Ce que Fukurokojin dit du Spider en C.E.

In his video interview at the Championships, Bryan revealed a few things about upcoming Spider themes, so I'm comfortable repeating that information here.

1. Dark Virtues will continue to be a theme for Spider. Spider Paragons that work better with Dark Virtues, new Dark Virtues, and such.

2. We're planning more Spider breeder. We'll be looking at other thematic ways to focus on Undead, as well. This theme will include a subset of Shugenja that raise zombies and use maho. However, let me stress that it is not just about creating zombie tokens; there will be ways to play the theme without having to swarm.

3. Working with Oni. We've got an idea for Spider decks that can use plenty of Oni without dishonoring themselves out of the game. You don't need to worry about the game mechanics behind this if you like the idea; suggestions for more hulking Oni and actions they can perform are quite welcome.

If you like some of the other aspects of Spider, feel free to let us know and make suggestions, such as Monk or Chuda Chiaki style honor cards. We are leaving room for cards that don't fit a solid theme, as well as having minor themes that will get built more slowly over the course of the arc.

Sorry for such a long post, but here are some views of mine from an outsider, for spider. First, I’ve only played spider at two events this year. At the Maumee kotei I took top spider, but missed the cut by 1 win due to playing 3 dishonors that day (ill return to this subject later) and I used Black silk to qualify for the main event at GenCon Indy this year going 6-2 the first day qualifier placing something like 7th or 11th. That being said, I really do not feel the lack of quality personalities, strongholds, or battle actions are the reasons for spider’s lack of success this year, I think it boils down to 3 things now.

1) Spider overall is still under represented at many tournaments. A handful of kotei’s I went to only had a handful of spiders when 80+ participants were there. Ratling was much the same way until lotus when they were absurdly good and even that did not entice an overwhelming number of players. Also, as noted by many of the fine people in this thread, early on spider lacked any direction and it took a while for players/design to find the niche for spider.

2) Well it’s simply this, spider for most of the arc has lost to 2 of the 3 real win conditions in L5R. Honor was a problem from the start (one top tier player at Evansville said “if spider could beat honor at a high level a lot more of us would play them“) this has become less of a problem, but I think people still struggle with honor to a degree.

Now the most important one, spider just doesn’t lose to dishonor it has really no mechanic to be able to handle this victory condition at all. You start a 0 honor, and at MOST can gain 1-4 points of honor during a game for those random 1 personal honor spiders you pay full for. Compare that even to crab who starts at 3 honor, and can gain 5-8 honor off buying personalities for full. Add those numbers together and it roughly means for dishonor to beat crab they need to make them lose in the nebierhood of 28-31 honor whereas for spider it’s 21-24.

That is a huge difference, not to mention clans like phoenix, unicorn, crane, lion, and dragon can gain honor at a much higher rate, and dishonor can beat those clans as well and are designed to do so. So spider is left in the dust there. The only thing you can do is over meta, meaning you lose more military and honor match ups then before or just ignore dishonor all together. Meaning you have a slim chance of winning a major event unless many favorable match ups appear.

3) I think spider suffer from a lack of tempo swinging abilities. Let me explain: if you take the clans that reliably go second besides spider: Crab, mantis, scorpion. Crab has bar none the hardest to deal with units of any clan. They are big and tough. They have a stronghold to negate death and an over abundance of personalities with movement abilities to ignore send home. With the attaching of large following even bowing is less attractive meaning it is hard to deal with crab in battle and that I believe makes up for their having less units on the board.

Mantis has arguably been in the same boat as spider for most of the arc. Poor performances despite a good stronghold in eastern hub, not until very powerful followers were printed (Taoist and Veteran) have they done better, and also with naval mantis can many times get the first action in battle negating the tempo issue of going second and having less units.

Scorpion dishonor cares less about tempo as it is a clock deck just waiting for it’s time. Scorpion military at least the good builds, win by denying you personalities by punking those provinces early.

Now to spider, with the exception of Spider’s Lair, Ruined City and Black silk while great in battle do not make up the fact you have less people, and most military games start a province or two down to your opponent. Spider’s Lair has tempo swinging in the fact that it does provide those resources to you despite your loss of provinces. What it doesn’t provide is any ability to handle either honor or dishonor two popular victory conditions in this years tournament scenes.

What does any of my rambling mean? I do no think spider personalities are sub par. There are a host of 5f for 7g personalities. Some of even have battle actions. Crab decks run Hiruma Aki for that cost and he’s blank. Spider shugenja are overstated for their cost, but besides breeder, how is one to win with them? Spider unique’s are fine as well. Even the spider strongholds in a vacuum are all great (although ruined city see’s pitiful if any support) The problem is always going second and not having a swing trait like naval or powerfully hard to deal with units like crab leaves spider to often playing catch up. And always losing to dishonor is the nail in the coffin for this arc I believe, unless dishonor becomes such a non viable tournament deck, which I doubt. The sad part of this these factors are mainly out of spider players hands.

To make a short story long, I think that the best thing for the spider players to do is to share successful deck lists more, and see what decks have had slight successes (SLuT, Paragons, Breeder) and to focus on working with other players to facilitate better deck lists. This happens to an extent but working together to build a deck might yield better results.I believe the author of the breeder said the reason he did not post his deck pre-gencon was he knew the reaction would be un favorable, that is a poopy environment to create good decks in. Maybe group decks in the deck forum would be good thing if someone wanted to start them, and maybe if people saw spider players working together in such a way, could field better all around tournament decks. Well if you read this thanks for listening, just my two koku. Good luck and goodnight.

