Obsidian Heresy

By Severijn#5194

Updated 21 December, 2021.

In October of 2021, another fan balance patch saw the light of day and saw a measure of success with games played. This was the Obsidian Heresy. As with the other balance patches, the Obsidian Heresy changes some rules of the core game and has its own ideals on which card is or is not allowed to be played. In this article, I will cover the rules updates by comparing them against the Emerald Legacy as it copies most of the rules introduced in that effort. For a longer explanation on what happened in the Emerald Legacy, be sure to check its article here. Afterwards, I will go over the principles that govern the balance patch overall and provide my thoughts in the conclusion.

Even the heresy needs its rules

Less is more: The rule of two

The main conceit of the format is that you can play only two cards by title in your decks. This means both dynasty and conflict consistency are greatly reduced. For a dynasty card, if you are seeing 4 cards each turn, you will see a specific card 28% of the time if you have 3 copies in the deck, whilst this is just 19% when you have 2 copies. For a conflict card it is similarly a drop from 34% to 24% when you are bidding 5 every turn.

Now, this effect becomes worse when you think about combining two cards, as the drop in consistency is cumulative. The consequence is that you are building less decks that just want to combine a couple of cards and dig towards that and more to decks that have more good all-rounders in there. That is not to say that each deck is just a pile of good cards; There's just more time needed to arrive at your ideal set-up compared to before.

Another consequence is that you have much more room to play with in your deck. Any cards that you consider "always include" have been cut by a third from your deck because of this rule, so you need to go looking for more alternatives that could perform the role you needed that card to do. It also makes it harder to support traits for any trait that has a limited set of characters like the Shinobi. Whenever there is a drop-off in quality, you will feel that much more in this format.

In the games themselves, you find yourself more often with your second string cards to perform a certain role, but so does your opponent. This inevitably leads to a broader spectrum of game states and more diverse games overall.

Rules from Emerald Legacy with some exceptions

The Jade Edict and the Emerald Legacy have both introduced new rules to the game, and the Obsidian Heresy adopts several of these rules that improve the game for everyone. The rules are specifically picked from the Emerald Legacy which I cover here. Not all make it through however. Let's first cover the ones that are identical:

• Attachments are unique per character. This means you can only have one attachment by title on a character. No doubling up on Fine Katana allowed. Note that this prevents you from playing the new copy too, which is relevant as it means that a card like Elegant Tessen cannot be played on a character that already has one in order to ready it. Now, this ability ultimately matters less here than in the Emerald Legacy because you only have two copies of any card anyway. Even so, it does matter in case you were intending to double-up attachments on a character that will last the entire game.

• Disguise has a minor update to it: When a character is disguised over, the character remains in the same area. For example, if you disguise a character that was in the conflict area as a participant, the new character has to remain there as a participant. This is to address one part of what makes disguise jarring. Unfortunately, there is still much about the ability that feels convoluted, so this one change feels a bit whatever to me. In most situations, this doesn't matter as you can also just disguise after the conflict is over if you wanted to be ready at home. The times it does matter are rare but they will come up ever so often: You could, for example, discard the character with disguise because you lost on an earth ring, or your participant has reasons to not be there when you win/lose the conflict.

• You can play any card during the dynasty phase. This means you can now play a 1-cost character from your conflict deck to soak the Way of the Crab that would hit your real character for the turn. This opens up a lot of counter-play to some trickery in the dynasty phase which is the most elegant solution we could have had for these situations where you have the answer, but you are not allowed to play the answer. I like this change because it also reduces the amount of stuff people need to remember when playing the game.

• All the minor quality of life improvements and errata made it over. These are smaller updates to the rules that are just improving the player experience. These are:

  • Playing a Limited card now requires you to bow your role which means you don't need to remember it afterwards; You can now just see that you played one of these cards.

  • A clarification that a card that is played leaves your hand when you play it. The old rule allowed for some freak situations where an interrupt would first force you to discard a card, which could be the card you intended to play. This is now no longer a thing and that's great. The old way was unintuitive to the extreme.

  • 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 Obsidian heresy did not adopt every rule however, so here are the exceptions made compared to the Emerald Legacy:

• The Covert ability works as it does under the official imperial rules. This makes characters with Covert have synergy with one another as you get to bypass another character for every character you declare with Covert, whilst in the Emerald Legacy having multiple characters with Covert is a drawback as you can only utilize the keyword on one character per conflict.

• Rally cards do not count towards the 40-45 cards that should be in your dynasty deck. This is similar to what happens in the Emerald Legacy, but different in that it doesn't make these card count towards your maximum either. You could play as many Rally cards as you want in your deck, as long as it has 40-45 non-Rally cards to accompany them. I think this solution largely leads to the same objective of decreasing dynasty consistency, but it is a bit more elegant because you can at least run as many of those as you want now. This is useful as some decks don't care as much about which card is revealed as much as there being more cards revealed. Other decks might just want the maximum consistency in its draws and play just one Rally card because that's a free-roll.

Balance in the chaos

The second feature of the Obsidian Heresy is how it addresses the balance patch. The overall approach is much more straight-forward than the other efforts, as it has a banlist but nothing else. No restricted cards, no cards banned from being splashed by other clans, just a couple of banned cards.

