There is one extremely important element to battle mathematics that I didn't cover in my previous article (Samurai Tempo). It often doesn't matter much, but there are certain decks to which it is critically important. One of these decks is switch, and the element is action restrictions.

Most Samurai format battle actions have certain requirements to play and restrictions on what they can target. Flanking Action requires more personalities and a Samurai to bow, and doesn't let you pick who to kill. Peasant Vengeance requires a follower to bow and a target without attachments - Yarijutusu is similar for weapons. Some actions are slightly more versatile: Draw Your Blade requires either an honorable personality or a target without attachments, and Ruthless Advance merely requires gold and that you be on the attack. Duels are a slightly special case: you need more chi, or the Duelist trait and a non-Duelist target - but the main cost is opportunity cost during deck construction.

Like exact gold costs and production, these restrictions are usually only critical during deck construction. If you're careful to include ways to pay the requirements and to diversify your targets, then you're usually never left with cards sitting uselessly. If you play with Flanking Action and Peasant Vengeance like the average Lion military deck, then you don't have to worry about their costs because you're playing with lots of Samurai, followers, and probably Matsu Benika. Throw in Ruthless Advance, and you've got an action for practically every possible target - if they've got a unit with an attachment and a unit without, then a combination of any two of those actions will kill them both. With a properly built deck, a player should rarely be stuck with useless battle actions in hand.

Yet, with proper card selection and a bit of gambling, it's possible to exploit these targeting restrictions to create virtual card advantage. The method is through disruptive reactive actions like Misdirection and A Soldier's Fate (two of my favorites that always make it into my switch decks). If you can interrupt the opponent's battle action plan at a key point - like Misdirecting the opponent's Ruthless Advance to a personality without attachment protection or a Draw Your Blade to your personality's weapon instead of the personality himself - then you may render several cards in his hand temporarily blank due to lack of a target. Likewise, A Soldier's Fate blanks every bow card in the opponent's hand when played on your important personality (because the straighten happens just before resolution) and can boost your force up beyond that of many bow/kill/send-home cards that require their target to have lower force. Flanking Action can be neutralized by keeping extra boxables around and answering their PK actions one-for-one. This strategy is never foolproof and requires an extremely good understanding of the cards that your opponent is likely running. Yet it can be extremely powerful when it does work - and a deck whose main unique capability is disruption rather than statistical strength (IE, Crane switch) is best when using this approach, finding those spaces between spaces where the tempest of lethality cannot reach.

Tags: L5R Strategy

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I’m finally going to attempt to crystallize and record how I analyze and see the game of L5R. This isn’t a unified theory; there are still quite a few of game mechanics that this article doesn’t cover. The main omission is force. Despite its relative loss of status compared to the first days, force is still an important factor in battles and strategic situations. In many such cases, I assume that a deck will have figured out how to acquire the necessary force systematically. Despite such assumptions and omissions, I feel that this article is a sizable piece of the puzzle.

L5R is a game based primarily on economic tempo. There are three basic resources: gold, battle tempo, and fate cards. I exclude both honor and dynasty cards from this list because while they interact with the other resources, they do so as positions or restrictions rather than as expendable resources.

Let’s start with gold, which is the easiest resource to quantify. In the Samurai format, the baseline for production is the generic 2-for-2 holding (2 gold cost, 2 gold production). Some decks can afford a higher proportion of holdings that produce 3 gold, such as Kyuden Kyotei out of Crane or the cavalry-friendly gold base of Unicorn decks. This is critically important during deckbuilding, but has almost no bearing on analysis of a game in progress. Because holding costs and production is so unified in the Samurai format, the cost of any personality can be expressed in holdings rather than gold. Strongholds often count as two holdings on the basis of gold production alone. Since there are no free holdings and no holdings that can split their production between multiple cards, holdings buy each other on a 1-to-1 basis. Any personality that you play comes at the expense of purchasing more holdings. It doesn’t matter if you pay 3g and 2g for a 5g personality and I pay 4g and 3g for a 7g personality – we both passed up exactly the same amount of development in order to put our personality into play.

