Hack the Planet: The Value of Patience

Patience is a virtue. But not in L5R.

Hello, and welcome to another Hack the Planet. Today I’ll be making a short article on something I saw several times at the local Plugged In tour (and was guilty of at least once myself) – the value of patience in this game. Often players would lose games because they acted before they were ready.

With the proliferation of Tag and Bag decks in  the tournament scene right now, Patience has become one of the more important qualities of a tournament player. For instance, I had one game I lost because I ran an unprotected server and was very happy to find an Agenda, thinking I had just lucked out on a misplay, when my opponent showed he was the smarter of us and Midseason Replaced me into tag death.

This shows the new importance for the Runner of playing conservatively: for the most part the Corp can only mess with you if you run. Thus you need to wait until you are fully established and can shake off something like a Sea Source before you start being aggressive. With the new tournament rules giving a 6-7 loss the same weight as a 0-7 loss there’s more incentive to run something like Tag and Bag which wins big or goes home. This means there’s even more Corp decks attempting to kill the Runner. If you are unprepared for their attack the Corp will gladly take their easy win.

The main threat to play around is scorched earth: watch for tags, keep 4 cards in hand, and try to keep your bit stack high enough to prevent them from tagging you when you don’t expect it. I won’t go into the meta in depth, but there’s plenty of it running around these days.

Now with less creepy woman looking over the destruction.

On the Corp side, you’ve got to be patient for your kill shot. If you spend too many Scorched Earths early game to drain resources from the Runner’s hand you won’t have enough left to be able to land your killing blow. That said, for the most part the Corp doesn’t have the same room for patience, mainly because it is the Runner who sets the pace of the game.

Happy Hacking.

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