War of Honor and L5R CCG

Canada_jezus

So war of honor is a standalone boardgame using the L5R CCG cards. Any cards in fact, apparently, as you can use other cards than the starting 4 sets they give you (Lion, scorpion, Dragon, Phoenix). I picked it up today on a whim, i always liked the l5r setting and i figured this was a good time to get into it a bit more.

Here is a random review i found that seems okay.

This is the boardgamegeek page

This is the aeg page

So i guess i have two questions

1.) Anyone play this? Am i going to regret my impulse buy horribly?

2.) So what should i pick up if i want to both get into the card game and make a few more decks for my friends and myself to pick things out. Like i guess some starter decks, but is there like a fatpack i can pick up to play around with?

Also if there is like a site that talks about l5r strategies or whatever feel free.

Arfort

I've played one War of Honor game with 4 players. 2 of them had never played L5R before, the other had only played a few times during the diamond era and I had played extensively for roughly three years during the gold and then diamond era. It took a while for the new players to grasp the game mechanics but by the end of the game they did pretty well. Heck, it's one of the two new players that won the game.

The 4 preconstructed decks are pretty fun. You have a dishonour magistrate scorpion deck, a phoenix honour shugenga deck, a lion military deck and a dragon monk enlightenment deck. Each are fairly well balanced. And the new multiplayer mechanics work well. But L5R will be L5R, the cards all have quite a lot of text on each of them and it's hard for beginners to keep track of it all. So we had fun but it's not a game you want to play with players that dislike reading.

I don't currently play constructed L5R but from what I've read the current starter decks still have random cards and aren't playable out of the box. They're apparently changing that with Emperor Edition which releases this fall I think. So if you want more decks you can just buy, open and play you'll have some soon. Notice that the multiplayer tiles for the 5 clans not featured in War of Honor are still included in the box.

Note that some of the cards in the War of Honor aren't legal in tournament play. I think they've done this so they could create very interesting and powerful cards just for the War of Honor game that wouldn't affect tournament play. So 1vs1 balance wasn't that much of a constraint and they were able to fill the decks with good cards. So the War of Honor decks are most likely a bit more powerful than the Emperor starter decks are going to be. Hopefully they'll release more War of Honor products in the future. Or switch to a LCG models. I like LCGs.

In the meantime if you want to construct a deck with tournament cards I highly advise against purchasing sealed boosters. You will not get the value out of what you open unless you somehow trade, sell or use most of them. And considering that there are usually few players in an area it's hard to move your cards. It's much cheaper to buy singles online. Back in the day I used to order from www.l5rsearch.com and another site that is no longer open. You can get away with buying a starter and buying 10-20 single cards online for 40$ or less. Just stay away from the high value rares.



tl;dr if you can find people willing to learn and play the game you didn't waste your money.

PMAvers

Arfort wrote:

Note that some of the cards in the War of Honor aren't legal in tournament play.

Unless you're playing in a War of Honor tournament, of course. Played in the Constructed one at GenCon with the Phoenix deck out of the box.

Didn't do too bad, either. Got to step 4 on Honor in the first game, and probably would've honored out if there weren't two Spider Zombie Breeder decks in my pod. As a wise man once said, "THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!"

The Extended format (Current + Previous arc) is actually kind of interesting, though. Sucks that for WoH we're going to have to deal with Breeder for one more arc, but whatever. We can persevere.

For normal Constructed, ended up playing my Mantis Zoo blitz deck, which involved tons of non-humans. Made some incredibly stupid changes the night before, though, which hurt me.
Getting three guys out Turn 1 and swinging for a province T2 is always fun, but sucks late-game especially since all my guys didn't do anything by themselves and I was highly reliant on my fate hand.

But, yeah, it's kind of hard to suggest product to purchase at the moment due to the format change to Emperor in November. There's some incredibly sexy rule changes coming, like the rulebook equip action that lets you attach spells as a battle action if you're opposed and you get a free action afterwards to use it. If I had to suggest sets, I'd probably say focusing on the dual-bugged sets like Before the Dawn and Second City (which comes out in a few weeks) is probably the way to go.

Strategy-wise, the faction forums are probably the best bet. They're sorta spread out across the internet, if there's a specific one you're looking for I can dig up the link. Generally they're www.the(faction)clan.com.

HamHamJ

I don't think its very balanced out of the box. Lion needs to attack to win, but needs honorable people for its strategies, but Scorpion is too good at dishonoring. Meanwhile Dragon can just win with little interaction.

Maybe Phoenix stabilizes this in four players.

PMAvers

Yeah, the Phoenix deck is basically a clock, since once it gets going it *will* gain 8 honor on it's turn unless someone throws a action to negate some, due to the honor gaining holdings and the tile. Or, y'know, attack it and knock it out of the game.

The Dragon deck is interesting, especially since you *have* to go to battle for some of the rings, and that you can only gain one tick on the Enlightenment track each turn, no matter how many rings you actually play. Gotta be careful and spread them out.

EDIT: Also, if people havn't seen it, the L5R Art Tumblr, which is being updated supposedly daily by the Art Directors/Tyrants Steve Argyle and Adrian Burton.