I've noticed that, like, seven or eight out of ten times, when someone says they loved the MCA, this is what they actually mean.

Thematic is fine, but you have to weigh how thematic you want to be versus how effective you want to be. If you go too far then people just won't play duels, they will just play any other thing that doesn't punish them because it works too reliably.

People bully duel because nobody wants to use cards that are not reliable. If there is a chance you will lose your duel, why even play with duels and instead just opt for alternative strategies that produce similar results without the risk? As long as there is dueling, people who chose to include it in their decks will do so because they do not intend to ever lose those duels, which means they don't intend for whoever they target to ever have a chance.

As one of the three people that designed Ivory, let me go ahead and disabuse you of that notion.

I remember that one of the things that Spooky from ST always wanted was for the Crab Clan Champion to be some kind of devious, strategic bishounen pretty boy just to see how the Crab playerbase would deal with that kind of guy leading them as opposed to the standard Kisada/Yakamo/Kuon/ect. We haven't seen Yakamo yet so there could always still be time for his dream to come true!

Come September I will be playing Clan War L5R and watching MST3K. It's like I've traveled back in time to the late nineties.

What will really be interesting is if they gender flipped Yoritomo...

That Shinjo Yokatsu has been turned into a girl as well and nobody flipped out about it should tell you all you need to know about how little attention was paid to Unicorn characters in the Clan Wars arc.

Some of it will come down to, when playing it, whether Nu5R is "based on a true story" (i.e. there was a house where people were murdered) or "inspired by a true story "(i.e. there was a house where people were murdered BY GHOSTS), in regards to how it feels vis-a-vis Old5R.

Nobody had anything against the Mantis Clan. I know this is a really popular thing to think that there was some secret cabal where we all hated X Clan and thus vindictively set out to 'punish' them, but that wasn't the case. You might be surprised to find out that among our Playtest teams by far the most popular clans were Spider and Mantis, in that order, with Spider being by far the largest group. Honestly, DT (from what I remember and what someone else confirmed here elsewhere) had nothing to do with deciding what happened to the Mantis Clan, we were merely told that was the decision and we did what we could to enact it from there (I think by the time we started planning for Onyx the whole decision about the Mantis had already been made by people that largely weren't even working for the company anymore). In fact, we (DT and Story Team, as well) fought to include the Other Family Sensei so that Mantis players would still be able to play some aspects of their clans and represent them. Initially they weren't planned to be there at all. There was also a big push by some higher ups to mostly destroy the Phoenix and Unicorn Clans and somehow mesh them together into a totally different clan, but that was so bizarre many of us pushed back hard enough that they opted against it in the end.

Clan loyalty is entirely dependent on how strong an individual clan deck can actually be. If you can only do so well with mono-Clan decks, then you'll probably see Clan loyalty fall to the wayside outside of extremely casual play.

It always struck me as funny how many people who loved the Mantis Clan actually loved the families that weren't an original part of it. Not that Yoritomo didn't have his fans, but everyone else always seemed to have more (except the Moshi, not a lot of love for a clan of supposedly traditional yet suspiciously underdressed fire priestesses). In Onyx it wasn't the entire Mantis that were wiped out, just the Yoritomo family, and the other Mantis families basically fractured back into the Wasp, Fox, and Centipede Clans, each with a Sensei that allowed you to play just them if you so chose. I think it was going to be interesting to see what, if anything, came of that.

Hopefully someday I can tell the horror stories of working on Ivory Edition. It was definitely a trial by fire for me. Unfortunately, by the time the Design Team was really able to gel, it was 20F and then it was all over too soon.

That baby is going to have to grow up SUPER fast if you intend for it to die in the coup. Also, Hotaru would be an unwed, pregnant female. You're basically destroying her character's ability to ever be taken seriously in society. Kachiko pretended Dairu was her child with Shoju. Hotaru would have no such cover.

So AEG eventually did that by bolding keywords with mechanical effects.

It'll be very unfortunate but if they had any plans for a Hotaru/Kachiko relationship, in a mature, non-exploitive way, I am sure this furor over this pillow fight thing has most likely scared them away from exploring it now. Truly sad because it would have been nice to see such things explored considering how hostile AEG was to the concept.

The Shadowlands can definitely be fundamental to the setting without having their own faction. Honestly, one of the big problems with the Shadowlands, and by extension the Spider, was that when you factionalize them, you bring them down to the level of any one other Clan. This serves to diminish the awe-inspiring nature of the threat they are supposed to possess. How can anyone really look at the Shadowlands and think 'oh crap' when they are only as strong as any other of the Seven Clans individually? You can say 'well, it's just a skirmish, not all of the horde against one clan', but you mind still sees them as being equals.

They've already rewritten the old cannon with Hotaru and Shinjo AltTab. That ship has sailed.

The possibilities for telling the old story in a new way are endless. They have a ton of material to work with, I'm very excited as a fan about the possibilities and also so jealous they actually get to do it. I mean, who hasn't run an L5R Clan Wars "alternate universe" campaign?

Like I said, I actually tried to have them make a "sexy male geisha" Scorpion Clan card but the art was changed by someone higher up with no explanation into a generic ninja on a roof. Sexy girls were fine, sexy men apparently less so. And as was said elsewhere by the 4E writer trying to depict a male same sex relationship, certain elements in AEG seemingly did not agree with depicting these types of relationships specifically for personal reasons. Another reason I hope FFG does go for a Hotaru/Kachiko relationship that is handled maturely and deeply and not fetishized.

Also happy to see a Shinjo leading the Unicorn again! Bye Moto!

This story appears to be set before the events that lead to the Coup, indeed even before meathead jock Arasou's ill-fated attempt to give Tsuko a Crane castle as a wedding present, leading to his own death. Thus it is totally appropriate for people who died during the Coup to be currently alive, new timeline or not. That being said, I hope that they incorporate Hida Sukune more into the story this time around.

I'd like to talk about how you never asked me to be on your show. I blame Jay, personally.

As someone who played this game since he was 15 back in the Imperial Edition days and never missed an Edition, met his wife and most of his dearest friends directly because of this game, and actually ended up designing the game and working for AEG, I like to think I am one of those people with a vested emotional attachment to L5R. I worked so hard on the Onyx Edition stuff, poured my heart and soul into cards that will never be played with and stories and characters I created from Ivory on that have now been effectively wiped from existence. I can tell you there's a pain from that that doesn't easily go away. The truth is, outside of Magic and probably Pokémon, the CCG model was failing and the game was dying at AEG slowly and painfully due to bad marketing decisions and various other issues, despite the best efforts of a lot of talented and dedicated people (mostly unpaid volunteers). I'm honestly happy it will be able to continue, that new people will have a chance to enjoy this world, and I'm really looking forward to sitting down and playing this game with old friends when it comes out. And, of course, teaching my son someday, who pretty much only exists because this game did. It took me most of these two years to come to this point, and I hope everyone else can come to feel this way about it.

All joking aside, it'd be refreshing for them to go this route if only because certain elements at AEG seemed intent on specifically making sure a same-sex relationship was never depicted, despite some of our best efforts (sorry Natsuyo and Fuyuko!) Strangely, an attempt to give the Scorpion a male geisha/ninja character appeared to meet with similar resistance. The geisha aspect of his character was expunged with no explanation given.