Too spicy even for Fu Leng

The Obsidian Heresy wants to make as many cards playable as can be and isn't very concerned with the balance between the clans. The argument is that balance is secondary to enjoyment of the format, and playing big powerful effects can be really fun. It also argues that with its rule of two a lot of degenerate interactions will happen infrequently which makes them more palatable. Ultimately, the game's pieces must be in a range of one another that allows player skill to win most games over quality of the cards in the deck.

To this end, the Obsidian Heresy banned specifically 13 cards from the game. This number is not picked arbitrarily: It represents about 1% of the total card pool. The cards that fall within the 13 are generally cards that go against the ideals of the format like Slovenly Scavenger which let's you restock your cards at a low cost and find your third copy of a card more easily. It also is where you can find the cards that break the game so soundly that it devolves into a different game, like Jurojin's Curse ever since the fate phase was reworked.

In practice, it means there are many more cards that are in a different league from most cards like good ol' Charge! and Consumed by Five Fires. This is intentional, as one of the objectives is to let players experience the history of the living card game and to meddle a little in the crazy cards that were printed across the years.

I want to call out how good it is that there's just those 13 cards that are banned. I do not need to track which restricted card could be in my opponent's deck, nor think about what is or isn't splash banned. It's just 13 cards that are never being played. This is a great development for players everywhere; It cuts down on what to remember, and especially makes it easier to on-board a new player to the game. Let the cards to track just be the ones tied to a certain role.

How does the Obsidian Heresy compare to the other stronghold modes?

I have played the format since October 2021 and arrived at these observations in terms of playing and deckbuilding:

• The enforced variety in your deck's composition means you should go less all-in on certain combinations like Embrace the Void with Consumed by Five Fires and plan to use these separately as well. This also means that decks that are built entirely around a card like Mirumoto Daisho need more time to assemble and need to have a plan B for all those duels they run.

• Covert is back, but the rule of two and the addition of Ayubune Pilot and cards like Charge! mitigate this.

• I need to remember that Policy Debate is back and be careful to not commit a small character unless if I can afford to get hit by Policy Debate.

• Holding removal is more important than ever. It is recommended to think about playing Fields of Ruin or at least some way to discard holdings because there are a couple of very strong ones that return like Kanjo District.

• Cloud the Mind is in season. When the best characters in the game are back out to play, it is a good idea to invest in Cloud the Mind if you have access to it if you don't have other ways to deal with them.

• Common effects are far less common than before. Some game effects aren't that abundant that you can just run worse versions to address the gap now that you can run a third less of those cards. Effects that for example honour you in Phoenix are much more rare than they already were, which increase their relative value. Another example would be Cunning Magistrate which was once a true force to reckon with, but in the Obsidian Heresy there are fewer dishonour effects around and you should compensate by playing just one copy of Cunning Magistrate in spite of how powerful he is.

• Provinces and strongholds effect remain as consistent as before which increase their relative worth compared to dynasty and conflict cards. You are at least certain you will have the stronghold ability to aid your deck idea which guides you on which cards you can compromise on.

Final Thoughts and conclusion

I think it is a great boon on how elegant the design of this format is. There is not much to remember beyond a couple of adaptations that are mostly relevant during deck construction. This makes it much easier to just focus on the play-by-play and your deck's strategy which is welcome as the game tends to have a lot of things to track by default.

The banned list felt a bit arbitrary in the beginning with its hard line on 13 banned cards, but I came to appreciate it as the idea is not to balance the clans; That part is left to the metagame which is aided by the rule of two that weakens every dominant strategy. The idea is to permit as many cards as possible and let players just have fun and fight fire with fire. Only the truly disrupting cards should go away. This is a pretty good compromise. I think the biggest flaw of the other fan balance patches is that they try to juggle too many different objectives, and some of those actively clash with one another. In this case there is much less that needs to be discussed on the balance of the game because it's not the goal anyway. Even so, I feel player skill still determines most games. The balance is not that bad even if it was largely left out of consideration. It is much more like the L5R we played before the first imperial law.

The biggest win is the decision to just allow just two copies of any card. This generates more diverse board states and that adds to the game experience because you will have a much more different experiences across two games between the same decks. This makes the game much more sustainable in this new era where new cards are few and far between. Also, this gives players a lot of agency on what they can play which leads to a greater ability to express yourself through your deckbuilding decisions. The overall number of "always play" cards that you can have in your deck has decreased and those cards are much less reliable because the effects they have are much rarer now too.

Now, everything can be better, and there is definitely room to improve this format. In particular, this format is not well-documented and relies you know the Emerald Legacy's rules. Even then, some of the rules changes I had to check with the creator as I didn't find it spelled out in the original article whether the imperial or emerald version is followed. This is overall a minor gripe though, and at least you now have these items gathered in this article until it becomes outdated!

So in conclusion, this game mode is pretty good. It has the least amount of stuff to remember and it promotes diverse games where player skill still matters above everything else. I think of the fan modes this is my favourite of the bunch because of those factors, and hope it will remain an online presence. You can find games of it on jigoku online with the tag [OBSIDIAN], and there is also a discord channel specifically for the format that you can find through its website too.