The Archive

Crab

The Wall. Attrition, economy, and the willingness to spend people.

Who they are

Founded by the Kami Hida, the Crab hold the Carpenter Wall along Rokugan's southern border, the only thing standing between the Empire and the Shadowlands — the blighted realm ruled by the fallen Kami Fu Leng. Their sworn duty is to keep it standing, and everything about the clan follows from that.

Five families divide the work. The Hida garrison the Wall and fight what comes over it. The Hiruma scout, raid and carry warnings from beyond it. The Kaiu engineer and maintain it. The Kuni are witch hunters and shugenja who study the taint closely enough to be feared by their own side. The Yasuki — merchants who defected from the Crane centuries ago, sparking a war the Crane have not forgotten — keep the supply lines fed.

The official telling is blunt about how the rest of the Empire sees them: impolite brutes, too pigheaded for the niceties of court. The Crab answer that they turn their backs on the court so they can face the real enemy, and that a single gap in the Wall costs more lives than a season of bad manners.

Crab are the clan that does not care about being liked. They hold the Kaiu Wall against the Shadowlands, and their card pool is built around the arithmetic of that job: bodies are cheap, bodies are expendable, and the wall must not fall.

Mechanically this makes them the game's attrition clan. Way of the Crab bows a character outright. The Mountain Does Not Fall turns a losing defence into a win. Funeral Pyre converts your own casualties into fate. The through-line is that Crab are content to trade one-for-one all game, because their engine refills faster than yours does.

The economy nobody talks about

The primer at Off Meta Musings makes a point worth repeating: Crab's reputation is defensive muscle, but what actually holds their decks together is economy. Kaiu Envoy, Shrewd Yasuki, Gallant Quartermaster and Funeral Pyre show up in most Crab lists regardless of archetype. Several of them, notably Shrewd Yasuki and Hida Guardian, want a holding in play — which is why Crab run more holdings than most clans, and why Rebuild is arguably their most theme-defining card. It was restricted in December 2018 and stayed there.

Strengths

• Cheap, resilient defenders and the best province-holding tools in the game
• Real economy: fate from death, fate from holdings, discounts on their own casualties
• Hida Kisada and the big Hida line give them credible late-game military
• Almost no reliance on splashes, which makes them forgiving to build

Weaknesses

• Political skill is thin and often absent entirely
• Slow starts against a clan that can win before the engine turns over
• Vulnerable to attachment control stripping the tools that make small bodies work
• Their honour tends to drift downward, which some of their own cards then punish

How they changed

Core Crab is a defensive brick: sit behind Defend the Wall and let the opponent come. The Imperial Cycle gave them Yasuki Taka and a genuine fate engine. The Elemental Cycle handed them Earth shugenja and Kuni Yori, leaning into a magical identity that never quite became dominant.

Then Defenders of Rokugan arrived in late 2019 with the Kaiu Wall holdings — six unique holdings, each buffing a province. It is the most flavourful thing FFG printed for the clan, and it is a trap. Community testing settled on running about four, because every wall holding you add is a character you do not see during the dynasty phase. Our showcase archive runs all six on purpose, and it is a slower, stranger, more thematic deck for it.

The late game brought a genuinely nasty Crab: Hida Yakamo and the Damned, characters that get better as your honour falls, and finally the Corrupted mechanics of Under Fu Leng's Shadow, where the Wall's defenders start becoming the thing they were built to keep out. It is the best long-form storytelling in the game's card design.

If you are building one

Decide early whether you are the wall or the hammer. The two Crab plans — grind them out behind provinces, or attack relentlessly while less honourable than your opponent — pull in opposite directions, and decks that try both do neither. Then count your holdings. Crab decks fail far more often from a clogged dynasty row than from a lost conflict.

Crane

Court, duels, and the quiet violence of perfect manners.

Who they are

The Kami Doji taught Rokugan its arts, its etiquette and its laws, and the clan she founded has been the Emperor's left hand ever since — the voice of the courts, as the Lion are the fist of the armies.

The Doji are the courtiers and the clan's ruling family. The Kakita produced the duelling schools that made Crane blades the standard against which all others are measured. The Asahina are shugenja and artisans with a pacifist streak that sits oddly in a clan so associated with killing. And the Daidoji — the Iron Warriors — do the pragmatic, unglamorous work the Crane's reputation depends on not seeing.

Courtesy is the Crane virtue, and it is worth understanding as they do: not politeness, but the discipline of making every interaction serve a purpose. A Crane at court is working. So is a Crane at a tea ceremony.

