First, thanks for starting this thread. One question I have: suppose I want to be able to make two 40/40 card decks of different clans to play with a friend on game night. They don't necessarily need to be good decks, just playable. How many core set boxes will I need to do that?

Might start making some Crane decklists. Make one dueling / military and one political flavored for variety?

The way the staff were talking in the last Facebook Livestream it's possible we will never see an "experienced" Hotaru (or anyone,) rather just a different version of her, perhaps with slightly different stats and a different ability or keywords, but not necessarily any stronger.

So we know that bowed characters can still use skills. If a character (like Kakita Kaezin) is bowed and uses his ability, is his unaltered duel stat used, or is it considered "0" for being bowed?

Saw a number of shutdown effects this time. But we can't make any judgement about how good they are until we've seen more of the card pool to see what ways there are to deal with them. For example, how much send home or discard will there be printed on personality cards that can get rid of the Guest of Honor? Though now that I think of it, I can Pacifism her from joining military conflicts or Cloud the Mind to remove her text (because Cloud is an attachment!) Maybe the shutdown isn't so bad, since it isn't so absolute. There are still options to deal with it. Dueling doesn't really seem that good at the moment. Maybe its utility will become more apparent in actually play? At the moment I don't think I would dread to see a duel on the board. Hm... we haven't seen the Phoenix yet so we can't say for sure, but I get the feeling the Crane might not be a good splash clan for the Phoenix; all the honor manipulation doesn't seem likely to mesh with our play style.

Apple keeps the details of new phone releases secret, but no one accuses them of visiting dark places. Well I mean maybe some people do, but that's not my point.

I would be all for it being an exploding Phoenix card, but the original specifically worked better with a Crane personality. But yeah, Noble Sacrifice is a perfectly fine card name, but I always had a soft spot for To Do.

Man the more I look at this card the more I'm disappointed that it actually isn't called "To Do What We Must." Perhaps it's selfish for an older player to want that sort of nostalgia, but I'm all for them re-using good card names.

Gives a two-point honor swing (+1 to you, -1 to opponent), too. At any rate, sometimes we have no choice but To Do What We Must.

I'm kind of wondering if the Scorpion won't start some plot that plays into the Gencon tourney. Maybe not a coup, but something. In which case they could be last to set up the story tournament with their fiction.

I'll go ahead and warn you: that is probably not going to change.

Doji Gift Giver? While I like the flavor of the card, the name really lacks any "umph."

In a way Mirabu's ascension to Champion was perhaps one of the most "realistic:" a mild-manner middle management guy is given the promotion not because any remarkable accomplishment but merely because of seniority and long years of loyal work. Or basically the council saw Aikune and decided to make the Shiba champion a guy that wouldn't rock the boat or try to fight with them over clan policy.

With a short stint in between by Shiba "Well I guess someone has the be champion" Mirabu.

I don't think character death ever caused a problem in the CCG, so I don't think it'll be a problem in the LCG either. While the kami cards from Dawn of the Empire weren't legal for the main story line events of the day, people like Kakita and Isawa were legal in the Diamond and Lotus environments. IIRC Kakita was also so widely used (and good) that they had to errata his ability.

It is not okay to say that even in jest.

The Phoenix have a champion; I see no problem with making the Phoenix fiction about him. (I use a Sparrow handle, but I'm a big Shiba fan.)

Bill Gates, indomitable Champion of the Windows Clan?

Well they did live next to each other, but it's often family members that fight the most. But indeed, we shall see how these topics are handled in the FFG setting. As much fun as Phoenix Dragons was to play (Void Dragon Munch Munch Munch) I would be just as happy if it wasn't a Phoenix (or any clan) deck type this time around.

This point got brought up a lot back in the day but it was never at odds with the lore; the Phoenix Clan are about understanding and using the mystical and divine forces of the universe (which the elemental dragons were embodiments of) while the Dragon Clan is about understanding and using the mystical and divine forces within yourself.

His twenty best name-drops?

Rokugan in a nutshell.

I don't know, an Akodo-trained tactician won the Battle of Beiden Pass in old L5R, but that story (as I recall) did have a lot of caveats.

This being the first fiction for the new L5R I was expecting FFG to pull out all of the stops and start with a really stellar piece. Instead, we got a standard weekly fiction that basically just did some name dropping / story set-up. I guess it did the job, but color me disappointed that there was no game mechanic preview this week to go with the fiction.

It's also possible that Doji Hotaru is the story team favorite / de facto "main character" of the new plot (though I have faith that the story team won't pick clan favorites like that.)