L5R Bushi league battle report

Okay well thanks everyone who voted on the next hour for those going to be for the blog. There was a tie at the end of tallying so I opted for the one I wanted to do!

The first thing I would like to talk a little bit about is; the style of deck that I used. If you're familiar with L5R (Legend of the Five Rings) you'll get more out of, however the actual gameplay I'm doing a breakdown of the smaller stages so if you know nothing about L5 are you still be able to follow along and hopefully enjoy it.

So I opted to do a battle report for my bushi league L5R deck. It's spider. After much haranguing and much failure from play testing, the thing I finally conceded to changing my stronghold. I tried desperately to use the 'Plains of Glass' as my stronghold, but many of my friends told me not to over and over again. I could just not listen. After several games of being defeated by a single battle action, I finally conceded and went with the Keep of the Dead as my stronghold.

My opponent for this match is the ever treacherous Chris Dunn, (actually he's quite a nice guy he just plays a very treacherous clan). So after a roll of the dice I got the chance to go first you'll see from the picture that I got to reveal my provinces (the four cards in between the two decks of cards) my dynasty deck are the white cards and the red deck of cards is are the fate deck.

Chris – my deck is the devious ninjas, I'm going to use the cards in my deck to misdirect his personalities, And basically kill his out of nowhere. Hopefully when I eliminate enough of his guys I can overwhelm his provinces to eliminate him from the game.


My deck is made of spider commanders; now the spider clan is known for using some sneaky tricks themselves, but their problem is they are more have dealings with, you know 'nonhuman' types... and basically not being very well known for being very nice people, My deck Revolves around having personalities that are fairly powerful, being teamed up with followers and basically sacrificing those followers to destroy things of his.

So if you've never played L5R before, the way it goes is you shuffle your two decks of cards. One of them is all the stuff you own like people (called personalities) and places (called holdings) which produce gold as resources. You place 4 face down cards to the right of this deck to create your provinces. The other deck (green) sits to the right of this . What it does is; it's all the things you can do with your people so sometimes you'll be able to perform actions with personalities or attach followers to them or even give them equipment to swing In battle. I won to roll to go first so I got to reveal my cards that are placed in the middle from left to right.

What we see here is: the card on the left is a holding which means that it generates money on my turns. The three cards to the right are personalities which are used to attack my opponent. In my first turn I can discard those three and reveal three new ones in place of them.

This set up seems much more appealing, I have more money generating holdings, And one of these personalities lets me replenish the facedown cards with faceup ones, Which means I can generate money a little faster early in the game because you can't purchase facedown cards.

Chris's first turn he decided to go for money generation too.

Because I am an aggressive player, and they like to play my games aggressively. My second turn I decided to grab two personalities. Even though it's normally a good idea to spend two turns building up lots of resources.

In a Mexican standoff style build up Chris and I both decide to grab more and more personalities, I grabbed the marsh, the incense mill, and one of the stronger guys. To have a balance between money and attacking people.

The personality I have lets me do damage to his personalities before you count up the final battle total. When you attack a province for the other player, Both players assign personalities to the battlefield, both players then get to take actions back-and-forth. Until both players pass, at that point the battle ends in both players total up the force of their personalities, The higher force wins and destroys all of the personalities of the other player.

Some actions allow you to destroy personalities before the battle ends. This is important because it can tip the battle in your favor. Other things you can do are called bowing, Which turns the cards 90° and indicates that they don't contribute to the army. Or sending people home, which removes from them from the battle completely.

On Chris's turn, he brought out two personalities which each create followers when they arrive. Followers attached to personalities and if the personality gets shot at or stabbed, the follower takes the damage first.

In the first battle I pulled several sneaky tricks which caused followers I had attached to personalities, to destroy all of Chris's followers. Unfortunately I ended up losing my battle, And subsequently the personality and all attached followers.

With lots of money in reserve, I purchased several personalities. And emptied out all of my provinces. During Christmas time I made his personality brash, which means that I get to draw card, whenever that personality attacks me. Sure enough Chris assigned all of his personalities to attack one of my provinces. I decided not to defend the province, because I knew his personalities would go home and bow. Leaving him with very few defenders for my turn.

Chris brought it to very strong ninjas, on his turn. Which made it very discouraging to attack him. I decided to get greedy and attack two separate provinces at once. After taking several actions, I was lucky enough to destroy both of them putting Chris in a very bad position, he decided that it would be best to concede the game at that point. It's very difficult to Shoney's photos but it was very very close. It could've gone very badly for either of us very quickly at any point throughout.