Emerald Legacy
Emerald legacy
By Severijn#5194
Updated 21 December, 2021.
A little while after the Jade Edict was launched, the Emerald Legacy was founded as a fan continuation project of the Legends of the Five Rings living card game. To answer perhaps your first question: The Emerald Legacy and the Emerald Dojo are not affiliated with each other.
This fan continuation was envisioned to be much more ambitious. They introduced new cards, rule updates, new lore, stories and new online tournaments. This makes them the closest thing to a replacement for Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) now that the game is "completed". I will cover the initial rule updates and the balance patch in this article. As with the Jade Edict before, I will also be adding my thoughts on some of the updates and additions they have brought to the game.
Rules changes from Imperial
Rally cards increase minimum deck size and count towards maximum deck size
The powerful Rally mechanic gets hit in this rule-set, but in a different way compared to the Jade Edict. You can include Rally cards and they work as before, but every Rally card added increases the minimum number of cards that should be in your deck by one. This kills any consistency gains from including Rally cards from the official rules. In fact, it even decreases deck consistency a little bit as you can Rally into another Rally card rather than the card you were interested in.
On the whole, this raises the bar on how good a Rally card must be in order to be included in your deck starting from the second Rally card. The first one is a free-roll essentially as it will always draw another card and starting from higher numbers you add to the odds to Rally into another Rally card. The odds are heavily in your favour that you do not Rally into another Rally card though. Still, there are decks that do not want any Rally cards, specifically those that pick a card from the top X cards in your deck like Guardians of Rokugan does.
Still, I think you should play Rally cards if they help your strategy, and especially in case you just want to see 5 or more cards in your dynasty flop more often, which is the stronger effect in my mind anyway.
Disguised characters stay where they are
The Disguise mechanic now modifies the way you play characters. When you disguise a character, the new character enters play in the same area as the original character that was chosen to be disguised. This is mainly addressing a clash between mechanics and the thematic idea of it. Your Akodo Mastermind is dropping his mask and Akodo Zentarō shows up and remains where he is. It used to be that Zentarō could just get out of the conflict and that's now been dealt with.
Practically speaking, Zentarō could of course just disguise after the conflict and get to the same end result, so this does not really change how Disguise is used in practice. The downside is that any effect from winning or losing would still be suffered by the original character. For example, if your character has Pride, then you may dishonour if you lose the fight, while you could just get out of the conflict before suffering consequences with the official rule.
Personally, I think this did not improve on the old rule. It is addressing just one part of the thematic vs mechanical break with Disguise while many others remain. Your disguised characters enter play readied, have none of the effects applied to the original and you get to double-tap any attachments that give an ability to the character like Tactical Ingenuity. This feels like a half-measure.
Covert works only for one character
In the Emerald Legacy, you can covert a maximum of one character per conflict. It doesn't matter that you're coming in with four Shinobi with the ability, you can only covert one character period.
This is a big blow to the decks that relied on coverting characters and removing them from conflict, and a massive boon to any deck that fights just by having bigger numbers in the conflict. Now, this wasn't the only blow for covert (and move home effects), as the Emerald Legacy also released this card at the same time:
Someone really has it out there against covert! An accessible way to fight the Covert/send home strategy that's very cheap and painless to include. Between this and the rules update to Covert, decks that featured this ability got significantly worse to the point where I wouldn't really bother with that strategy anymore as plan A.
Attachments are unique per character
The new rule is that you can only play one attachment by title on a character. No longer can you wield three Duelist Trainings on one character. This is a hit to any eggs-meet-basket strategy where you play all attachments on just one character and make it a tower that can't be dealt with easily in a fight. Of note, this is not like the Restricted keyword which allows you to still play an attachment on the character and then pick which you wish to retain; Here, you are prevented from playing the second copy altogether. This is important for the card Elegant Tessen which has a reaction to being played. You cannot play the second Elegant Tessen on the same character to ready it once more.
This update is a pretty good way to make towering a character more variable as you probably need to play more different attachments to compensate, which also weakens the strategy overall.
Notably, this doesn't really kill the strategy, it just makes it harder to field. One way to cope is to spread your cards across a couple of characters and make smaller towers. Another is to play more attachments with one or two copies in the deck to bypass this rule.