There is a limit to economic development: your number of provinces. If you have 8 holdings, but the cards in your provinces only cost 6 total holdings to play, then the 2 extra holdings go to waste. Since you played those holdings instead of personalities earlier in the game, that’s a significant tempo disadvantage. One way to combat this is to include a mix of cheap and expensive personalities in your deck, since you can discard the expensive ones early buy play them late to take advantage of your higher production. This is also where action phase kill comes into its own: if you spend holdings to Hired Killer a unit and still play everything in your provinces (or at least everything that matters), then you’ve actually gained tempo over a player who can’t spend above their province cap.

Tempo is the second resource, specifically battle tempo. The Samurai format is extremely battle focused. While it’s possible to avoid battle, doing so is often inefficient or unreliable. All of the most efficient kill cards are battle actions, military decks must fight battles to win, and quite a few honor-gaining effects require battles as well. Battle tempo directly interacts with gold: most battle actions either kill or incapacitate a unit, and most battle actions also require presence and/or an unbowed personality. That means that most early battles, when fate hands are still flush, tend to follow an eye-for-an-eye pattern of kill and counter kill. I tend to think of the number of personalities that you have in your army as the number of tempo beats that you will get to use in battle. When combined with a strategic understanding of evasive effects (Stay Your Blade, Weigh the Cost, Knowledge) and presenceless actions (Outer Walls, Refugees), this is an extremely easy and fairly accurate way to calculate the outcome of an early attack.

There are only a few ways to skew the tempo pattern in your favor. The most systematic way to come out ahead is to simply have more beats on the board. This is done by using the cheapest personalities that can still do the necessary job, or on a temporary basis by using action phase PK or bow to thin your opponent’s ranks before engaging. Another way is to get the first action, either through defending or using sneak attack effects (like Hachigoro or Naval cards – or theoretically Sneak Attack). If the number of personalities is even, then you come out ahead when you go first. If you’re outnumbered, then you can still take down as many as you lose. Sounds great, eh? But there are two more ways to swing things. Neutralizing multiple units at once is ideal, but there’s only one card in the environment that can do it: Shuten Doji’s Fury, which has its own set of restrictions and drawbacks (though Fury combined with Hachigoro can absolutely wreck certain deck types, since it puts you multiple beats up). Finally, using negation or redirection effects can negate your opponent’s beats or prevent them from robbing you of your force and your on-board actions that preserve cards. If you’re lucky, or shrewd, they might even run out of cards or beats before they get around to killing your important personality.

Just like gold, there’s a limit on how many beats that you can use: your fate hand. After a certain point in the mid-game, you’ll run short on actions. Once you’re out of actions in hand, your beats don’t do anything. Some games are decided before reaching this point, which is why the theory of beats is so important, but most results still have to be finalized as the gas tank reaches empty. Sources of card advantage in the Samurai format are uncommon, but they exist. Each one turns either beats or gold into cards: Shrine to Fukurokujin, Stay Your Blade, Knowledge, and more. Good on-board battle actions have the potential to save at least a card per turn through their use. Though they almost never live up to their full potential, since they’re not always engaged and are typically a priority target, these on-board actions still help.

