For this pack review, we have some of the top Dragon players giving their thoughts. It starts with Gunnar who posted his initial review a few weeks back, and now we’ve added Arash, Suburbaknght, Neojko, Will, Nightcrawlers, Aneil, and Chaley’s thoughts.
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One of the best ways to build a tournament winning deck is to see what the top players are playing. But what do you do when your faction is weak, and the players winning tournaments are busy playing other factions. This is the situation Dragon find themselves ahead of Winter Court.
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The elemental cycle has been a big one for the Dragon. The Monk theme is a core aspect of the Dragon Clan that many wanted to explore, but up until now, the deck hasn’t been viable. Additions like Togashi Mitsu, Hurricane Punch, and Void Fist have most certainly changed that. The Monk trait is now a key element in Dragon’s most competitive deck. Dragon players can now live the dream of Kung-Fu fighting their way through tournaments. But what is that deck going to look like? …
In this article, we look at the Dragon cards in the Elemental Cycle. We’ve asked Aneil Seetharam to give some of his perspective on the cards. Aneil aka Mindsdesire is the first player to get Hatamoto for the same clan 4 times in the same season, he is also the winner of the Origins Kotei and Gencon Grand Kotei. Currently he is organising the L5R World Cup.
Dragon have been a bit of an enigma for the player base, capable of some extremely strong plays they are often placed along with Crab and Scorpion in the top tier of competitive play. In a recent article, Dragon were rating as having the best dynasty and provinces in the game with overall ratings in excess of Crab and just below Scorpion. And yet, results show otherwise.
Top players prepping for a tournament will put together a range of the decks they expect to face and play their chosen deck against this ‘gauntlet’. The first difficulty with this is picking out the right decks, hopefully, I’ve done a decent job below but any suggestions are welcome. Different environments have different playstyles and sometimes a deck that will do well in one area will underperform in another. At the most basic, does your environment typically bid high or low during the draw phase? Just that simple norm can shift which decks come out on top. This might mean you need to shift your playstyle to get the best out of each deck. The hard part then is getting the games in. Practice, practice, practice.
The first Imperial tournament is going to be at PAX south on January 12th followed by Cork on 27th January. So far, we have only the faintest idea of where the clans stand relative to each other as the Imperial cycle added 120 cards to the small starting card pool. At the end of January, we will have a pretty good idea, but that’s no good for us now. This Christmas, Imperial Advisor is giving you the gift of rampant and wild speculation. We’ve had limited testing and nothing to back it all up with. I’ve included win rates based on the results from the Lotus Pavilion tournament website. As tournaments, you’d hope that it would be a little more accurate, but that could still have a lot of noise. With that aside, we present, the Imperial cycle tier list.
With the Imperial cyle finally out, lets have a look at the Dragon specifically to see what cards in the new packs go into their decks. …
Although not a faction, the Neutral cards are the most important in any pack. They are playable by everyone and have the greatest potential impact on the meta. For the Imperial cycle a few stand out.
During their Gempukku Samurai of the Dragon clan consider the story of their founder Togashi and the wise Shinsei. They compose a Haiku to explain their own understanding of the story.
