There's still time to build, right?

It's been a long time, but the Kotei is coming and I want to be in on it. Can any of you help me get back up to speed with Spider Paragons and/or this new fangled Crab Merchant thing?

The paragon deck I played in Atlanta is posted on the Spider clan forum (spider.daigotsu.com) if you want to take a look at it.

Daigotsu Thrakhath wrote:The paragon deck I played in Atlanta is posted on the Spider clan forum (spider.daigotsu.com) if you want to take a look at it.

I hear that decks stratagem works because it kills shit.

I'm also building spider commanders because it looks more fun than unicorn women on horses taking perfect pictures and looking pretty.

I don't recommend Yasuki because it requires a lot of chase rares and is pretty hard to play.

As far as military goes, take a look at Thrakhath's deck, he made top spider, went 5-1 in swiss and made 11th overall in Atlanta.

My general rule for this environment is: make a deck that can consistently win battles, has a shot in hell vs honor, and ignore dishonor. Take a look at each card you are considering and score it on a scale of 0-3. Take note that I consider there to be 3 military "decktypes": Attachment, Naked, and Cavalry.

0 - The card cannot be used by your deck, or it doesn't help you vs any foreseeable matchup.

1 - The card is a niche card that you can use, but will only be good vs one decktype (honor, dishonor, attachment military, naked military, cavalry military, or enlightenment)
2 - The card is useful vs all of the military decktypes, or a niche card that COMPLETELY hoses only 1-2 decktypes (Think Imperial Census/Crossing the Forbidden Sea in Celestial)

3 - The card is useful against every decktype.

Go through your deck and score every card. Perfect score is 240 (80 "3's"), but is unrealistic and just not possible right now. So, consider the following...

<100: You are probably playing a starter deck.

100-124: You are building a collection but probably missing quite a few "3'ofs"

125-149: You have some semblance of a deck... there is a core theme and there are moving parts.

150-174: ENTRY LEVEL for a deck that I would even consider taking to a Kotei.

175-199: Now you are in the area where you are making a "swiss deck"... or a deck that would be very consistent vs a large, varied field. Thing is, once you make the cut, you may end up losing to a more specialized deck.

200+ : You are probably scoring some of your cards wrong. Remember, certain matchups do not care about attachments, and many MANY personalities for most clans right now fall into the "1"-"2" range so it is pretty hard to score over a 200 if you are doing it correctly.

If your deck is in the 175 column, you've probably got a pretty solid deck but you should start looking for what your bad matchups are and consider dropping a few of the actions you use the least in playtesting, and putting in a few "1" ranked cards that specifically deal with those bad matchups. This is what is considered running "meta" cards. Cards that aren't too great, but really fit the meta-game (larger picture of what you expect the environment to look like).

Other than that, I recommend playtesting as much as possible. Coordinate with your local playgroup whenever they are available and just flip cardboard. Don't get discouraged, and don't let losses get to you. Instead, analyze your games. Which cards would sit in your hand and never be used? Which cards were consistently awesome? What traps did you fall into? What did you do right that your opponent couldn't deal with? Analyze all of that and go back to the drawing board.

If you can't play with local players much (like me, I live far away from the game shop and only make it down there once or twice a month), look into Egg of Pan'ku, the online client. It is a little tough to set up your first time, and you have to use an external client to make it work, but it is INVALUABLE for playtesting. I would say about 2/3rds of my playtesting is done in solitaire matches to iron out my gold scheme, or vs myself by opening two clients. And I just knock out as many games as I can, as fast as I can. It gets you familiar with your cards, and it makes certain card interactions stand out in your memory. Aside from playing alone, you can also play online with others via Hamachi (which has several dedicated rooms for L5R players across the world) and us Forgotten Bay guys use Evolve to coordinate our playtesting. We usually post about playtesting events and play for several hours a night.

The best thing you can do is build decks and playtest over, and over, and over again.

or just make a deck you like and have fun

ogre, I've played you in the past and seen some of your deck, in my honest opinion, you will really enjoy crab zerkers. Fun to play, kill shit, brute force, and has a lot of flavor to it, and does pretty well.

Pruto wrote:or just make a deck you like and have fun

ogre, I've played you in the past and seen some of your deck, in my honest opinion, you will really enjoy crab zerkers. Fun to play, kill shit, brute force, and has a lot of flavor to it, and does pretty well.

This... Which is why I fucking hate playing battle maidens.

If I could find a deck that let me get top 8, and was still fun as hell to play I would be playing it.

(would be looking if people would show up to stack cardboard).

If you want to play spider there are two decks I know are viable if played properly (spider monk and spider paragon). Commanders is close, I am looking at the deck now and I swear the thing has a battle action on every freaking guy in the deck besides bofana, who is bofana... More like Bofanda, girl got back.

Thanks you guys. We should meet up and play (meaning you guys school me like 1st grade) before the Kotei