushed. It wasn’t until the tyranny of corrupt gold ended, and personality design started to ramp up in Diamond that the two turns of gold became routine.

Which isn’t to say that Gifts didn’t have any impact when it first hit the scene. It did. It allowed people to reduce or eliminate holdings.  At first only a few canny players experimented with just G&F builds, but in time, it became a common occurrence to see events/regions on one, grab Gifts, and flush to set up for your ideal turn two, which was something like a boxable and your clan holding,  Kan’ok’ticheck and more rats (multiple Kn’ok’tichecks…) or something like Hida Tenshu and a free holding. The value of less holdings in a deck and the explosive starts created through the costless nature of events (themselves near the height of their power) wasn’t fully conceptualized and embraced by players and design for some time.

Diamond, and Lotus continued to work with Gifts and Favors. The changes in card pool and format design made it both more common and less impactful. The game was now fundamentally constructed around the idea of gold(Gifts) on one, gold on two, guys on three. Which was boring and restrictive in its own way.

So Samurai gave us Legacy holdings which was a little more fun because the holdings could do things, but still the first few turns of the game were dull. So we moved onto Border Keep, and the laws of unintended consequences reared its ugly head. So away they went.

I’ve now spent over a 1000 words talking about cards and formats from editions past. In a post that is suppose to be part of a review of 20Festivals. It is, but the history here is essential. The lessons of the past highlight the fact that Forgotten Legacy is an insanely important card. It is easily the most environmentally stimulating card in 20Festivals, and it is better than any legacy holding that has come before. Fully unlocking its potential is going to be the first big test for players preparing for the 20Festivals kotei season and beyond.

Forgotten Legacy makes 3 gold. No other legacy holding has ever done that (Kyuden Kyotei and Supply Smugglers – Loophole man strikes again!) and it makes all the difference in the world. Lion get to build around first turn Legacy, two 3 produces on turn two (including another Legacy if they must) and whatever the heck they want on turn three.

High gold cost holdings are now a consistent viable option. Weapon Artist is no longer relegated to draft only status. School of Wizardry decks can always afford their Hogwarts when they see it in. Platinum Mine can be ran in tandem with Secluded Outpost. With the right number of one gold cost holdings, there may be even be room for a few 6 gold cost holdings that only make 5. Say for instance, Jesse’s beloved Merchant Atoll.

The Elephant in the room of course, is how Forgotten Legacy interacts with gold pooling. Now every Brilliant Cascade Inn/Questionable Market/Temple of Destiny also functions as a Jade Pearl Inn. The loss of a fate card matters, but nothing is as important as good gold. Good gold and the quest for excellent gold is what will cause players to experiment with 3x Building Contract and 3x Coastal Lane. Gold matters. Invest in gold. Like Glenn Beck tells you to. That used to mean bowing your stronghold and only getting 2 gold out of the deal, now with Deep Harbor/Lane of Immorality/Toil of Zokujin plus Forgotten Legacy you bow your box and get 5 gold. I wouldn’t be surprised if gold schemes featuring 14x 1 gold cost holdings and 2x Forgotten Legacy start becoming the industry standard.

The holding minimum on Forgotten Legacy is there to help hedge against the unanticipated fallout witnessed from the gold fixers of days gone by. Loophole man made an interesting observation. It demands 16 holdings. Not 16 gold producing holdings. Not 16 holdings with a gold cost. The semantic difference doesn’t mean much right now unless you are just chomping at the bit for an excuse to play Tower of Vigilance alongside Tunnel Network. Still, we are just coming off a format filled with General’s Hatamoto, and I spent many a night trying to bust Hidden Weapons open, its a notable consideration.

A common question in l5r is: “is it worth it”? Is it worth playing this card to work with that card? Is it worth buying this attachment now and that personality later? Is it worth risking my army to a battle? Forgotten Legacy is going to cause me to sacrifice a lot of my free time working and rethinking how to best construct a deck. It will be worth it.