Homer a écrit:point 1) Wet & sea mais il faut que le design soit encore meilleur que celui des Lion Bushido car on a pas les persos qui font le café à coté

Marge a écrit:le breeder c'est fort mais c'est chiant et pas bandant à jouer et à affronter

Bart a écrit:avec des shug et des onis le désho va se régaler

Spider will have four themes going into CE (as will every Clan). For Spider, these are:

Major Theme 1: Paragon Samurai using Dark Virtues
Major Theme 2: Undead supported by Shugenja
Minor Theme 1: Kensai Monks
Minor Theme 2: Nonhuman Shadowlands Beasties

The major themes will get a lot of support, and we expect them to be competitive out of the gate. That is not to say they will be complete; we're leaving room to develop them more, so no one gets a theme that goes unsupported past the base set (like Scorpion dishonor; it was complete with no room to grow way to quickly in SE). You can see a lot of support for Undead in GotE.

A little explanation of the minor themes. These themes are underdeveloped compared to the major themes. We expect them to be less competative early, but to grow in strength and really start to shine mid-arc. We're doing this for every Clan.

Kensei Monks are basically Sohei. They are a good match of game mechanics and story. Sohei can wander the Empire freely, something the Spider needs (in Story). Mechanically, they receive support every time we print a Kiho and every time we print a Kensai action, so I think they'll develop rather quickly. They have a lot of tempo altering actions already (look at Split the Reed); both Monk Kihos and Kensai actions are areas where we are looking at consecutive Battle actions to represent the speed and precision of the characters. I think it will make for a good, fun deck.

Shadowlands Beasts is an odd theme; the Spider will have a few Clan-aligned Nonhumans, but will also have access to unaligned Shadowlands creatures. We're not supporting it like Phoenix Elemental Dragons; we certainly don't want to force you to step outside the Clan to be competitive, but you will be able to freely include Onis and such in your decks. The way I see it, there will be two uses for these: 1) Supporting Paragon or Undead decks with a few massive Oni for extra punch, 2) emulating old-school Yogo Junzo's Army (that's the Shadowlands Horde for you upstarts who weren't around during the Clan War).

And there you have it.

While we would love to tell everyone what their themes are next arc, we are not yet ready to do that. This is not to say we don't know their themes, we do, but more so that the time to reveal these is not quite right. Spider got a sneak peek because, frankly, it is to instill some sort of confidence in them (lord know we have not done that yet) that we do have a plan.

As Duncan points out, every clan will have four themes, two major ones and two minor ones. Every theme will get support in every regular expansion set (please note that the graphic novel is an exception to the rule due to having to design the cards around the art, instead of the other way around like usual). Also, since 4 themes will not fill up the 7 Personality slots each clan gets every set, you will get some flavor personalities which are meant to give you some variety and use cards that weren't cookie cutter for your deck (the Dragon Cav Samurai and Tactician are good examples of this).

One of SE main's weaknesses, as you guys well know, is a lack of congruent themes. This is a major focus of CE that we are staying on theme. Every expansion you will get support for each of your four themes. Your main themes will get support more frequently than your minor themes. This includes both Dynasty support and Fate support.

I know we have lost your confidence, and I know this does not magically fix it all. But we are working at re-gaining both yours and Phoenix's confidence. We appreciate you not sending your new Ninja Assassin at us in the meantime. Smile

There is no conspiracy against Spider. I'm a huge fan of Spider, and I typically have to compete with all the other designers to get the Spider cards for a set; I don't get to design nearly as many Spider cards as I want to, because everyone loves them on design. The problems which have plagued Spider are quite simple:

1. New faction with no clear mechanical niche: This affected the early design of the faction. We hope we've solved this problem for CE by focusing on specific themes (already outlined for Spider).

2. Too many cooks in the kitchen: We all want to design cool Spider cards, which unfortunately drives the themes further apart. We hope we've solved this problem with the same focus on themes as above. We know mechanically what the we want Spider to accomplish, we just have to make sure we give 'em the right cards for the job.

3. Always goes last: Spider has the lowest family honor, which puts them at a disadvantage. This is always going to be a weakness of the faction. In Samurai, we tried to correct for it with the Spider's Lair stronghold, which gave Spider a huge advantage against other military decks, but was blank against non-military. We'll be trying other ideas in CE to account for this.

4. Balanced against Military: Spider is a fair and balanced faction when it plays against other military decks. The problem is it has no means of fighting honor or dishonor decks. In SE, the Scorpion dishonor deck had all its pieces in place out of the gate; Scorpion players have had nearly two years to perfect their play-style with this deck, and the fact that it is popular and one of Spider's natural predators just make the matchup impossible for Spider. We hope to solve this problem in CE by re-examining dishonor, and starting it out cautiously instead of at full capacity. Spider ought to have the same chances against honor as any (non-Lion) military deck out there (well, Crab and Mantis); you may find you have to meta properly to beat it, you may find its not a huge problem . . . I dunno, but we're working to balance the honor vs. military match-up and Spider should fit into the general case (without the need for Spider only silver-bullet meta).

5. We thought we had it! We thought that we had given Spider a winning deck with W&D in the Spider breeder. We thought that it was a powerful deck that could handle the field. We thought wrong.
This is our worst mistake, because we gave that deck only mild support in the next two expansions. THW and GotE were designed before we had any player feedback on Spider Breeder. We probably had too small a sample size in play-test. We hope we've solved this problem in CE by a massive play-test process and asking for specific feedback on Spider.

That's what I see as why we failed Spider, and how we plan to fix those problems in the future.