But that's how it worked in Old5R when you played out of clan personalities. The cards will still also clearly be colored for another faction. Why would it be so impossible for my Crane deck to suddenly throw out a Shiba Bodyguard?

Well, they didn't "fix" Hoturi as much as change the character's name to something that sounded similar. Of course, you could always just say the tu like tsu, but then it's confusing because it most other places in the game usually tsu is written like tsu.

"Bayushi Taro is a leftie, and I have the evidence to prove it." "TRAITOR TO THE EMPIRE! Have him executed immediately!"

Plagues are always good for foreshadowing trouble on the horizon. So... the Wasting Disease? Which scroll did Yogo Junzo open first in the AEG canon?

Right, but I think there was also something about him at least pretending to be right-handed to keep people off guard. That way when he put his swords to his right side (where they would be difficult for a right-hander to draw) in situations where Rokugani custom made such a show of unpreparedness to fight a social politeness, he actually had his swords in an advantageous position for him should the encounter turn to swordplay. Or I might have made that up in my head.

Oh, please DO give the Scorpion a Soy Sauce Champion.

Your post was specifically referencing the lack of the "I" in "Nerishma", so I thought it was a really clever meta-joke.

Or Kuro Mori.

But with the fact we've already seen Yojin no Shiro change names, I think it's possible to assume that at least the first batch of cards we saw were not the absolute final versions to go to the printers, so we could see Nerishima's spelling getting fixed yet.

Was that intentional?

I've always wondered how they picked the original family names for the great clans in the first place. Like, if there was any specific inspiration, etc.

As long as both writer and reader each mutually understand the style with no ambiguity then as far as I'm concerned that's "correct." But Hepburn with diacritics is, I'm to understand, preferred in academic contexts. It's just a pain to write on a standard keyboard is all. But I'll take it over Kunrei Style ("sho" written as "syo", "chi" written as "ti," etc.) any day.

Straight up Hepburn with the diacritics all up in here. And they have changed the card name for Yojin no Shiro since last week. Perhaps the new one is the one that went to the printers and the old one was an early mock-up?

These Scorpion cards seem kind of cool and even look fun to play. I mean what, no, I am a loyal Phoenix player, I am...

My intuition would be to assume the opposite. That is to say, if the Shadowlands are not a playable faction then making anti-Taint cards is easier for the design team, because then it just becomes meta rather than a hard shutdown of an entire faction. I mean Purity of the Seven Thunders was a powerful play against a tainted/corrupt deck, but was just unfair against a Shadowlands Horde deck (as it was basically an auto-win.)

It looks like that you'll have a Crab deck full of generic, no-name personalities either way. Depending on how many uniques we get and how many it's practical to put in a deck, mono-family decks might be possible, but I feel that is down the road. In the meantime, there is nothing to stop you from playing your Eager Scout and Borderlands Defender and imagining them to be Yasuki.

I hope it doesn't have to do with the taint. I mean, I am all on favor of taint and corruption being in the game both as a story element and a game-play element. But I want there to be space for pure players, and some sort of benefit to pure Phoenix outside of being able to act annoyingly smug about being pure (while tanking the Swiss rounds.)

Also, hopefully spells and magic will actually provide powerful effects appropriate to their costs. In L5R1 I always felt spells were either too good or not good enough, without much varience in between. I do find it curious we haven't seen magic yet in the previews, or any Phoenix personalities yet for that matter. I'm looking forward to see that preview article.

C'mon, "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" is a classic!

We also don't know where the story is going yet. For all we know Daigotsu might show up as a foil to the Seven Thunders instead of the Four Winds. I wouldn't completely rule out the Spider showing up as the default Shadowlands faction as some point (perhaps in a way like WHW suggests above.) Just as long as they don't eat the Sparrow this time...

So I've just realized that the decision to use generic names for most basic personalities reduces the number of characters we will be seeing as cards from the get-go. Here's hoping the expansions include a lot of named character cards.

"He removed the sword from his belt and placed it on the stand." Good writing is simplicity, or so I hear.

While you make a great point Builder2, unfortunately there is also the fact that foreign-sounding names and words often "sound cool" to non-native speakers, even when they sound pretty silly to a native speaker. We're playing a game about magical samurai authored by native English speakers with varying degrees of understanding of Japanese. I've come to terms with the fact that any and all Japanese (or other languages, for that matter) that is incorporated into the game will probably not be correct. But if we bring up the "supai" trait I will probably go on an epic rant. (Guess I've not come to terms with everything...)

To be fair, English spelling rules are so much all over the place that you could probably find a spelling example that would justify pronouncing "o" as an "a." (Not that I'm condoning such practices.)

So I've always assumed "kotei" came from 皇帝 ("emperor") and thus the the "o" is actually elongated like the "do" of bushido (or for that matter, both o's in Tokyo.) This is (basically) equivalent to how the "i" on the end if "te" sort of elongates the "e" sound. So while in Japanese the word has four moras, the English pronunciation in two syllables (koh-tay) is a decent equivalent for native English speakers. But a Japanese speaker would see the word as four "sounds" (ko-u-te-i, again assuming it's supposed to be "emperor/皇帝") that for practical purposes might sound like "ko-o-te-e." But someone more knowledgeable about Japanese phonetic discourse might correct me on the above points (I'm not really sure if the final "i" is elongating the "e" or if it's doing something slightly different, though I remember being taught like a decade and a half ago that's how "i" after "e" worked in Japanese and never questioned it until I starting writing this post today.) tl;dr Koh-tay, basically?