How many times have you wished you could find 1 or 2 more force to crack a province? And how many times have you had a hand full of followers and just needed one more action to defeat an army?
Ideally, your deck will never be in either of these situations. Honour decks have it easy: they can afford to run very few attachables and thus have a hand full of action cards. Actions are fundamentally very
strong: free, fast (take effect as soon as they're played, while for example followers often don't take effect until the attack phase) and tough for your opponent to predict. In addition, attachable cards are vulnerable to other players' actions - having your Personality with 4 Followers attached killed by a Kolat Assassin is frustrating to say the least!
Of course, attachable cards do have some advantages. For a start, they're very efficient at what they do. No single action card has the same power, for instance, as a Clan Sword. Heavy Infantry is much more effective than Rend the Soul, giving a permanant bonus without the drawbacks of Rend. Kuro's Fire is far superior to Tsuruchi Technique, if you get to use
it. A second advantage of attachable cards is that they open up other options. Actions like Armed and Ready and Peasant Vengeance require you to have items and follower respectively if the card is to be of any use. Both items and followers also protect against opponents' actions, making your personalities less vulnerable. Spells often resemble reusable action
cards more than anything else, and reusable is good.
In any deck, then, a balance must be struck. Any deck which needs permanant Force, including the majority of military decks, is likely to be strengthened by including Items or Followers. Personality-kill and other control decks are often helped by the power of spells, that can often kill personalities at the cost of one Fate card. Even honour decks can benefit
from the Imperial Standard, or defensive spells such as Importune Kami. However, building a deck with no actions is a very dangerous strategy. Your deck will be slower (since everything costs gold) and less flexible (since you'll be slower to react to anything your opponent does). No more than 15-20 attachable cards is often a good compromise, while decks with
very few (under 10) attachable cards are noticeably less vulnerable to personality-kill strategies, since the death of a personality represents the loss of a smaller investment. For this reason, honour decks (which have little need of permanant force) are often almost completely made up of action cards, freeing up their gold production to dedicate to gaining honour.
So when building decks, ask yourself whether you need attachable cards, and whether you can manage without them. Even if you decide you do, don't neglect to put a reasonable number of actions in your deck to allow you to react to and surprise your opponents.
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