How to beat honor, by Jared D-S

Here is a little background on me before we get to the meat of this week’s article. I've played L5R since Jade Edition and have always been a competitive player. While I do still have storyline goals, I play decks from every clan in order to better understand the environment and prepare myself for large events. I've won two major storyline events and two Koteis (last year) since I started playing on a higher level at the beginning of gold. I'm currently a member of the dreaded Dynasty. I'm writing all this not to brag about my skill, but to make you, the reader, understand I'm not talking out of the depths of my ass.

L5R is not an easy game to play at the highly competitive level. While most of you deal on a local scale where meta situations may be very specific, L5R players encounter similar problems all across the world. One of the major concerns when building a deck is always how to appropriately meta versus the field. In the current diamond environment many players are having huge problems dealing with two deck types: Turbo honor and Lion blitz. With the errata of key Lion cards coming into effect this week I've seen complaints on list servers and message boards about how Crane is broken.

Not only are there answers built into the environment to beat Turbo honor, but there's enough answers where you can properly meta your deck so you don't lose to turbo honor in the majority of the games you play against it. In my opinion, turbo honor isn't even competitive in the current environment because properly metaed military and control decks can handle it over 80% of the time in my testing.

There’s lots of honor meta available in the DE environment. As a deck builder you have lots of options, but you have to remember you want to choose cards that are un-cancelable and provide strong effects.

Event meta while strong is cancelable. Most honor decks I’ve seen run 3x Avoid Fate, 2x Shrine of the Sun. Often you can have your honor events show up perfectly only to have them have no effect on your opponents honor total. The lesson here is you either have to overload your opponent with anti-honor events or run none at all. For example: if you’re running say 5 anti-honor events: A New Order, In Time of War, Proposal at Peace, Far from the Empire, Broken Words (SL specific) their Avoid Fates and Shrine of the Suns will become easily overloaded and you’ll effect how fast they can honor out. Running all those event slots is very consuming on deck space. Thus, I don’t recommend using any event meta at all in the DE environment (Shadowlands is an exception to this). The effects are just too easy to cancel.

Another example of key anti-honor cards is canceling effects. Outmaneuvered By Force cancels key honor fate cards (such as PK or battle stall). Feign Death cancels the limited and in battle PK decks which many honor decks are full of. Finally, Strategic Crossroads cancels the Underhand/Left hand of the Emperor and many different effects which prevent your unbowed units from assigning to battle. Outmaneuvered By Force is the most powerful of these cards because of its simple versatility. Its not only useful in an honor matchup, because of its ability to cancel a Battlefield of Shallow Graves in military on military games. Also control decks often run key political cards (Show of Good faith) and thus Outmaneuvered by Force can be a key reactive card that stops multiple deck types.

Desperate Wager and Tribute to your house provide an ENTIRE extra turn. These two cards are the most powerful honor meta available in the DE environment. Often a military deck will need one extra attack phase to beat an honor player. Both of these cards can provide that key attack phase. However, since Dismissed (an often played card in honor decks) can cancel Tribute, Desperate Wager is obviously a better choice as a meta card. If you are a control/pk deck you can often get around the use of Dismissed by removing your opponent’s unbowed courtiers or bowing them before you play Tribute to your House. If you choose to play Outmaneuvered by Force you can save your ObF to cancel your opponents Dismissed enabling you to use Tribute as a meta card.

Now you’re probably saying, there’s no way I can fit all those cards in my decks in order to beat honor more consistently without losing efficiency in a lot of other match ups. However, Diamond has provided you with tools to lower the # of meta cards required in a fate deck. Refuge of the Three Sisters (often just one) can increase the drawing chance of a singular fateside meta card (such as one Desperate Wager) exponentially. Since honor decks run Regions of Rokugan you combine the chance of you drawing your one Refuge with the chance of them drawing their one Regions and the chance of you actually just drawing your Desperate Wager. You’ll find that you can get a single Desperate Wager into your hand a high percentage of the time.

So how many cards/which cards do you need to devote to beating honor? Not many at all. I often find that 1-4 fate cards and 1 dynasty card can give almost every deck in the environment a 80%+ chance to beat honor decks. I don’t believe that a small percentage of fate cards and one dynasty card is too much to include to not have to worry about your match up versus honor opponents. The following scheme was included in a Razor’s Edge Dojo midgame military deck (slow military). The win percentage versus turbo honor in testing jumped from 30% to around 90%.

Example 1 of Anti-Honor scheme:
1x Refuge of the Three Sisters
1x Desperate Wager
1x Tribute to your House
3x Outmaneuvered By Force

However, in a faster military deck such as Lion not as much meta was needed. Lion Gakka blitz didn’t need that much of an addition to increase its win percentage versus honor to a very high level. Two cards provided everything that was needed in testing.

Example 2 of Anti-Honor scheme:
1x Refuge of the Three Sisters
1x Desperate Wager

There are other factors then individual meta cards to consider when deck building. Faster decks have a better chance versus honor. That means the more expediently you can produce personalities and force the better your chances will be. If you’re deck can’t bring seven force on the table before the end of turn 4 you might want to rework your military build. Remember more boxable personalities can provide the key to the speed you need. Voitagi in a Mantis deck is a key example of where 12 boxable personalities instead of 9 can provide a huge difference in the speed required to provide a crediable threat to honor runners. If your control deck can’t clear the entire opponents board by turn 6 you need to rework your control deck.

Since control decks often have a stronger game versus military (military decks care more about their personalities being alive) you often have to run more honor meta in them. This doesn’t depreciate the value of control in the current l5R environment since you already have a strong game versus the rest of the field. Control decks can use different subsets of honor meta because they often can remove all of the opponents courtiers (or bow them). Mantis and Phoenix PK decks can run the below scheme to gain 3 additional turns. Assuming honor decks honor out on turn 6 (not always true its more often turn 7) the following scheme with fate side and dynasty side card draw (Scroll Cache/Walking the Way) provides three additional turns. In other words you have till turn 9 to beat an honor player. Any control deck worth its salt should be able to handle honor in that time frame.

Example 3 of a control anti-honor scheme: 2x Refuge of the Three Sisters (combos with Show of Good Faith anyways)
2x Tribute to your House
1x Desperate Wager

Although honor is believed to be the most powerful archetype in the current format inclusion of small number of meta cards can give your military/control deck an acceptable win percentage versus solid honor builds. In my testing I’ve concluded it’s pretty much impossible to build a successful honor deck if your environment is metaing against you. The fact is honor decks just don’t have an answer to some of the meta available. There’s no way to cancel Desperate Wager or Outmaneuvered by Force in Diamond. One extra turn along with a canceled action or two can provide a solid military deck an easy win.

Jared Devlin-Scherer
Dynasty Member
Any questions/comments/or I hate you may be sent to: jaredds@wpi.edu

Samoshii adds:

Ironically, Phoenix switch decks require very different treatment from speed honour decks. Desperate Wager, for instance, is less likely to hurt us thanks to our high force and large number of battle actions - in fact, we can afford to use it ourselves! Outmaneuvered by Force is a solid choice for a defensive Phoenix deck, since you can use it to cancel the reaction on the Right Hand as well as Crane political tricks. Tribute is still effective, but the fact that we can take provinces even off a military deck means they have to be careful not to give you a chance to wipe them out a turn after they've bowed themselves out for an attack!

Switch definitely seems to be the way to go if you want to play honour with the current card pool - a trend that I expect to only grow after Hidden City is released!