Well, that was fast.

You probably haven’t built the deck yet. Rae Sensei is terrible, after all. It has -1 gold. Phoenix has been off the radar for the entire Kotei season. Spells aren’t good enough. There’s not enough “synergy”. Running Yojimbo and Shugenja together makes too many awkward draws.

Build this deck, play 3 test games, then come back. Don’t goldfish, don’t theory craft. I’ll wait.

 

The Eternal Temple of the Phoenix Rae Sensei
Dynasty (40)	Fate (40)
Events 1 Wisdom Gained 3 The BlessingHoldings 3 Suana Dojo 3 Silver Mine 3 Jade Pearl Inn 1 Counting House 3 Shrine To Hachiman 1 Remote Temple 2 Abundant Farmlands Personalities 3 Isawa Kouka 2 Isawa Genma 3 Shiba Yuuchi 3 Shiba Tuoko 3 Shiba Eraki 3 Komori Taruko 3 Isawa Tenkawa, The Scholar	Actions 3 Thoughtless Sacrifice 3 Banish All Shadows 3 Jade Ascension 1 A Game Of Dice 3 Long Term Fruition 3 Final Sacrifice 3 Sorrowful Prayer 1 Creating OrderSpells 3 Final Ruin 3 The Dragon’s Breath 3 Burning Spirit 2 Fire Kami’s Greed 3 Ward Of Air 1 Koan’s Whisper 3 Strength Of The Fifth Ring Rings 1 Ring Of The Void 1 Ring Of Air

Welcome back! So you played some games, you completely destroyed all your opponents, and now you agree with me. Here’s a deck breakdown anyway, because it’s perhaps possible you actually didn’t play any games with it yet.

The Beating Heart

Rae Sensei, despite being the butt of a lot of jokes throughout Ivory, has one of the most powerful effects on any legal sensei. Cards are always dependent on their context, and before The New Order, all Rae sensei had to work with was The Dragon’s Breath, which was terrible. But this is a CCG, and every new set brings a new context.

ALitS brought Burning Spirit, which intrigued me with Rae Sensei because it gives defensive decks access to Thoughtless Sacrifice + Burning Spirit to blow up huge follower-heavy units at basically no cost. That wasn’t enough to justify running either card though, and Burning Spirit was better just on a fire shugenja in a Kosei Sensei deck as force generation. TNO brought Final Ruin and Jade Ascension, and everything changed.

Final Ruin

This card is so pushed. Everyone else is sitting around messing with bow and straighten effects, and Shugenja get a recursive bow to kill you. Sure it is blocked by attachments, but that’s how kill effects are templated these days. It’s also limited to Chi, but Burning Spirit quickly boosts that over even suited up clan champions. Even if Burning Spirit didn’t interact with Chi, TNO also brought us a 5 chi non-unique Shugenja – Isawa Tenkawa – who can hold a Naginata, go to 7 chi, and blow up anything anyway.

It’s amazing to me this card was allowed to exist in Ivory, when other clans are supposed to be happy with Unstoppable Melee 2. It’s something straight out of Lotus. But what really blows the mind is that it was printed in the same set as…

Jade Ascension

This card is the real powerhouse. It does everything, and all from the safety of your home. First off, realize a single personality can have as many instances of the ability as you can play Jade Ascensions. In the build of the deck I have here, which abuses Sorrowful Prayers to play and replay Jade Ascension, a personality can have 12 instances of the ability. Twelve. What can you do with a fully suited up super unit?

• You can cast Final Ruin 15 times, destroying 15 cards in the opponent’s army. FIFTEEN! The most follower heavy decks I can construct don’t put out that many cards.
• You can give a single unit +30/+30 using Burning Spirit, +9/+9 of which cannot be interacted with by your opponent. It is impossible to interact with a 30/30 unit in Ivory, aside from a 32 gold Deliberations or a send-home ability. Even out-forcing a 30/30 unit is difficult for many decks.
• The strict version of the deck plays alchemy lab, so make that +75/+30. Good luck out-forcing that.
• If your target for all those Burning Spirits is Shiba Erkai, it’s +45/+45 base or +90/+45 with Alchemy Lab. Get the picture yet?
• Assuming you have 3 Burning Spirit and Shiba Eraki, you can give the opposing army a total of -240F using The Fire Kami’s greed, spit between 15 targets. With a normal 3C Samurai, it’s “merely”  -135F.
• Make a ranged 90 attack using Eraki, 15 Burning Spirits, Alchemy Lab and The Dragon’s Breath
• …all from home, where you opponent CANNOT INTERACT WITH YOU AT ALL.

Honestly, using Sorrowful Prayers to do all this is just show boating. With just 3 Jade Ascension, the super unit comes online just fine. 6 shots of Final Ruin, or +12/+12 is more than enough to win the game.

Answers, Answers, Answers

There are some ways to interact with the super unit. You can harpoon it in with Determined Challenge, or take off the shugenja trait with Victory Through Deference. You can kill the super unit with control cards like Planted Evidence, Ambush or Goju Saido’s invest. You can bow the super unit with Imperial Summons or The Soul of Man, creating an opening to swing for multiple provinces. You can destroy or steal the spells with Your True Nature or Unsettling Gathering.

