les Celestial par Mr 10 Koteis

To go along with our New Player Spectacular and bringing you more in-depth information on the game, Roku-Cast & Roku-Mart are proud to present our first strategy article: Celestials, by Case Kiyonaga.http://www.alderac.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=78751

In the future we plan on bringing you more articles as well on subjects too vast to cover in the podcast but that are important none the less. This will also allow us to bring you the views of other very good players besides our own crew of hosts.

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Celestials
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Generally, new sets are fairly similar animals. You can usually count on most decks getting a few upgrades and maybe two or three viable new decks. For example, the Imperial Gift Two, while not adding any truly significant strongholds, gave most decks five or six playable cards. Path of the Destroyer is a larger, more powerful set and will likely form the backbone of many tournament decks for the entire arc. However, the most significant cards from Path are an entirely new card type. I mean, of course, the Celestials.

Let’s consider, first, the anatomy of a Celestial. You may only have one Celestial in play at a time (potentially important, as there are two ronin strongholds in the environment). This more or less will limit all players to playing one Celestial per deck, which is probably exactly what design intended. The important part of Celestials is that they enter play as soon as they flip face up in a province. This is highly significant when it comes to game play: you can dig for a Celestial using your border keep at any point in the game, and they will enter play immediately when you flip it after buying a famous bazaar. Let’s take a look at the Celestials themselves (in alphabetical order):

* Akodo’s Guidance: In my opinion, this is the strongest Celestial. There is no game situation where it isn’t at the very least useful, and it provides a ton of force for the attacking lion player. If the lion player is defending, it becomes an almost no-questions-asked kill action that goes through anything.
* Bayushi’s Guidance: This guidance gives two moderate effects. Being able to discard a champion in province is nice, and the trait seems decent but in reality you are activating the ability at first opportunity. The trait does nothing against military.
* Doji’s Guidance: Combined with Shiro Daidoji, this could make crane honor a nightmare for some decks. A blanket force bonus of +2 is incredibly significant, and the battle action is effectively a kill action in some situations. Also potentially very potent for military and switch decks.
* Fu Leng’s Guidance: While this looks incredible, it’s fairly easy to play around the second ability. The blanket force bonus is nice, but requiring opposition limits any blitz possibilities that might otherwise exist. Spider has a few very good military decks right now, but this doesn’t really do anything to help them with their bad matchups. It will get better as the personalities available get stronger.
* Hida’s Guidance: The trait is almost negligible. While the ability seems very strong, there are also situations where it will be entirely dead. Crab players didn’t use Seiden Sanzo on their personalities early in Samurai to sleaze provinces, and I don’t see them using this effect early either. It might make I Do Not Die So Easily! more useful(keep your Hida Tatsuma alive for one more action and sacrifice him to Hida), but for now it’s too situational for me to really get excited about it.
* Shiba’s Guidance: Sort of the opposite of the spider guidance, it provides what is effectively restriction-free force bonus and an effectively restriction-free resurrection. This is definitely one of the stronger guidances, but doesn’t really fit into honor decks.
* Shinjo’s Guidance: Between the new stronghold and this, I guess unicorn wants to be opposed now. A free upgraded Chugo Seido isn’t bad, though your opponents will be able to play around it because it’s on the board. A very solid but unexciting celestial.
* Togashi’s Guidance: The trait is fairly significant, and the ability is potentially a great source of card draw between Void and Satsu. I see it being played in all dragon decks, but the split will be a bit interesting: enlightenment decks will play it mainly for the trait, and military/honor for the reaction.
* Yoritomo’s Guidance: Similar to the crab guidance, this is a somewhat situational effect with a somewhat meaningless trait. Mantis players will use it as soon as possible, but flipped any time after turn 6 and it’s effectively a dead card.



