Traitor's Reward

This action card has seen little use in the Diamond environment, but deserves a second look. As a Limited action, bow one of your personalities to remove a number of cards from your deck equal to the amount of gold paid for the card, if the personality is a courtier, or half as many cards as gold paid if not a courtier.

So, why would you want to discard cards from your own deck? Often, especially at this stage of the environment, there are two severely different types of decks to face, with specific counters and meta for each. However, if you include the counters for both, you often end up with useless cards in your hands. If you only include the counters to one type of strategy, you will have severe problems when facing the other.

Traitor's Reward is the answer. First, it allows you to take out useless cards from your deck. This gives you a greater chance to get the cards you need. Second, almost a carryover of the first, by pulling cards out of your deck, you can get to the cards you want that much faster.

Obviously, the more gold you spend on this, the more cards you may pull out. One holding that will help with this is Kaeru Contracters. That holding is a 2 for 2 that produces 3 gold when paying for an action card, which this is. Another factor is that you want to use a courtier if at all possible. All clans have the unaligned courtier Otomo Taneji available. Phoenix also have the only Phoenix clan Courtier in Diamond, Isawa Toshiji. He is becoming much more common in Diamond than his original, Isawa Mitori, ever was.

Of course, even if you don't use courtiers, you might still use this card. It will only be half as effective, but that could still be all you need. After all, when facing an honour runner, who wants to draw a Block Supply Lines?

Hope this is helpful in the future.

Samoshii adds: If your deck relies on key cards, like Bayushi Kaukatsu, Traitor's Reward can be used to thin your deck and allow you to reliably get him out.