Courts of the Crane Clan

After trying the starter in a sealed environment, the following judgements have been made by this fine magistrate and friend of the Crane Clan.

There were enough Duels for the requisite defensive fights to protect our land in the face of all opponents faced.
There was significant chance to prove our honor within our holdings and actions taken to accomplish relatively swift superiority in every matchup.
It became necessary to agree to a draw with another crane player to preserve our place at the top two of the competition, yet it was an easy decision as we are both courtly in demeanour.

The Temple Fortress was a wise and decisive choice for victory every match it appeared.

The opinion of a lowly monkey given to advising the efforts of the Crane.

OK, sealed is a kind of environment as well, that's true.

Personally, I did very well with mine winning in a 6-player Sealed event, narrowly beating out Unicorn because of his improper sequencing.

I agree that the rare choices were poor. Only a very few cards can be printed in more than one base set and still hold any value. See: Famous Bazaar.

It seemed to me that the deck wasn't sure if it was honor or dishonor based. Having a major card in the deck, the shady Kakita, focus solely on dishonor without the ability to duel or any other functional purpose save lobbying, was kind of strange. I'm not sure if there is enough Crane dishonor stuff out there to make it a playable deck type, and I'm not sure if its advisable to throw in another deck type into the mix when we already have military and honor, with dueling as a sub theme.

But I am only recently getting back into the game, so perhaps I missed some super important meta purpose for his card. But it seemed to play off the magistrate dishonor cards throughout the deck. Just not enough to make it a playable theme. Thats just my two cents.

Is the design team planning on a Crane dishonor theme? Perhaps it already exists and I'm just a crappy player.

Well Kakita Ikura was required to be something like that since he was born under the Kakita curse back in Diamond Era. He can never touch a blade, ever.

I feel like it was mentioned somewhere by someone AEG that Kakita jester dishonor is going to be a theme this year. I seem to remember it being a sort of off-hand statement in another conversation but I swear I read it. They're probably just setting it up now with personalities like Ikura and Akitomo so there isn't a set where half of the Crane personalities are non-duelist Kakita.