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Re: What's To Come
Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 12:15 pm
by Daramere
Re: What's To Come
Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 12:30 pm
by Martino
But you know that dueling is unusual among most themes with most clans in that its primary functional action, the duel, has an unspoken targeting restriction: You cannot target someone with higher Chi. That's the issue with Crane dueling right now, and unfortunately once you slide into the realm of "not very strong," there is only a thin line to "completely unplayable." Right now we have one non-unique duelist with 4 Chi, and a handful of non-duelists with 4 of 5 Chi. In order to even most of the time be able to play our duels, we have to make a weird hodgepodge of personalities, and the many 3chi duelists are nearly unplayable because we have to devote an item to them just to get up to many possible targets' chi, and still hope the opponent isn't playing any weapons.
Re: What's To Come
Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 12:34 pm
by Kakita Shiro
Re: What's To Come
Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2015 1:52 pm
by Martino
Okay I forgot about Shune lol
Re: What's To Come
Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2015 12:34 am
by Kakita Kasukaru
Re: What's To Come
Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2015 7:41 am
by Daramere
Embassy of the Crane was through the end of Celestial, so that's the starting point for when there was last a good Crane deck with dueling.
Weren't you guys just basically bad at everything for the duration of Emperor Edition? Something like "Crane Clan: Emperor Edition in Hard Mode?" So the next two years didn't feature a good Crane dueling deck, but that wasn't a case of whether dueling was your good deck, it was just a case of Crane being bad generally. Totally a valid thing to complain about, but a different thing.
Then in Ivory you had an amazing military deck, further variations of which still seem to remain your best deck a year later. But that's only been about 1.25 years.
So it's inaccurate to say that Crane honor/dueling has not worked for 4 years, because that ignores Embassy of the Crane in the last year of Celestial. You could accurately say 3+ years, but that's a bit misleading because two of those years aren't about the strength of Crane honor/dueling compared to other Crane decks, they were about Crane overall being weak. Which basically just reduces this down to Crane Scouts being the best Crane deck (and a very good deck) during Ivory/20F.
Re: What's To Come
Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2015 7:43 am
by Daidoji Tacticus
I have been told (wasn't playing at the time) that there was a crazy Crane Honour deck in early EE based around Exquisite Gifts and Artisans - good enough to get Exquisite Gifts banned. At which point, yeah, Crane had nothing left that was remotely competitive.
Re: What's To Come
Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2015 7:50 am
by Martino
The problem with dueling today isn't that they haven't printed dueling cards, because they have. It's because there were some very fundamental changes (no long focusing first as duelist), some generalized mechanical changes (an overall stat squish), and some specific thematic changes (the introduction of kensai as a broad range of personalities who can increase their chi by up to 2 completely within design intent) that have made dueling far riskier. In addition, the replacement of Steel on Steel with duels that are either refusable (Sanctionaed Duel), require a fragile defensive position (COAAT), or non-lethal (everything else), the reward for this risk has decreased.
When these paradigms shift, honor dueling will be good again.