This update also affects the attachments that are so good that you tend to play three of them. You can no longer play multiple Fine Katanas on one character either after all. Now, the jury is still out on whether this changes the number of copies of the card you should include. Statistically speaking, the chance of drawing a duplicate attachment on the first turn is about 12% if you were bidding five. On the second turn, this increases to 28% if the bidding trend continues. So you're seeing a duplicate by turn two every four games, but there's another factor: How many targets do you have for the duplicate attachment? In my experience, I will have two characters that can use it anyway by the time I get or need the second copy.
Personally, I think you can totally still play three copies and be fine. If you have another card with a similar effect though, then it becomes much easier to make 2-1 split between the two, especially if both are Restricted on top of that. For example, if you're playing 3 Fine Katana and 3 Ornate Fan before and you're not really needing one more than the other, then you could go with 2 Fine Katana, 2 Ornate Fan and 2 Ayubune Pilot. You may even prefer this if you have a use for the ability on the new card you are adding.
You can play any card during the dynasty phase
The final larger change is that you can now play any card during the dynasty phase, as opposed to limiting this just to dynasty cards and conflict events. This allows counter-play against some gotcha cards in the dynasty phase like Way of the Crab. You can just play your 1 cost conflict character as insurance if you happen to be the first player facing the crab.
I think this is a good change as it reduces the amount you need to remember to play the game and it stops some play patterns that weren't exactly healthy. On the other hand this means you can play some other really rude combinations during the dynasty phase like stripping fate with Yogo Junzo after playing Embrace the Void. Still, I think this is better as it simplifies and aspect of the dynasty phase that was needlessly precise before.
Odds and ends
The Emerald Legacy also did a couple of quality of life updates and minor errata to pre-empt some weird interactions.
The first update is that cards leave the hand when they are played. You may not know that this wasn't the case, but it is now the case. This prevented some weird situations where an interrupt would first discard a card from your hand which could be the card you were playing.
The second update is that playing a Limited card requires you to bow your role card. This means you need to play a role card of course, but there's literally no reason not to play a role card so this is another good improvement because this visually reminds you that you have played a Limited card.
Finally, Spell Scroll is no longer an item and Shosuro Deceiver does not copy abilities from other Shosuro Deceivers. This is to stop two loops that were present in the game. (Spell Scroll could be looped indefinitely if you animated an item with Togashi Hoshi)
The Emerald Legacy balance patch
The Emerald Legacy also added its own balance patch to the game which builds upon the foundation built by the Jade Edict. Rather than talking in specifics, I will cover how the balance patch works as it has a new feature we haven't seen before and then explore the principles behind this balance patch
Banned, Restricted and Splash-Banned
Like with the imperial law, there are cards that are banned from the game. There are also cards on a restricted list of which you can pick just one for your deck. The new thing added by the Emerald Legacy is the concept of a splash-banned card. These are cards from factions that are banned from being included in any deck that isn't of that faction. For example, Against the Waves was one of the original splash-banned cards, which means that you can only play this in Phoenix decks; It is banned for all 6 other factions.
This allows some card to avoid getting removed from the game for another clan's sins, like Heroic Resolve which is played mostly by Phoenix in the past.
Balance ideals of the Emerald Legacy
Let's start with listing the different guidelines set out by the architects of the balance patch. Note that these are guidelines, not absolute rules; Exceptions may apply to the rule.
Use the Jade Edict as the foundation. It is not spelled out what this means, but the 7 guidelines from the original may apply to some degree. Some notable deviations:
Alternative victory conditions are back. You can, as of this writing, play Scouted Terrain and Enlightenment in the format.
Neutral cards are being targetted in order to decrease the abundance of an effect in an effort to open up deck slots for in-faction alternatives.
The stance on card draw is less clear. The Jade Edict intended to decrease consistency by curbing card draw, and some of this was inherited. The Emerald Legacy however also allows for cards that draw a bunch of cards over the game like Proving Grounds and Shadowed Village. In other words, they're much softer on this principle compared to the Jade Edict.
Weakening the common strategies. These include a couple of dominant strategies in Jade like playing with towers of characters, or just splashing the best ready effects for your clan and maybe one or two other effects from another clan as your basic idea of a splash. Another example would be kill decks out of Scorpion which we have seen since the core set. These decks now lose Noble Sacrifice from the kill repertoire as it now a Crane-only card.
Keep cards in a narrower power-band. This means the best cards of the game are getting removed from play to level the playing field a bit for decks that cannot utilize these. This also involves cards that can swing a board state like Sanguine Mastery.
How does the Emerald Legacy play compared to the other stronghold modes?
