Struggles With Astrology
Predictions are hard. The future is unknown. Yet we try. With every new preview, every new set release, we peer into our divining bowl and call our shots. Which faction will be good, what decks will be bad, what card will be the first to get hit with the nerf bat.
With the year coming to an end, and the doldrums setting in. It is time for an annual ritual. The look back at the prognostications I made concerning certain cards and strategies. This article will focus on my biggest failure. Where, how, and why I got it wrong.
I thought honor would win more. Much more. I wasn’t the only one. Good players, top notch players, played honest to goodness honor meta in their early Ivory kotei decks.
With pay the printed cost being implanted, Ivory was set to eliminate the soft production advantage military decks of the past had utilized. Simultaneously, Ivory design saw depression of the force stat across the board. This combination of factors combined with seemingly good personalities and legacy strategies that harken back to lotus felt like it would form the foundation of a number of powerful honor decks.
Honor did win a couple of koteis. Some were pre-errata Crane, some were all in battle defense decks, and some were “Come One At a Time sure is a good card!” builds. So there is a Loophole Man argument that I didn’t get honor completely wrong. I just got it, oh, like 90% wrong. It was not to be. What happened?
The rules of the game.
Some of the blame is to be laid at the foundational mechanics of the game. In a vacuum, military is always the strongest path to victory. You take a province, this advances you closer to your win condition while also stunting your opponent’s development. The problem with this explanation is that prefatory clause. “In a vacuum”. l5r decks are not built in a vacuum. Games are not played in a vacuum. Vacuums suck.
The Fate cards.
The best honor green cards in the history of l5r did two things at once. Gain honor and defend provinces. Whenever honor has been at its most powerful as an archtype it had access to some number of these cards, often supplemented by other efficient attrition effects. In the old old days, not only did honor decks get to play Iaijutsu Duel, they also got to proclaim multiple times a turn.
What a good honor card looks like.
In the absence of dual threat cards, for honor to be effective it needs accelerants, attrition, and or grossly above the curve defensive cards. So far the Ivory card pool hasn’t produced enough or any of these. This creates a cascading effect. The absence of attrition effects lowers also the quality of send home effects like the Imperial Favor and Block Supplys. Kill a guy, send a guy home, save the province is a recipe that can work. Remove the kill a guy part, and you are stuck with live for a few turns, run out of gas, lose. If there were enough honor gain effects, then the blitz to 40 build would be on the table, but that isn’t much of an option either. Decks are left with a hodge podge of a couple of good cards that fit one lane, and are stuck hoping to draw and match up appropriately.
A good honor deck card doesn’t have to gain honor.
You get 3 Thoughtless Sacrifice or 3 Come One at Time for attrition (not both of course, because dueling and focus values) and then some soft delay like Imperial Summons or Way of the Crane, and then for speed Inexplicable Challenge or Wheels within Wheels. A little bit here and a little bit there in a game where redundancy of effect is important, and a precious lack of above the curve defensive plays. No haymakers, and not enough little papercuts to bleed your opponent out.
The Dynasty cards.
Looking at the best honor decks of formats past provides a template for what success looks like. In addition to gold and guys, they feature honor generation from multiple dynasty side card types. Personalities, holdings, regions/celestials (we’ll ignore these) and events. That last one is critical. Crossing 40 is a game of critical of mass, and while events come with an opportunity cost, they lean closer to free than any other card type and the extra bits picked up from Imperial Gifts/Badger Lives/Birth of the Sword/etc went a long way to giving an honor deck the extra gear of propulsion it needed. Long gone too are the Peasant Revolt and Emperor’s Peace type effects.
Hooray Avoid Fate!
The honor holdings available are either Fortifications, and thus liable to be destroyed, or so laughably inefficient that only The Exquisite Palace of the Crane can ever justify playing them. A case of me (and design?) not fully appreciating the value of gold costs and production in a post pooling era.
Seems ok. It isn’t.
There is an often encountered perception that then personalities aren’t all that important to an honor deck. That their primary purpose is to be proclaimed and then disregarded. That has never been accurate. The personalities matter for their stats. Ph to gold cost ratio, chi for dueling, some keyword or other to facilitate some powerful fate card, and their, of course abilities.
The best honor personalities? *Yawn*
When I peruse the various honor personalities I don’t see much of anything that excites the competitive Spike in me.
Other decks.
Wait. I am suppose to do what now? I’ll just attack instead, thanks.