Except not at all. This deck comes ready for anything.

Victory Through Deference? Final Sacrifice can redirect that.

Harpoon? Ward of Air can move home. Multiples can even protect while the unit is stuck, in case the first one gets hit with Ring of Earth.

Bow? Ring of Air and Creating Order are ready to go. These guys, plus Shrine to Hachiman, even let you attack and defend with the same power.

Spell Destruction? Jade Ascension exists, remember? Unless you’re packing over 6 destruction effects, the super unit will end up with at least 1 power spell left attached, and the ability to cast and re-cast it 13 times. Maybe the difference between winning and losing is 2 casts of Final Ruin, but I doubt it.

An Embarrassment of Riches

It’s easy to theorycraft ways to trump powerful answer cards like Victory Through Deference. Obviously a deck can’t have it all, so there will be times you draw your meta and the deck doesn’t draw it’s answers can you can push through for the win. This isn’t much to hang your hat on, as the chances you draw Victory Through Deference is equal to the chance the Phoenix deck draws Final Sacrifice. Except…

And also…

And let’s not forget…

This deck very easily draws 4 cards on its turn, then 3 more cards on your turn. It isn’t even playing Walking the Way and Heart of Fudo Experienced, which it very easily could be. It could play Hiyamako, the 2 gold Monk Kensai, to play In Stillness, Forge the Soul to get even more card selection. The bottom line is simple: unless you are able to play your bomb meta in the first 4 turns and win the game, this deck will come online and have more answers than you have meta.

The whole deck is either gas or ways to find the gas, and it only needs 2 personalities in play to go off. Those two personalities can come from a single personality, Shiba Tuoko, who also has Resilient to chump block and save a province on 3 when the voltron is only partially assembled. It easily draws its entire deck by turn 7, if the game somehow manages to go that long. The enormous mass of card draw also guarantees you will be able to recycle your Jade Ascensions with Sorrowful Prayers and replay them with ease.

This List is Untuned

And it will still beat the best decks you have put together right now. As I mentioned, there are a number of great cards it could be playing but isn’t. Card draw or manipulation effects like Walking the Way, Heart of Fudo Exp, and In Stillness, Forge the Soul. It can run more meta answers, like Interrupt the Void’s Flow to cancel attempts to mess with the super unit, or Spirited Dispute to get back spells destroyed by Your True Nature or Provoked Violence. It can run Koan’s Scroll Sachel and Searing Seige to make even more ranged attacks.

The point is the combination of card draw effects, answers, and powerful spells cast from the safety of home is too much to deal with. This deck cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand and a reference to a single good card.

A Single Answer

The only legal card that interacts with this deck in a way that cannot be stopped is A New Alliance. It can’t be stopped with Final Sacrifice, and although you can blink out with Interrupt the Void’s Flow, that doesn’t really help because now your Voltron is removed from the game.

Even this has it’s problems, though. The first is that it can only remove abilities from 2 cards, which means it can hit all the instances of Jade Ascension on a single guy plus one spell. If you go all-in on one guy, that means you’re still left with all the spells you have out, minus one, which is still a lot. But this isn’t a voltron deck. There’s no reason to put everything on one guy. If every single shugenja in play has an instance of Jade Ascension and a single spell, this card looks a lot less good.

Plus you have a play what’s more or less a dead card in a lot of matchups. Sure it replaces itself, but it’s much worse than Victory Through Deference. Are military decks really going to reach for this before Victory? I don’t think so. Even if they have to because the Rae Sensei deck is so oppressive, this card will be an ego fig leaf for players who don’t want to get on the bandwagon.

Banning Jade Ascension Is The Only Reasonable Answer

There are a number of other options, in theory.

• Ban Rae Sensei. This would just shift the deck to a voltron military deck that suits up a single huge shugenja and attacks with all the spells. It would still have the best battle action in the game (Final Ruin) basically infinite times. In Arc, you could still build you own Rae Sensei using your draw engine and Koan’s Robes, Scroll Satchel and Whispers to give all the relevant spells Home. Cuts down the power level significantly, but probably not enough.
• Ban Final Ruin. If this happened, The Fire Kami’s Greed would also have to go, because zeroing out the opponent’s army is just as good as killing them. It would also prohibit design from ever printing another spell that references Force or Chi as variables for the next 2 years.
• Ban Strength of the Fifth Ring. This would stop the card draw engine, but the deck isn’t even running Walk or Heart of Fudo. Draw-your-whole-deck decks existed before Fifth Ring, and the deck would survive this ban no problem.
• Ban Sorrowful Prayers. This cuts down on the crazy, but the deck doesn’t even need this card. It’s possible it shouldn’t have it. That slot could be more card draw, or package (absent battle actions to defend provinces).
• Ban Jade Ascension. This cuts the power of all these cards down to once per turn per card. The deck will survive, but as a shadow of it’s former self. With only 3 final ruin, 3 fire kami’s greed and 3 dragon’s teeth, it will still pack a punch, but not enough of one to obliterate all the competition all the time. It’s possible Final Ruin would need a ban along side this. Limiting Ascension to once per personality doesn’t solve the problem, as it just forces you to spread them out. This is my preferred solution.

