Winter Court 2018 – Prelude

This year’s Winter Court is this weekend starting on Friday the 2nd of November and culminating on Sunday the 4th with the finals. We’ll be updating the site with all the most up to date info we can find.

Here is a quick summary of everything we know before the event starts. We know from the tournament outline that registration starts on Friday around 10:30 (check-in ends at 10:00). There will be 6 rounds and everyone who goes 4-2 or better will get through to the next day. Also, the top of each clan that does not make 4-2 will also qualify. This is a much more generous cut than events up to now which were 7 rounds and required 6-1 to qualify. That should be something around 25% of the field for each day. Lets assume 200 people per day and 50 qualifying.

Sunday will take all those players who qualified and throws them into a single elimination rounds. The top players will be matched with the bottom players, so the top players should have some ‘easy’ games while those in the middle should be facing players of similar skill. There are 7 rounds scheduled, so it can handle up to 128 players starting in the first round.

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FFG will be streaming the event on Twitch, details can be found here. It’ll just be on Friday and Sunday with 4 hours on Friday and 10 hours on Sunday. We know Tyler will be commentating at least some of it. Roseville is currently on Central Daylight Time which is GMT -5 hours but it changes on Sunday to Central Standard Time which is GMT -6.

• Friday 10:00 to 14:00 CDT (GMT-5) – Day 1A
• Sunday 09:30 to 15:00 CDT (GMT-6) – Day2 Swiss
• Sunday 16:00 to 20:30 CDT (GMT-6) – Final Cut

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This year is Scorpion themed, so many of the prizes have the Scorpion mon or Scorpion art, check them out here. Of interest to every clan are the special promo clan champions with a unique frame. The silver ones will be available at the booth (including a Yoritomo). The gold ones are limited to the top 8 of each clan for the qualifying days. That means there will be in total only 16 Hida Kisada, 16 Shiba Tsukune, etc. Expect to see some crazy prices as people try complete the set.

Of greater interest are the top of clan choices. We still have the roles like last year, although they’re a little less important with the new role system. Of more interest are the story choices! The top of each clan will get to make a story decision, selecting one family to solve a problem and take the centre stage. The player who makes Shogun gets to select a specific character rather than just a family.

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Predicting the top cut is the primary pass time of most of the podcasts at the moment. The most recent big event was Gencon which was the first tournament with any of the Elemental cycle but not the full cycle. We also have the first appearance of the Scorpion clan pack, Hawk Tattoo has errata and going second no longer gives fate, so things are going to be a bit up in the air. The word on the ‘street’ is that Scorpion, Dragon, and Phoenix are the top dogs, but no matter how much testing players have done it is difficult to predict the convergence of players from all over the world. One thing we can do, is have a look at the Lotus Pavilion figures!

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Overall we’re looking at a pretty good spread. Lion are looking weak, which is expected, but everyone else seems to be doing well. Crab players have been concerned, but only the Scorpion match-up is a real issue. Crane only have a weakness to Dragon. Dragon do seem to have a slight edge over Scorpion and Phoenix, but it is so slight as to be negligible. Phoenix have good numbers across the board but are under the odds slightly against Dragon and Scorpion. Scorpion look to be in a good position with 3 strong matchups and no real weakness. Unicorn are obviously in a much better situation than last year, but they still have difficult matchups against Crab, Phoenix, and Scorpion. Honestly, there are so many matchup variables here that the winner is most certainly going to be the player that gets lucky enough to dodge their clan’s weak games or get lucky in the ones they do hit. 

In addition, we’ve come a long way in the past year. We have a full year of experience and tinkering where players finally got to grips with the core mechanics of the game and are now playing at a much higher level than a year ago. This event will have big names from all across the world and we’ll get to see some serious competition. This is going to be a lot of fun!

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As usual, the plan is to put as much coverage as we can up on the site. I’ll be hanging out in the Discord channels trying to snag updates as we receive them. If you’re making the event or have some info from mates who are there, please do post them! Keep an eye on all the various podcasts media channels also as I’m sure a few of them will be posting info from the event itself.

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If you have any comments or feedback please post them in the comments section below. Check us out on the Imperial Advisor website, podcast, and YouTube channel for more discussion about the L5R LCG.