I have played the game with this rule-set for about half a year at the time of writing and came to a couple of observations. First, let's talk about strategy:
Readies are far less commonplace than before. The original splash banned list divided up all the ready effects (though they missed a couple of good ones) in an effort to make the effect less abundant for clans in general. This means that you need to pay more attention to when to commit one of your precious readying effects.
A slower experience with fewer swings. This was also my experience with the Jade Edict and the Emerald Legacy is headed more in this direction than the edict that came before. Games aren't races to a finish line with some cars spinning out of the track, but instead it's a test of endurance where you build and maintain a lead. There are fewer ways to stop someone from snowballing. A fair number of tricks aren't available anymore, or only to one of the clans. In strategic terms this means you should build your deck to be efficient with its fate and cards, and focus less of knocking out your opponent in one of the conflicts.
There is less to safeguard against. With weakening towers and dominant strategies as well as game plans that intend to bypass your strategy with covert, there is a much smaller of pool of cards you should be concerned about. In my games, this meant that I really didn't need to bring cards to protect my characters as much as before. I relegated my Cloak of Nights back to the binder as there weren't enough situations where I could use it efficiently. Instead, I could focus on just bringing more regular combat tricks and ways to generate resources over time.
The strategy that is hard to stop is honour. I think this one is more an effect from the errata to City of the Open Hand, but adding further restrictions on ways to dishonour players made the honour running strategy better than I have seen it before (combo decks excluded). This makes it very important to build your deck with enough auxiliary card draw so that you are not dead in the water against an early bid 1 that honour decks will do.
Final thoughts and conclusion
It is not easy to create a balanced experience; This I know. The problem begins with the very word balanced. It is a word with different meanings, and it is often that you balance on a scale with two extremes. The emerald legacy's task isn't an easy one, and I think they have done a decent job with some of the rules updates. I am happy with simplifications and quality of life improvements to the game where you can get them.
On the other hand, some other rules updates remain a mystery to me. The updates to Disguise and Covert did not improve the game experience. An effect like Covert is tricky; You want some of it to exist, but it should not be a reliably winning strategy to go all-in on Covert and move-home effects. It bypasses a big part of the game which is building up numbers of ready participating characters. I think it is fine to have some of this just so that I have reasons not to cram every military and political boost in my conflict deck. The thing that confounds me is that Ayubune Pilot gives everyone another option for counter-play against this very strategy which should have been enough. Similarly, Disguise's update does not do a lot for the game. The ability is still jarring and it does not really change my plays except in fairly rare situations.
The splash ban approach is an interesting experiment, and I think it elucidates that each clan's conflict card pool is not made equal. Some have far more depth and diverse effects in them than others. In practice, this means that some clans are way, way worse in a game where they are more reliant on their cards for one of the better effects in the game in your ready-effects. In preventing clans to splash for what they lack, it really warps the strength of that clan.
The addition of the splash ban also adds to the mental load that I have when I play this game. The number of cards that feature on the list are much more numerous than before. Just from the first version there were 21 cards you now needed to keep in mind and track which could/couldn't be in your opponent's deck under the new rules. I feel this is not a great direction to head to, because complexity was already a big hurdle for any player of this game with just the core rules and this increases the layer you need to understand on top of the core rules.
The balance patch feels inconsistent and uneven, and this is a consequence of trying to balance too many factors. The Jade Edict also had this problem, and things did not improve with this version. The clans must be balanced. Some cards must be curbed because they are too powerful for a neutral card. Some deck archetypes should be weaker/stronger based on how good and fun it is to play with and against. Common strategies should be weaker. These are a lot of factors to design around and some pull against each other, which leads to the discussion on what balance even means to a person. This leads to a format that feels unfair to the player. For example, drawing cards was made weaker by the Jade edict in order to curb conflict deck consistency. A lot of auxiliary draw was made worse because of that. In the Emerald Legacy, some clans were found to be weak and this was addressed by giving them back a bit of power which turns out to be card draw engines, whilst these are taken away from other clans at the same time. This feels unfair in the 'rules for thee and not for me' fashion even if this technically brings the win percentages closer together.
Finally, I think the game was made a bit too flat by this endeavour. As much as I dislike Covert as a predominantly phoenix player, I kinda miss seeing it and it feels weird to play against scorpion that can't really deal with my characters efficiently anymore. The games I play end up a little more samey than before and that is a shame.
On the bright side, it is good to see a fan continuation that tries to take on the monumental task of replacing FFG and provide new cards in addition to the balance patch. While I hope future balance patches improve on making the game as fun as it can be without compromising too much on the power spectrum, I think that the overall project is a big win for us all.