Understanding how these elements mesh together can do wonders for your choices while playing. Gold, battle tempo, and fate cards are all used to further your goal of winning the game. Each turn, a player will invest resources into their win condition and presumably come closer to it. Honor decks and combo decks (like Dishonor or Enlightenment) tend to simply win after enough resources have been invested while military decks must invest in taking provinces before that ticking bomb goes off. The strategic tempo of these matches is easy to read: one player responds when it’s cheapest to slow down the opponent’s win condition while the other simply goes for their goal as quickly as possible without aiding the opponent. The key strategic question is this: when does my investment of resources give better return than that of the opponent? Careful analysis of resource patterns may yield answers, or at least the important tactical questions. When would the resources spent on an attacking force or defensive force fail and be wasted? Beats are critical. When does that action phase PK card gain more than it costs? Beats and gold are both major factors. The military mirror match is more complicated, with more interactions to read, but again there’s really only one key strategic question that needs answering: who benefits from delay and who benefits from immediate action? That question can be answered by looking at the balance of resources. Who has more gold with which to pile up beats to bring to the battlefield? Who is drawing more cards? Who has on-board actions that they could use to gain comparative card advantage through frequent battle? This is amplified for the player of a switch deck, since options expand while margin for error shrinks. When is it worthwhile to push for the military option and when is it best to go for honor instead? That question is often very hard to answer. Each situation is unique, but it’s critical to know the basic patterns of resource use.

This knowledge also benefits deckbuilding in a few simple ways. Building a deck with gold costs that don’t align well with production numbers results in wasted tempo. Paying 2g, 2g, and 2g for a 5g personality is a waste of tempo – look for ways to either play with cheaper, even gold costs, or add more 3g producing holdings. Boxable personalities are extremely high priority, since a pair of them gives you multiple beats compared to one expensive personality. Essentially: don’t use a wasteful gold scheme; don’t build a deck without ways of swinging tempo to your advantage (even if it’s simple as “defend rather than attack”); and don’t build a deck without ways of drawing or conserving fate cards.

Tags: L5R Strategy

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Synergy is something that I feel is under-discussed, since I believe that it is second only to play testing as the best guide when building a deck. The theory is straightforward: the best way to build a powerful deck is to have every card complement and increase the power of every other card. While achieving that ideal is well nigh impossible, it’s quite practical to keep it in mind during deck construction. Every card has individual components that aid or hinder the rest of your deck and your progress towards a win condition. I like to think of these components as many little nubs sticking out from each card, waiting to connect with the rest of your deck. Identifying these nubs and linking them together will practically make a deck build itself. The more nubs that are linked the better each card becomes.

L5R cards have many different statistics that can offer subtle opportunities for synergy. Let’s take glance at a card like Doji Toyoaki. He’s a Courtier and a Samurai, which opens up a wide variety of actions for use. He’s best in an honorable deck, since he gets a bonus from having the Imperial Favor. High focus values synergize with his battle ability, but he has one related point of anti-synergy: high focus values work best alongside dueling, but Toyoaki has only 3 chi and is not a duelist, which makes it difficult or impossible for him to initiate a duel. Toyoaki himself actually conflicts with some of his potential synergy, but that doesn’t make him a bad card since he has a ton of good stats and plenty of nubs.

Even vanilla cards have many nubs: take Doji Ayano as an example. No, I’m not talking about those. I mean that while she’s about as vanilla a card as Crane can get, she has plenty of synergistic potential. Ayano has no abilities or traits, but she does have both the Samurai and Courtier keywords to enable the use of actions. Her chi and personal honor are both 4, which allow her to synergize with a number of effects based on those stats (including force reduction and dueling). She’s not perfect though. Ayano is clearly best in an honor deck due to her honor requirement of 10, which gives her anti-synergy with any other win condition. Her force is only 2, which makes her poor in a military deck (though Crane sometimes has to take what they can get). The ideal deck for her would utilize all of her potential synergies and avoid her anti-synergies: an honorable dueling deck with effects like The Fortunes Smile (also synergizes with duels), Strength in Certainty, Weigh the Cost (also synergizes with duels), and political cards like Governor’s Court. That’s a lot of possibilities for such a seemingly straightforward card.

Fate cards can be evaluated for synergy as well. My favorite example is Impromptu Duel. It has three nubs: it can gain honor and either initiate a duel or cause dishonor. The trick is that your opponent has the choice of effects; to get the best out of the card your deck should connect with all three nubs. The ideal deck for Impromptu Duel would be an honorable dueling deck that also focused on causing and punishing dishonor.