 

This Deck Is Better In Strict Than Arc

Don’t count on rotation to solve all our problems with this deck. We already know 20 Festivals will change the Shugenja trait to make it unaffected by Victory Through Deference. All the important cards survive into the next arc. The new box allows us to recycle yojimbo forever, making the deck able to chump defend early even better.

This is a problem that will need to be solved sooner or later. I vote for sooner.

It’s an oldish preview now that The New Order dropped, but it’s existence had me thinking about the 2 for 2 holdings in TNO in a whole new light. I’m talking, of course, about Forgotten Legacy.

This card is going to have enormous impacts on how we design our gold schemes. At first glance it just looks like a reverse Jade Pearl Inn, but in reality it’s much better.

I hate Forgotten Legacy, but that’s a subject for another article. For now, it’s just important to point out one thing:

With the printing of Forgotten Legacy, 1 for 1s become awesome

That’s not to say 1 for 1s aren’t already awesome, but it does make it even more true thanks to context. 2 for 2s are already being pushed out for a 3 for 1 and 1 for 1 scheme. It’s entirely possible the 3/1 scheme is more powerful than the 2 for 2 scheme in strict. Clearly, 2 for 2s are being pushed out.

Before gold pooling, a 2 for 2 was the smallest holding anyone played because wasting gold was terrible. They are where utility effects ended up, as small kickers that made them more attractive. There have been a ton of 2 for 2s printed (259, actually). For the most part, and as recently as The New Order, they blow up to do something or bow to create incremental advantage.

Non-telescoping 2 for 2 holdings have always been hit or miss, but there are general themes. If we want better 2 for 2s, we should look at the best of the bunch and try to learn some lessons. Let’s take a trip down memory lane!

They generate (a lot) or force

I’m not talking about Humble House or one of the +1F effects I mocked from The New Order. I’m talking about real force. At least a reusable +2F. Well-Defended Farm was too pushed, and the Chi bonus on Temple of the Ages was why that card was played, but L5R is full of 2 for 2s that were played for their force bonus. Saiden Sanzo, Standing Stones, Venerable Master, and Revered Sensei all count.

Lesson: Produce at least 2 force, with an additional cost of bowing the holding, or limited what it can target.

They draw cards

Drawing off the top is a risky proposal. A single fate card sometimes can win the game on the spot, and other times has no effect at all. The value of a fate card relative to a dynasty card isn’t always clear. En masse, however, the power of drawing cards can’t be denied, and 2 for 2 holdings are a great home for these sorts of effects, provided they price is right.

Good costing mechanisms restrict when you can draw, what you can draw, or how much the card costs.

The actual cost of a card has varied over time, but 5 gold or a dynasty card seems about right. Too low and degenerate combo decks start to come online.

Cycle effects are another subject. Some see some play, but only with no cost beyond bowing the card. Cards with additional costs have been misses.

Lesson: Make the cost high enough to matter, but always draw a whole card rather than cycle if there is any cost beyond bowing.

They have the power to swing the game at pivotal moments

These cards disrupt your opponents plans, make your attacks safer, and give you that final push. They blow themselves up because when you do you’re going to win the game.

The effects cards like these produce vary, from very marginal (Akodo’s Grave, Family Library) to board warping (Chugo Seido, Shrine to Osano-Wo, Yobajin Fortress). At the lower end, though, these cards represent what 2 for 2s used to be – the cheap holdings you could sacrifice for some on-board advantage. Now that 1 for 1s exist it seems cards like Akodo’s Grave and Family Library should be 1 for 1s.

It’s hard to draw a concrete lesson from cards like these, except to say that the value of a 2 for 2 holding is much higher now than it was pre-gold pooling. Their opportunity cost is higher, so they need to be more powerful to compensate. The value of their effect also varies with their context. For example, Living Blade Dojo was crazy good but Delicate Forge is trash. Why? Because Living Blade Dojo picked up Iaijutsu Challenge, while Delicate Forge gets Stockpiled Weapons. QED.

Lesson: Cards that destroy themselves must be impact the board right away, either by getting powerful cards or having powerful effects.  Marginal destruction effects should be moved to 1 for 1s.

2 for 2s are terrible, but they don’t have to be

The history of L5R is littered with examples of successful 2 for 2s. In the past, design was forced to print a lot of them, but times have changed. These holdings can get much better, especially considering how must cost there is to running them.

Good 2 for 2 holdings should:

• Generate card advantage with reasonable costs and restrictions
• Generate permanent force, or generate more than 1 force with minimal hassle
• Only blow themselves up for long-lasting or very powerful effects

With a few intelligent changes to holding design, we can push back against the tyranny of Forgotten Legacy 3/1 gold schemes. You have nothing to lose but your chains, Mr. Reece!