For today we will be taking a look at the scorpion clan. For the record this clan is my favorite to splash provided that you run enough courtiers. Forged Edict takes care of your opponents best cards and Calling in Favors turns the Reprieves and Spyglasses that your opponent is counting on against them. Scorpion is also a good topic to discuss because it illustrates an important point in gaming. Separating fluff from mechanics.

In theory the lore behind a card matches its design. This is especially true in a world like Rokugan which is addictingly immersive. In Rokugan, the Scorpion are consummate politicians. Easily the match of the Crane. They rely on tricks to dishonor their opponent and shame them in front of the imperial court. They rarely engage in combat, doing so only to defend their lands from the more aggressive clans. This is reflected in the older version of legend of the five rings where dishonor was the primary win condition of scorpion. They even had a stronghold with a province strength almost twice that of other clans to help them survive to dishonor their opponent. We will see if their fluff matches their current design.

The final deck can be found here.

Stronghold

As always everything starts with the stronghold. The only scorpion stronghold available is City of the Open Hand. Its ability is to take one honor from your opponent if your honor is lower. When you first look at the card you get shades of the old scorpion from the previous game. Dishonorable courtiers dishonoring the opposition. The house ability even directly contributes to a dishonor victory.

In practice that is not the case. If you have ever run a deck whose primary win condition is dishonor you will know that most of the honor loss comes from the draw phase. This is where you bid low while your opponent bids high and he gives you the difference in honor directly. It would not be an exaggeration to say at least half the honor loss from a dishonor victory comes from this phase. The rest comes from conflicts. If scorpion were to actively pursue dishonor as a win condition then they would have higher honor than their opponent. This renders their house and some of their cards unusable.

What does the house actually want you to do from a design standpoint? To state the obvious it and other scorpion cards want you to have lower honor than your opponent. As previously mentioned the best way to achieve this is by bidding high. It would not be uncommon to bid 5 every turn you can. The house helps you mitigate the risk from this by taking back honor from your opponent. Dishonor is no longer a viable win condition therefore we have to go for province destruction. The house encourages us to bid high and our own effects require us to lose honor so it will be a race to see whether we can destroy our opponents stronghold before we lose by dishonor. Thematically you can think of this as the scorpion exploiting their schemes for an advantage in court and outside to achieve their goal before the empire finds out about their plot.

We will be focusing on both political and military conflicts as we need both to win as fast as possible. We have cards that get better when we have less honor and in any case we want the card advantage so we will bid high to be more dishonorable than our opponent. We have the courtier tribal so we will include the normal suite of courtier cards. Next we also have the covert mechanic. We will try to exploit this to bar defenders from the final battle. Lastly we don’t really want to defend as we want our people to attack instead. We will be relying on debuffs and bowing to reduce our opponents force to 0 making the attack fail.

Provinces

We have our standard province set up with entrenched position going under the stronghold. The scorpion province secret cache replaces our water province. It is important to note that when attacking scorpion there are no good provinces to attack. All four provinces all do something to give scorpion incremental advantage. We exploit this by our strategy of reducing force for defense. Even if they win the ring they have a harder time breaking and be forced to attack again.

Dynasty

The primary theme of our dynasty deck will be raw power. We want stats as lopsided as possible. The attacker decides on the conflict type so we will be able to send the people to the right conflicts. We do not have staging grounds or other dynasty accelerators so our curve cannot be too low. We do not have a lot of high cost conflict cards as well so we are free to spend on dynasty.

Holdings

A set of favorable grounds make up our holdings. We do not need card draw with our bidding strategy so we opt for holdings which give us more flexibility in combat.

1 cost

Bayushi Liar, sinister soshi, Seppun Guardsman, and Otomo Courtier make up our 1 slot. Most scorpion players would protest the lack of the bayushi manipulator. The reason he is not here is that most province strengths are 4. Everyone in this list can break one with just one item whereas the manipulator would require two. 5 cards a turn should be enough without having to rely on manipulator for an extra one. Sinister Soshi acts as an additional layer of defense.

A quick not on Bayushi Liar. He is a one cost that has 3 pol skill and is immune to dishonor because of his glory. There is no reason not to put fate on him. Most players just use him without fate to get the card draw faster which is a mistake.

2 cost

Young Rumormonger, Soshi Illusionist, and Yogo outcast make up our two costs. In most instances we are getting 3 force for 2 which helps with the break. Young Rumormonger only provides two but we dont really have any other options. He does provide some defense from honor effects by shunting it to the 0 glory characters.

3 cost

Bayushi Miyako and Actress make up our 3 costs with a one of of favored niece to fill out slots. Miyako punishes our opponents for costing us honor by bidding low and actress is essentially 3 force for political conflicts and your opponents best character for military ones. There really isnt much more to be said for this slot.

4 and 5 cost

Yunako, Shoju, and Hiroue make up our heavy hitters. Yunako is essential. Most strongholds will contain a province that require you to have 12 or more strength to break. Yunako lets you compete in the other conflict type by switching your heavy hitter meaning you will only need 7. Shoju is a truck that people dont even bother to defend and Hiroue is in competition with the Lions Pride Brawler and Doji Challenger for best character in the game.

A quick note on Hiroue. Remember that his ability also works on defense. If your already going to lose a province anyway you can defend with him to pull in your opponents best character to force him to overextend. Then Hiroue can either stay or move out via favorable grounds.

Conflict

The conflict deck is divided into 3 parts. Force boosts, Defense, and what I call removal.

Boosts

Banzai, Court games, Katana, Banzai, and Fan make up the force boosts. As of right now every deck will be using them so there is no real merit in discussing them in depth. seven conflict characters are also available in case you need more. Your military strength will usually need more help than your political skill which is why the conflict characters lean towards mil.

Defense

Fury, Fiery madness, Way of the scorpion, and for shame make up our defense. Note that even if we reduce someone to 0 force the favor would still provide 1. Getting the favor is a major part of our defense. In any case we are running 6 Imperials so we want to have it.

Removal

At the end of the game your opponent will be committing everything to defend his stronghold. To counteract this we have ways to make sure that they cannot. 6 sources of covert remove their strongest characters from the defense, instead encouraging them to attack our beneficial provinces. Outwit does the rest with our highly skilled courtiers.

Missing

What is missing is often as important as what is included and this list is sure to raise some eyebrows. Assassination is not in the deck. Court Mask is missing and there is only two copies of adept of shadows. When scorpion loses it is mostly because they get so close to 0 from their own dishonor that the opponent only has to push them over the edge or they run out of steam because they are forced to draw one card a turn due to honor issues. I only include the most necessary

The heavier conflict cards are absent as well. Blackmail, Ambush, I can swim and other high cost conflict cards. Your dynasty deck is already top heavy. Having a heavy conflict deck as well causes fate issues.

Alternatives

In case you do not want to run dragon splash lion or phoenix would work as well. Both are more aggressive versions of the deck. Lion would run a set of ready for battle and vengeful oathkeepers to make sure your military attacks push thru. While Phoenix would run a set of display of powers and a set of i can swim. Both rely on attacks getting thru to generate a stronger counterattack.