Girltori is my new waifu. Considering how much Fire Emblem Heroes I've been playing, that's quite an accomplishment.

Girltori x Kachiko. Nothing else matters. That aside, mechanically it feels like a lot of their other games. No surprises, it'll probably all be very balanced at the start.

I think the tsunami was caused by the Romulans going back in time and destroying the USS Kelvin.

She's referred to as Shoju's "impossibly beautiful wife" in the write-up.

Akodo Arasou was not previously unnamed. He was well known from the RPG supplements.

Doubtful, they swapped Yokatsu too. However, if they intend for Hotaru and Kachiko to have a romance I am totally in this game like yesterday. AEG never let us push the romance between the Crane and Scorpion girl in Ivory/20F.

They gender swapped Doji Hoturi! EDIT: And Shinjo Yokatsu! I mean Shinjo Altansarnai.

Back to Clan Wars, with some of my favorite old characters like Savvy Politician! What memories we two made. The nostalgia is flowing!

So many reused art assets

I had a great L5R campaign years ago based on the idea of Fu Leng possessing Hida Kisada instead of Hantei. I'm all about pulling a USS Kelvin if we go back to the old story.

If it is Fu Leng I hope they keep his 80s Hair Metal look.

It would have to be someone big that instantly places the era, so probably someone like Fu Leng or one of the other Kami, or Toturi or something.

They specifically said they didn't because they realized one of the cards would show a character that was a "big spoiler" for where they were taking the story.

The box set will have the same cards in it. They usually just only include a portion of the total amount you can have (like if the limit is 4 of the same card, they might include only 2 or even 1 copy per core set to force you to buy multiples of the core set to have the maximum copies of everything). So if you need 2 core sets to play it means you'll need 2 core sets to have the maximum amount of each card in the set available to play.

2 core sets to be competitive, so it's either 2 cards to make a set or 4 cards to make a set. Also they are still doing Koteis but they will "work differently" and there will only be 8 worldwide the first year.

I just hope FFG seriously revamps attachments. They could cut so many unnecessary cards and rules annoyances out by getting rid of them or curtailing them. From what I have heard I honestly don't expect this game to resemble 'Classic L5R' at all, so I just hope it's an entertaining game on its own.

Just keep in mind that 'There were going to be three or four factions' is technically true in the sense that there was a set with a Shadowlands Nitoshi and an Undead Moto Taigo is true (they were both in a very early layout for a set we never actually started officially designing, so neither had final approval from ST or even any abilities). It's 'technically' true.

Though keep in mind this was 2 years ago almost, so take the finer details with a grain of salt.

They were going to be, and this is general because we never really hammered out anything more than the most basic concepts, but essentially they would be 4 'faction' Strongholds, each with dual or multiple clans aligned to them (ie Naga, Lion, Crab for example). We would release sensei that had aspects of each individual clan in the alliance, so if you wanted to, you could use that faction to play only Crab or Lion or Naga. Anyway, that was the general idea. As to those 4 alliances, like I said, we only vaguely talked about it. In the end I think we might have even discussed cutting it down to 3; Crab + Lion + Naga, Crane + Phoenix + Unicorn, and Spider + Scorpion + Dragon. It's been a while, though, so I don't 100% remember. The idea of cutting factions down actually came up seriously after we (the Design Team) were told that we would be moving L5R to an LCG, though I think I pitched it in a meeting once before then. It was a bit after this we were told it was being sold to FFG. I believe Sept. 11th when the news broke online was a Friday, I had only found out about it at the beginning of that week.

Sorry you feel that way, it was meant more as an anecdote than some deep insight into the nature of design theory. The reality was because there was a mandate for a focus on draft in Ivory and later Onyx, that low rarity Items and Followers (which is what I was sure to specify) needed to generally speaking produce simpler effects, and had to be more universally useful, which tended to make them a bit generic. Because x number of cards per set were items or followers, you tended, after a while to have common items and followers that sort of all blended together, and it became a bit of a challenge to keep trying to make them interesting or unique. When you get up to the uncommon and rare items, though, you will get to see some of those more nonstandard items and effects that I was talking about looking forward to making (Aramasu's Mask, Regal Furisode, Official Sanction, things like that). Due to how limited they were in terms of being able to be used in draft, spells tended to be higher rarity, and thus we had a little more flexibility to make their effects nonstandard, or things that might be kind of useless in a draft environment.

They are more generous than we would have been. We'd basically planned after Onyx to cut it back to 4 factions, total.

Enough to know I hated making low rarity Items (and followers that weren't Undead or Naga)

I always hated Items the most. You could do so many weird and unique things with spells, they could function as the engine for entire deck concepts. Anyone who's seen the Chuda cards from Onyx can tell you I quite loved spells. Items were always just boring, especially at the lower rarities. How many different versions of a common sword do I have to make? It was always such a pain, which is why I always begged for the chance to make the rare Items and Followers. I hope FFG streamlines attachments, if they don't just get rid of them entirely.

Sorry you never got that Shadowlands Nitoshi, but that set never even got to the layout phase. Seriously I really envy FFG for being able to hack out elements of this game without worrying about the past cardpool and its effect on them. I loved designing L5R but so many of its gameplay elements were in need of modernization that we simply didn't have the leeway to do.

Not good enough, apparently!