There are often many cards that share synergies and identifying them can speed deck construction. The battle duel package is the first that springs to mind: Warrior Challenge plus First and Final Strike. They have some differences in nubs: Warrior Challenge synergies with the imperial favor and has anti-synergy with dueling due to its low focus value; First and Final Strike has slightly more synergy with the Duelist keyword and honor victories. But both have the same major nub: they’re both battle actions that initiate lethal duels. Normally, if you’re going to include one of them in a deck then you’re going to include both of them. Thus they can usually be lumped together as one package when considering synergy. There are many other such packages out there, but the battle duels are the most obvious.

Synergy theory can be a great guide to building a new deck. The pieces of a deck will fall into place by themselves once you select a few cards as a starting point. Simply find other cards or packages that have synergy with the cards that you know you want to play. Continue doing so, also trying to connect with the synergy nubs of previous additions, until you’ve got more cards than you need. Then begin to cut out the least synergistic or simply bad cards through play testing.

Impromptu Duel alone inspired my first tournament-grade Crane deck: dishonor-control honor out of Shizuka Toshi. My plan was to get as much synergy with Impromptu Duel’s as possible. That meant that the deck must be able to duel, that it must take advantage of honor gain, and that it must be able to punish dishonor. The first point means high chi or duelist personalities, high focus values, and the immediate addition of the battle duel package to take full advantage of dueling. I determined that the deck would try to win an honor victory to take advantage of Impromptu Duel’s honor gain. Finally, many Magistrates and Magistrate actions should be used to punish dishonored personalities. A number of good Magistrate actions have high focus value, like Scouring the Village and Restoring Order, so they have additional synergy with dueling (in fact, they form a nice package that’s worth keeping in mind). I quickly chose Shizuka Toshi for my stronghold since it synergizes heavily with honor victories and dishonor punishment. It so happens that several Crane courtiers have high Chi, so they fit right in with Shizuka Toshi and dueling (one of them, Doji Tsubakita, also has the Magistrate keyword – another connection!). Crane is lucky enough to have a superb crop of Magistrates in Hakuseki and Doukohito, both of whom have the capability to duel as well as use Magistrate actions (they also have fantastic printed actions). These are just the first few pieces that fall into place – many more follow with ease.

Synergy theory is also handy when considering changes between play tests. When considering which cards to remove, first look for what has the most anti-synergy with your deck and the least synergy with the rest of your deck. When looking for cards to add, look for what would most synergize with your deck. If you trim a few cards from a package, consider whether it would be an improvement to cut the rest of the package and replace it with a whole other package that might synergize better with the remaining packages. Similarly, if you remove a package then it might be time to re-evaluate the cards that were connected to it. For example, if you use force reduction alongside small ranged attacks then removing one will significantly weaken the other – possibly to the point where it should also be removed. Synergy theory is good for pointing you in the right direction.

A point of caution though: even with all of the benefits of synergy theory, building a winning deck requires extensive play testing. Some cards may have great synergy with some of your themes but hamper others. It usually takes play testing to determine which cards are worth the anti-synergy that they carry.  Let's go back to my dishonor-control deck.  Allegations was a useful battle action that causes dishonor disruption, but it was anti-synergistic with dueling due to its low focus value. It was in my original builds, but play testing proved that the anti-synergy was too damaging to retain the card. Reinforce the Gates is allowed me to use my battle-swinging duels and dishonor punishment without being dodged or killed preemptively, but it also has the anti-synergy of low focus value. Play testing proved that the effect was absolutely worth the cost, so the card stayed.

Synergy is an essential part of strategy. The better your cards complement each other, the better that they all become. This theory can be used as a good guide and rapid shortcut when building decks. Recognition of the possibilities of each card can easily be leveraged into the quick construction of a solid deck. With time and play testing, the result can be refined into a spider web of elegant power.

Tags: L5R Strategy

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