With The Harbinger you are going to see some new cards appearing in your Common slots as you open your boosters. We hope that these will increase the ease of play and enjoyment of your L5R experience.
If, like me (Bryan Reese), you started playing L5R a long time ago you will have been in the habit of using many and varied tokens for all sorts different attachments and personalities created in the game – by regions, events, strategies, personalities, spells, items, and holdings. What we are making an effort to do now is create some really good high quality cards that players can use as proxies for these created cards to make the game clearer for everyone.
So let me clarify one thing for everyone. The number of your basic common cards in each set is not going to change. There will still be 50 cards, and they will still mostly appear with the same frequency on each printing sheet. What we have done is to utilize some “spare slots” in the printing process to create a subset of what will effectively become Common 1s on the sheet. And I suppose I ought to say that, no, this did not have any bearing on the Uncommon issue in The Harbinger – that is just an unfortunate coincidence of timing. What a Common 1 means is that on a 110 card sheet, each of the 50 Common 2s (the commons in the set) will appear twice each, using 100 of the sheets 110 card slots. The remaining 10 slots will be used to print 10 of these new proxy cards, making them Common 1s. In short, for each two Common 2s you collect you should, in theory, have one Common 1. These proxy cards are not legal cards to put in your decks, as indicated by their lack of a legality bug and the trait on the cards “May not be included in decks.” These are simply to use as proxies for when cards create cards, such as Farmlands.
Going forward we will continue to do this as we produce cards in the game that create the need for some sort of token representation.
So what have we got in The Harbinger? Well it’s mainly the more common things that you might expect to start off with, basic famer and cavalry followers for example…
However, we do have one or two more specialized guys – like Chikara, Oishi’s son – just because we thought that they were cool. You will even see a foretelling teaser with Fudo. Our goal is to make sure every instance of a created card in a set will have a proxy card printed for it in the same set. This is all done for you at no extra cost.
All in all we hope you enjoy this bonus addition to your L5R booster pack and that it makes keeping track of things in the game a smoother and clearer process!