As I said before, all the celestials are likely to be played by their respective clans, but the biggest twist comes in how many clans will run the celestial-nuking event. The decision isn’t an easy one: a number of the guidances are fairly situational, and some will be used as soon as the player can activate them. Some of the guidances will be difficult to handle for opposing decks, and some of them just plain don’t fit nicely into current clan deck themes (I’m looking at you Shinjo’s Guidance). Oddly, the decision to include The Lost Path will likely depend on how debilitating other guidances are for the deck as well as how long the player’s own celestial is likely to stay in play. Clans like Lion, Phoenix, and Crane are unlikely to ever run the event because their celestials are likely to sit in play. Clans like Mantis, some Dragon, Scorpion, and Spider will occasionally run both the event and their Guidance. Crab and Unicorn will only ever run one or the other.

The Lost Path might actually bring more meaningful deck construction changes than the celestials themselves. A lot of decks will simply throw in their clan’s celestial and be done with it, but let’s glance at possible deck additions:

* Nothing
* Celestial only
* The Lost Path only
* Celestial and The Lost Path
* Celestial and Forewarning
* Celestial, The Lost Path, and Forewarning

Decks will have to decide on whether their Celestial is debilitating enough to run forewarning. A scorpion dishonor deck out of Stings might decide to run forewarning for the phoenix honor matchup, as keeping the celestial in play might give the scorpion deck just enough time to crack all of phoenix’s provinces, and because phoenix honor is the most likely deck to run the event and nothing else. If the scorpion player also decided to run The Lost Path, Forewarning would be able to prevent them from destroying their own Celestial in honor matchups. Lion players will have to decide if their celestial is strong enough to run forewarning to keep it around. Since forewarning has other uses for that particular deck, it’s a much more enticing option: it breaks terrains, hits imperial census and other troublesome events, and could just be a generally useful card. Clans like Mantis and sometimes Dragon are unlikely to have their celestial in play for longer than a turn or two, and there aren’t any celestials that are exceptionally harmful to them, so those two clans are likely to just play their celestial and stop there. Phoenix honor will probably run The Lost Path and nothing else—their celestial doesn’t really do anything for that decktype.

Path gives us a new super powerful card type and a single answer to them. Players will have to decide for themselves whether their guidance is strong enough to protect or weak enough to ignore for whatever deck they choose. These deck constructions choices will have to be very carefully considered and weighed against potential game situations, then backed up by playtesting. The celestials won’t define the environment, but like clan champions everyone will have to deal with them in one way or another. Start planning.

Thank you, Captain Obvious !

Honnêtement, j'ai l'impression de n'avoir rien appris en lisant son article

à la première lecture je me suis dit que c'était pas mal et pis ensuite je me suis dit la même chose que toi

A la première lecture je n'ai rien appris, à la deuxième, j'ai eu une nième confirmation du lieu commun portant sur les différences de style entre US et EU.
Pour les Celestial les plus fortes sont les plus facilement jouables (Lion Phénix et Grue), pas forcément celles qui auront le plus gros impact sur la partie (Grue, Dragon, Mante, voire Crabe). Mais aussi celles qui gèrent des batailles (Kill, antikill, renvoi) et pas celle qui vont permettre de contrôler le jeu (gain de temps, card advantage en Fate ou en Dynasty).
Lire que la Guidance Lion va fournir "a ton of Force" me fait un peu sourire. Alors attends, j'ai trois persos dans mon armée, ça me fait un grand total de +3F. Wahou la tonne...

Si, le seul point que je trouve original, à défaut d'être d'accord, c'est l'idée de jouer l'event + une celestial si la celestial est du genre à se défausser ASAP.

Jib, si tu as 3 Lion dans ton armée on est dans 2 cas de figure, à mon avis:

tôt dans la partie et le boost de force est bienvenu
tard dans la partie et tu as dejà perdu s'il te reste que 3 Lion sur la table

Après, eux ils jouent pas trop les items et plus swarm, ce qui aide certainement à qualifier la force de "a ton".
C'est sur que si tu joues midgame military ou switch, tu vas moins en bénéficier du boost de la guidance.

Le seul moment de la partie que connaît le Lion est précisément "tôt dans la partie" donc oui, je n'ai que 3 pelots