Or at least, I don’t see much that excites the competitive honor deck Spike player. There are all kinds of cool toys for military players. One of the real surprises is how many military decks can compete with honor in the proclaim game. Lion has historically been awash in solid 3ph military personalities, but Crane, Phoenix, Dragon, and Crab are getting in on the action now too. There should be more non-unique personalities with over 3 personal honor. The notion that it is easier to construct a military deck flooded with 3ph personalities then it is build an honest to goodness win by starting at 40 honor deck highlights just how far honor has fallen.
All the non-unique personalities with over 3 ph. That’s it. That’s the list.
While personality force has been capped and isn’t all that efficient, attachments, specifically followers, are all kinds of value. Even more so when Family Dojo gets factored in. For every good easily played send home action, there are two that counter it. The default nature of many a military deck in Ivory involves a sea of humanity sending waves against an opponents provinces. In this reality, a single attrition effect, even something as powerful as Come One At A Time, isn’t enough to stem the tide. The decks not built around low to the ground and force efficient swarms are populated with bruizer uniques and the best looking defensive cards fair no better against them. The Dark Naga and Hiruma Nikaru are a huge pain to deal with. To say nothing of a unit with an Elephant Cavalry.
If honor ever gets good…
Yet the honor meta element of events remains fully intact. A Time For Action now as a non-unique open action that can be surgically timed.
Player choices.
Even with all the the issues facing it, there will always be players who want to play honor. Players have preferences. One of the reasons honor has been so under-represented is because the faction with the most honor players is Crane, who have been blessed with some of the best military decks in the format. All things being equal, most Crane players will gravitate towards honor, but things aren’t close to equal. Crane have some of the best military personalities in the game, a powerful sensei, and an innate tempo advantage over most other military factions. It makes all kinds of sense to play Crane military right now. What is the strategic advantage to playing Crane honor? There isn’t one.
The same reasoning applies to Unicorn, Lion, Mantis, Dragon and Phoenix. With few exceptions, players need a reason to play a deck beyond “I want to play l5r this way”. They are looking for an edge, a tool they can utilize, an advantage they can leverage. The most successful form of honor deck in the later seasons were the all in defensive decks. Built around a win (or tie, just as good) in a single battle, a big honor gain, and coasting to victory. That there, is players exploiting the rules for a strategic advantage. It is what players do.
Honor isn’t giving players much in the ways of tools right now, but as we start to dream about 20 festivals it is important to understand where it sits, and what it needs to push forward.
The pendulum has swung, it will swing back again. This the nature of l5r.
Playing Honor in IvE Arc with all these Yasuki decks around was pure masochism.
I considered doing a whole paragraph on honor versus dishonor in the article as it does provide another lens through which the underpowered nature of the honor card pool is made plain. Dishonor cards are so much higher in quality and quantity. Compare Brilliant Cascade Inn and Exquisite Silk Works to, well, there isn’t even a good comparison point, to say nothing of pure accelerants like Mercantile Conflict and dual threat cards like Ramifications.
As someone who has tried to make Phoenix honor work in Ivory since Ivory came out, I appreciate the sympathy.
Proclaiming only once per turn, more than anything else, hurts honor. Not only are you prevented from a dynasty phase honor bomb of 9 or 10 but it also discourages honor decks from buying too many personalities at once. If I miss a proclaim on a turn 3-7 because I flipped all gold I’m done. This means I have to portion out my purchases of personalities rather than clearing my provinces. I’m generally hard up for bodies anyway, given all the bowing for card draw, lobbying etc… that an honor deck has to do. Couple that with the honor holdings that suck up slots that would be personalities in a military deck and it creates a serious problem for honor running. I suppose design could make up for this deficiency by giving us more, high PH personalities but, as you mentioned, this hasn’t really happened yet.
Lastly, as someone who has played Phoenix honor all arc, you left Tsukimi off your list of non-unique personalities with over 3 ph.
Error acknowledged. One no-prize awarded to you! I play Tsukimi a ton too, but she clearly struggles to rate as an honor personality. High gold cost, honor requirement, and questionable keywords. She remains my second favorite Visions of Darkness target though and that ain’t nothing. Multiple proclaim honor gains were removed from the game for a reason. I cannot tell you what that reason is, but things have reasons. It could make a return a la legacy holdings, but I tend to doubt it. Been a long time to mulligan on that.
Yeah, I love that, seemingly, design’s compensation for giving Phoenix an overpriced, underpowered champion was to let us play with more than one of that mediocre personality. I shouldn’t complain too much though, as her 5 ph has won me a game or two.
I came back to l5r when Ivory hit after a very long hiatus so I assumed that the once per turn honor gain was a new rule along with the other Ivory changes. I hadn’t realized that had been in place for some time.
We can always hope that 20 festivals will have some kick-ass defensive/honor gain cards.