What's To Come

[Kakita Onimaru]

[Martino]

In tournament results, winning decks that focus much at all on dueling have been predominantly dueling have been military decks or switch decks. Tadanobu this year has been switch. Last year dueling was Fallen. And the most effective lethal duel for the last year has been an offensive duel, Weakness Exposed, which I feel is actually better than Come One at a Time because it is so counterproductive to fight a battle with one guy.

[Kakita Onimaru]

I see. Well, I still wouldn't say that Dueling is designed for Military, so much that Military is (as usual) so much more powerful than Honor. There are a lot of factors for that, but overall dueling is "designed" to be used for defensive honor, especially our cards.

[Martino]

I don't agree, but it doesn't matter what the design principle is since defensive dueling has been largely an afterthought competitively since the beginning of Emperor Edition. Results count.

[Dare]

In this thread: Martino tells everyone his opinion is gospel, and decides he knows all about Design. Also Ultimatecalibre says all Crane decks should be honour decks (how about no), and then puts forward a theme that dishonours your own personalities, which would be literally trash tier for an honour deck.

[Daramere]

Having a theme be out there is something totally under design's control. If there simply isn't a Crane dueling theme, a Crane honor theme, or what have you, that's something that can legitimately be complained of. But that Crane's better decks have ended up being one thing instead of another? The design team just doesn't have fine control over that - unless you want them to just deliberately take the themes don't like and make them bad, or if you think they should just aim for broken when making the themes you don't like. And none of that is a legitimate complaint.

[Martino]

But right now we have two Design-stated themes (magistrate honor and artisan dishonor) at the same time that both feel like they should be supplemental themes instead of our only themes. Add to that a scout theme that pretty clearly didn't excite the clan base even when it was really good, and you end up with some perfectly functional themes that fail to capture the aesthetic the targeted customers want when they are the ONLY outright themes.

[Daramere]

[Dare]

[Martino]

I'm going with played in tournaments. I agree, a lot of PLAYERS loved scouts. But I don't think AEG's intent is for one clan to draw more players from outside the clan than inside. And the sheer numbers show that Crane player, like many other players, aren't excited. I think a lot of the player loss since the beginning of EE wasn't just because of marketing issues like delays and DTP sets, but that a lot of clans got themes that were either divisive or ignored. So I'm not saying this is a problem exclusive to Crane, I'm saying that it's right in line with some other clans.

Daramere - A lot of Dragons I've talked to wish they got more monks and fewer shugenja, because they don't see shugenja being that much of a core Dragon thing. What is your take on that, and do you think it equates to Crane scouts?