The latest episode of the Strange Assembly podcast is now available for download! Chris and Jay give some snap thoughts on the recent purchase of the Legend of the Five Rings brand by Fantasy Flight Games.
Strange Assembly – Episode 179 – FFG Loves L5R
You can find the FFG announcement on their website, and the AEG announcement on l5r.com.
Nice to hear your thoughts on the announcement.
Just one note/correction on the statement that MtG being the only long-lived commercial non-licensed CCG out there. Redemption CCG just celebrated its 20th anniversary having been in commercial production since July of 1995.
OK, there technically isn’t a license for Redemption, but that’s because its source material is in the public domain. But it is based on a media property, and one that happens to be the most printed book of all time. And I think that most of its customers are probably specifically interested in it because of the tie-in. So I think maybe my point stands.
Also, I did not know it was still in print. 🙂 Or that it had ever had an Organized Play system.
Shadowfist is still around, too, though I think they also converted to the LCG/ECG model a few years back.
Shadowfist died the first time after a year, then came back after four. It averaged about a set a year over ten years, then died again. It came back (thanks to Kickstarter) four years later (in 2013) as an LCG-style product. I believe they’ve been Kickstarting expansions since then (their most recent was this summer). It wouldn’t fall into the active CCG category, but it was more than a flash-in-the-pan.
Fair enough. I admittedly hadn’t paid that close attention to specific releases, I just knew that there was still an active fanbase that wasn’t just still playing with old cards (like Netrunner, pre-FFG) or fan-made sets (like Rage). Still blew my mind when I found out, though.
I suspect that when FFG does bring back L5R, regarding the factions, we’ll either see something like Conquest’s faction wheel (with clan alliances built-in) or something akin to Netrunner’s faction system, with Clan Strongholds taking the place of individual identities. They could divide the clans up into groupings not unlike the old ‘Winds’ (Left Hand, Right Hand, Underhand, Black Heart). That sort of setup would make it easier to add in new clans and non-clan factions.