The Swift Sword

Games of Will

0GC

Battle: Choose your performing unbowed Personality and target an enemy card with lower Gold Cost: Bow it.

Battle: Choose your performing Personality: Negate all current and new Force penalties to him from actions. Negate all current and new effects from other players' cards that prevent him from contributing Force to his army.

"Ah, politics." - Shiba Tsukimi

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I am proud to be a Black Lion. One of many...

What am I playing now? [still in development]

An answer to Game of Sincerity, finally. It just also nixes force penalties at the same time. And it has a printed battle action on it.

This punts a solid chunk of our printed actions in the junk.

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Swift Sword Forum Rules

Finally, an answer to Game of Sincerity!

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I am proud to be a Black Lion. One of many...

What am I playing now? [still in development]

Yep. A perfect card for Unicorn and a horrible card for Lion to see. Shunori liked a game of sinerity :-/

In full disclosure: My current tournament deck is partly a force reduction deck, so I cannot say that I am unbiased about that chunk of the card.

The blanket negation of current and future force penalties on a personality that doesn't need to be opposed supports a less interactive style. A force penalty is generally the very weakest of battle actions, barely qualifying as a "pro-active" action. There were already two non-unique and one unique fate card that filled this role of nixing force penalties, all of which also function unopposed.

A: "I give your guy -4F"
B: "I kill your guy."
A: "Province is saved. Pass."
B: "Negate your force penalty. Now I'm taking."

One opposed action that does not actually threaten an enemy personality is undone by an unopposed action. However, this creates a larger problem later in the game. Justly Earned Victory sat next to Ordered Retreat as a problem card because it was capable of undoing multiple actions (an entire battle's worth) with a single card. Cards that prevent future force penalties do so on a smaller scale. They have the option of undoing multiple actions with a single card, or with preventing multiple actions from having any effectiveness. A card that prevents multiple actions from having an impact is only a little lower on the scale.

Decks have weaknesses. They run meta for them. There is no meta for "negate all force penalties" aside from "run a different deck." There isn't a card that straightens a personality and prevents all further bowing, though we have re-usable straighten. There isn't a card that prevents all send-home, though we have re-usable movement negation. If there were a card that did either, then we have Preserving Honor. We do have cards that negate all current and future force penalties, and three decks that have this as a general strategy.

I'm not saying that the sky is falling. No military deck is going to stop running Creating Order. Decks that run 3 Tireless Efforts now are more likely to drop to 2 and run 2 copies of Games of Will than they are to just go from 4 to seven cards to deal with force penalties. Some berserker decks might, since the other action on Games of Will requires greater gold cost, but that isn't going to be as helpful for 7G Kensai. I'm not expecting to see force penalty meta leap from 4 to 7 cards, but I fully expect to see it go from 4 to 5 cards in decks concerned about it. This is not a small thing, however. A deck that aims for a single unit taking a province can slap down this action and still have plenty left to deal with an enemy army after shutting down multiple printed actions. The decks most needing Games of Will are already decks that have inherently higher resistance based on their available card pool.

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Swift Sword Forum Rules

All I can say is that I completely agree with Domotai. I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed if it weren't for the fact that 3 of our non-unique personalities( Arata, Koyama, Kaido) were all strictly force penalty actions. Nevermind that those force penalties at least enabled us to bring opposing personalities into Ranged attack range. It makes Paragons even more of a blank personality base against large force opponents.

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Akodo Arasou
Lion Clan•Samurai•Tactician•Paragon•Loyal•Unique

Same feelings here. But unfortunately mentioning it in non-Lion company results in "your Paragons are br0ken bceause they are, you know, Lion Paragons therefore you have no right to complain " autoresponse.

This card is in my opinione example of what was (is?) bad in card design&testing departament. Card that is necessary to counter another single and powerful card, put something extra to make it playable against decks not playing that single particular card and do not sit to thought what those extra things do to other existing cards. And all in first expansion.

[EDIT]
Technical question. How I should rate it ? Card involutnarily hoses down one kind of deck (therefore is bad), but besides that is balanced and playable (therefore is good). There is no option "mixed feeling"

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Matsu Semitaro
Lion Clan • Samurai • Grumble • Tempted • Loyal • Unique • Bounty Hunter • 1768 • 2067
Limited: Grumble. A lot.
Daughter of Heaven? I wonder what my granny thinks about it...

Question about this card...the last line reads, "Negate all current and new effects from other players' cards that prevent him from contributing Force to his army."

Bowed personalities don't contribute force to his army.

Would this card also prevent your personality from being bowed?

No. A card must be directly preventing the personality from contributing force. In the case of being bowed it is the rulebook that prevents the peep from contributing force.

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Legacy format discussion

Nice. Thanks!