With the addition of the Inheritance cycle and the recent release of the second pack Bonds of Blood, players have once again questioned the value of the role locking clans. While it is widely accepted that having cards locked into specific roles is a great system, locking clans out of roles is less popular.
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This week FFG released a new restricted list for L5R. The day before I had just finished my first draft of this article which concluded FFG weren’t going to release one and didn’t need to anyway. I present it today with a minor addendum discussing the changes they did make.
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.
During our last Imperial Advisor podcast, the question was raised, who is going to win Worlds? The general consensus was that Crane is a serious contender, but I hedged my bets somewhat, suggesting that all clans apart from Unicorn had a shot. Let’s examine this a little more and have a look at some of the currently popular decks.
Although the new Legend of the Five Rings card game is only just about to come out, we’re already looking to the future. The Alderac version of the game survived for over 20 years and for many players it has been an important part of their life. We want this game to be strong and vibrant for at least another 20 years. The Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) Living Card Game (LCG) model has a lot of benefits, but over the years it has had some difficulties.