With Winter Court upon us, we have the Scorpion Clan pack just in time to shake things up and give Worlds a brand new environment. Going into this, the Dragon Monk deck is commonly accepted as the strongest in the environment, but Scorpion still are a strong contender. The question then, is whether this influx of cards will give Scorpion the edge they need to come out ahead.
…
In this article, we look at the Scorpion cards in the Elemental Cycle. For added commentary, we have Jakub Irzyk winner of the Polish Kotei, the Paris Grand Kotei, and the Birmingham Grand Kotei. Jakub comes from the Polish L5R community, which has always had a reputation for being highly competitive.
The Scorpion clan are having a stellar Kotei season, with a significant portion of their success due to Fro Top’s excellent switch deck focused on Conflict Characters and card draw. In this article, I’m going to talk about a different style of deck, one that focuses on a control and denial strategy. This strategy forces both players to draw fewer cards and thus starves more aggressive decks of the fuel they require to close out the game. A deck based on this theory saw great success at Gencon and Worlds, making top of clan for both events.
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 cycle finally out, let’s have a look at the Scorpion 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.
At the dawn of the Empire, Bayushi, the Scorpion Clan founder, pledged to be the villian for the Emperor. Those acts the honorable Samurai cannot imagine, the Scorpion will. Where the honorable Samurai cannot go, the Scorpion are there. They work in the shadows and deal with the criminal’s of Rokugan, not out of self-interest or weakness, but out of loyalty. The Scorpion know there are certain things that need to be done that are distasteful to other Samurai. They sacrifice their own honor, so they can know of threats to the Empire before anyone else and they can deal with those threats with a subtle blade.