“When the historians of the Empire recall the reign of Iweko I, the Divine Empress, there is one truth that will never be questioned: her reign changed the face of Rokugan and its people forever.” – Togashi Satsu, Voice of the Empress
At the year’s end Celestial Edition will be wrapping up to make way for the next L5R arc: Emperor Edition. From now until then, every Friday, starting this Friday, February 4th, we will be previewing one clan theme. The first up will be the Crab. But before we start revealing the themes, lets go over some basics.
As many of you know, we started heavily focusing on themes in Celestial Edition. We feel we did some things right and some things wrong, and we have learned from these experiences. Using this knowledge, we have made the themes for Emperor Edition even better. Here are some things you can expect.
There will be four themes per clan. However, unlike Celestial Edition, there will be no primary and secondary themes. We feel this gave a connotation to the themes we did not intend. Primary and secondary were only supposed to indicate their perceived starting strength at the beginning of the arc, though deviation from this was perfectly acceptable. We feel that by labeling them, some people felt cheated if their primary themes fell behind while their secondary themes excelled. This was never our goal and we feel by creating four equal themes, we can alleviate this point of confusion and frustration for players.
All clans will have new tools to play with. In the transition from Samurai Edition to Celestial Edition, not all clans got a new deck to play with. However, in Emperor Edition, every clan will have at least one brand new theme and deck to play with.
All clans will have access to multiple victory conditions. This is true for 8 of the 9 clans, Spider being the exception. We could not find a great fit for Spider beyond military, but that does not mean there will not be new goodies for our evil friends out there. The Spider will have two brand new themes for them. Everyone else will have access to at least two, and sometimes more, victory conditions. So Crab and Mantis will no longer simply be four different variations of military, nor will Crane be four different variations of honor. And to our truly evil Jigoku lovers out there, the results of the Empire’s Glory mega game has not left you out in the dust, but more on that later…
No theme will be forgotten. Like in Celestial Edition, we vow to not leave any theme behind. In ages past, if a deck for a clan was not working (or it was working too well), it would often be abandoned for new decks. This was fixed in Celestial Edition and we shall continue this tradition into Emperor Edition. This is obviously not to say there will not be power disparity between different themes. We will always shoot to make every theme tournament competitive, but with 36 different themes, we do realize that power levels will naturally vary.
No more half themes. These are the themes that were never meant to be their own deck type, such as Dragon duelists or Crane artisans. Now every clan will have four themes that will make up four decks.
These are only some of the things we here at AEG are bringing to you to make Emperor Edition the best, most exciting experience yet. Our first 15 years of L5R have been great, and we look forward to the next 15 years being even better!
The L5R Team
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