End of an Arc 2

Okay a few this,

1) As some of you may be aware I am participating in the L5R Play-by-Post event Winter Court IV. Since that will be taking up the majority of my time for the next several months I am putting all my web comic activity on indefinite hiatus.

2) I apologize for my lateness posting this. I'd intended to post it yesterday, but Thanksgiving and other things ended up taking up more of my time than I'd planned.

Okay now for my review of Ivory.

Mechanically Ivory was a mixed bag. Some of the changes like gold pooling and making the Clan discount more intuitive were good. However Ivory was plagued by an undeniable fact, Crane was overwhelmingly good especially during the first few weeks before their Sensei was errataed. Now I don't hold that against Crane players at all especially after their under performance in Emperor, but I feel having one Clan so clearly dominant demoralized many players and contributed to the negative feelings towards Ivory as a whole.

This was even more true for the Crab. We certainly weren't enthusiastic going into Ivory and after the article previewing our new Stronghold used some poorly chosen words the outrage among the community was palpable. We struggled for most of the arc until dishonor started to become viable after The Coming Storm, but it didn't really take off until Tsujiken Sensei came out with A Line in the Sand and by that point most of the arc was over. Several key cards for the deck are getting phased out at the end of the year and the future is once again uncertain.

On a personal note this arc did lead to me becoming one of the best Crab players in the Northeast from a combination of becoming more experienced and the more experienced players either quitting or switching to other Clans.

Story wise this arc reek of filler. The problematic lack of focus from the second half of Emperor continued, but thankfully the large scale and somewhat random character deaths didn't.