The Swift Sword

Oh my goodness, I confused a pair of buttons that sit right next to each other. Very sorry.

I'd love to offer a more detailed analysis, but the access to product has been somewhat restricted. There are no Lion starts within a hundred miles of my location and you are asking prior to the release date.

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Swift Sword Forum Rules

I don't have access to the Lion Clan Starter, but I do have the Crab Clan starter through your Facebook promotion, so I'll restrict my comments to what I can talk about safely (mostly as a retailer) and update when (if) my store's Starter box order arrives, as our wholesaler has informed us about shortage issues.

The selection of two dovetailing clan themes is an excellent choice and should work well for any clan. I suspect that your self-enforced build rules will favor the most straightforward victory conditions, but that's a feature, not a bug. It might lead to a lot of "more of the same" Clan decks going forward into the arc, but that's only if you don't use expansion starters to showcase the less obvious themes a clan is capable of.

Including the Clan Champion and all four Strongholds is another excellent idea and I hope to see it continued in the future. This aspect of the product has been particularly exciting for the prospective players in my store and right now is putting L5R head and shoulders above competing CCGs in that I can advertise a well-built, structured, complete deck with all of the staples you'll need to proceed in the game. Magic: The Gathering has something similar in its competitive "Event Deck" product, but even then, you need to purchase additional product to get all the lands, etc, you need to play the game fully. Yu-Gi-Oh Starter and Structure decks might as well not even exist in terms of actual play, and WoW TCG's prebuilt products are so variable in terms of play quality that it's hard to recommend any of them confidently.

I love the cardboard token/chip insert to keep track of force pumps, etc. Super-nice, particularly in L5R when there are so many modifiers a card can carry on a permanent or temporary basis. Including a few token cards to represent relevant token followers/items when need be would be a good idea as well, I think.

The included fiction is compelling, as usual, and the "Profile cards" for the Starter deck's personalities is well appreciated, particularly by the new players. Nice to see that the binding on the rulebook looks up to the task of holding to together for the many flip-thoughs it will see.

Finally, the packaging is keeping pace with the usual solid, durable, presentable, reusable philosophy I've come to expect from you guys. Overall, great job in that department. It threw me for a second to see the random rares and the rest of the promotional/etc cards packed in with the deck itself, and I think a new player will continue to attempt to shuffle the random rares into their deck without thinking about it too much, so there might be an opportunity here to separate the deck itself from the value-adds more clearly now that you have a deluxe deck box providing the space.

I'll include thoughts about the construction of the actual Lion deck here later. If you have a link to the equivalent Crab Clan discussion, I'd be happy to contribute there regarding the Crab build.

The Lion starter is an excellent assembly of cards to demonstrate the difference between themes. The fact that there is one card for each of the two represented themes that is not usable without the appropriate trait is perhaps not as newbie-friendly as it could be, nor am I keen on the idea of putting Heart of Rokugan and Brothers in Battle in a deck with three non-humans. Some new players will see these and learn from them, some will not. When it comes to starters, that is pretty much my primary concern.

However, I do have to completely acknowledge that Scout as a theme has no real cards that work without the scout trait and just do more if you have it. Cast Aside the Weak is an exception to the trend about theme-centric strategy cards.

It is readily cohesive enough to function without a lot of extra work. Definitely kudos on that front.

Next week, I should be able to compare and contrast to the other starters.

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Swift Sword Forum Rules

Finally got to play sealed.

The Lion deck suffers horribly from the lack of battle actions on the Lions. This was very apparent in my matchup with a Mantis deck. Both were scout themed but Mantis had at least 2 copies of 2 peeps with RA's able to kill most peeps and followers as well as their champ while Lion's only on peep kill was the champ and Shinju which has the downside of destroying the card that you need for stuff like well prepared (which was really one of the stars of the deck).

The only keyword specific actions included was Disrupting Communication and Guided by Honor this left the deck with filler like 3 incapacitated. Why not include 2 or 3 copies of both Spirit of the Scout and Spirit of Paragons? They give keywords out and/or useable actions.

With the deck so dependent on the fate hand card draw beyond the Satoshi War Fans and the Face of Ninube cards was essential but missing. Which with the restrictions of no rares is unavoidable I guess.

Overall, with the design restrictions taken into account, it wasn't horrible but in the future design restrictions for starters should be taken into account when assigning rarity.

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