The Strange Assembly set review of Embers of War continues in Episode 51, which is now available for download. This episode features Chris, Jay, Kevin, and Mike discussing Crab, Spider, Crane, and Mantis-focused cards from Embers of War.
Strange Assembly – Episode 051 – Refrigerator (Part 3)
You can discuss this episode here, or on our forums.
Nice series of casts 🙂
A bunch of comments touched on a deck I’m working on and enjoying a lot. Its Goju sleaze /attrition. From the Shadows and Far from the Empire make for a pretty consistent pile of sleaze and of course the box makes that all the easier. Having so much of that frees me up to bow freely and still take provinces or to use them as sleaze and as a response to send home.
The 6f ninja is not great by any means, but for my deck he was more or less what I needed to smooth out some of the personality base. I’m running Shadows Walk, and From the Shadows and he helps make both a little more playable and the shugenja trait gives me a bit more leave to have a greater number of spells if I choose to. (still working on what spells to include or not).
I like ambush a lot in the deck. I’m trying for a fair bit of limited kill to discourage attacks in mid game and set up a long term military advantage not to mention taking out utility personalities in honor/dishonor decks. Due to the sleaze cards all unbowing they can ambush and still be ready to take a province. The deck has tools for naval kill/steal on the ambush along wtih the usual tricks like negating the targets ability to perform actions. And the box action helps minimize the chance of losing my personality on the ambush. There is no honor loss for ninja etc… All in all its a cheap way to do a lot of mischief with little down side.
Its not a tournament powerhouse but I’d say that Embers helped smooth the deck out a bit and made the sleaze, which is its strongest trick, far more consistent.
I don’t think the new Scout cards will be changing the Iron Crane’s abuse of unaligned/crab personalities. They’re both relatively expensive and have comparable uses to a couple of our currently lackluster heavy hitters (really, does anyone use Tametaka or Masafuni by choice?), whereas the unaligned peeps are generally there to facilitate a swarm/blitz approach and get the most use out of the strongholds supercav recon. The crab ones are just the best scouts in the environment and will probably stay in the deck until we get handed something comparable to Tensin.
To hazard a guess, I’d say that Akeha goes in at the expense of Yuki (or Akio, in decks that are borrowing her) and Narizane takes the slot of whichever of Tametaka/Masafuni/Takichi is still somehow in the deck.