Crane hold the Emperor's left hand: the courts, the arts, and the duel. They are the clan of honour as a weapon rather than a virtue, and their card pool is unusually coherent about it.

Two cards define them. Voice of Honor cancels an opponent's event outright if you are more honourable, and the Emerald Dojo's primer describes it as expected at three copies in essentially every competitive Crane deck. Way of the Crane exists largely to make sure the honour condition is met when you need it. Together they mean a Crane player is always holding a threat, and a good one makes you feel it without ever playing the card.

The duel as a win condition

Masters of the Court, the 2019 clan pack, turned duelling from flavour into an engine. Kyūden Kakita honours a character every time you win a duel. Kakita Toshimoko duels on arrival. Iaijutsu Master and Kakita Blade make the duel a fight you have already won before it starts. Toshimoko was eventually restricted, which is as good a review of the archetype as any.

The subtlety is that Crane duels are rarely about killing the character. They are about bowing it, sending it home, or forcing an honour bid that wrecks the opponent's draw. A Crane player who duels to kill is usually a Crane player having a bad game.

Strengths

• The best cancel in the game, and the honour engine to switch it on
• Duels that convert a small skill advantage into total board control
• Deep political characters, from Doji Whisperer up to Doji Hotaru
• Genuine access to the honour victory, which forces opponents to race

Weaknesses

• Military is real but narrow; they win fights they have prepared, not fights they stumble into
• Heavily reliant on being more honourable, which dishonour decks attack directly
• Expensive characters and a slow clock against aggressive military
• Their best cards are answers, and answers are dead when you are already behind

The house divided

The most interesting thing about Crane over the game's life is the story. Doji Hotaru and Doji Kuwanan are siblings contesting the clan, and their cards discard each other on sight. It is design where the flavour and the rules text say the same thing, and the 2019 releases are full of it — Conflict Between Kin, Kakita Ryoku, the whole Justice for Satsume arc.

Worth knowing: the Emerald Dojo's primer notes that Kuwanan does not see much competitive play, because cheap ready effects make an expensive bow poor value. He is still one of the best cards in the game to build a deck around, which is not the same thing.

If you are building one

Crane reward patience more than any other clan. Hold Voice of Honor. Do not duel because you can. Keep your honour above theirs and let the deck's cards switch themselves on. And run Proving Ground — the primer flags it as a duelling-deck staple, and it draws two cards a turn in a deck that wants to hold cards.

Dragon

One enormous character, and the patience to build it.

Who they are

The Dragon keep to their mountains and explain themselves to no one. Their founder, the Kami Togashi, is said to have seen the future and then declined to discuss it, which is roughly the clan's posture toward everything since.

The Togashi family are not a family in the usual sense but an order of tattooed monks — ise zumi — whose inked designs carry real power. The Mirumoto developed Niten, the two-sword style, and are the clan's warriors. The Kitsuki are magistrates who built a school of investigation around physical evidence, a genuinely radical idea in an Empire where a samurai's word was proof enough. The Agasha are shugenja and alchemists.

Enlightenment is the Dragon pursuit, and the clan is comfortable with the possibility that it looks like idleness, eccentricity or madness from outside. They are the smallest of the Great Clans and the least interested in that being a problem.

Dragon are the mountain clan: monks, duellists and magistrates who would rather understand a problem than fight it. In game terms they are the tower clan. Where Unicorn attack with six characters, Dragon attack with one, and that one is enormous.

The archetype had a name. Test, built by the community in 2018, is the deck the Emerald Dojo's guide credits with defining the year: trade cheaply early with Doomed Shugenja and Togashi Initiate, bank fate rather than spending it, then invest everything in Mirumoto Raitsugu, Niten Master or Togashi Yokuni and win every conflict for the rest of the game.

The two Dragons

The clan really has two identities and they rarely mix well.

Monks run Togashi Mendicant, Ancient Master and the kihō — Hurricane Punch, Void Fist, Iron Foundations Stance — which are free but demand a Monk in the conflict. Seal of the Dragon exists to hand the Monk trait to someone who lacks it, which tells you how tight the requirement is.

Bushi run Mirumoto Raitsugu, Niten Master and the two-sword attachments, winning duels through sheer accumulated skill.

A note for anyone building Dragon for the first time, because it caught me repeatedly while assembling this archive: the dual-purpose Monks — Tattooed Wanderer, Ancient Master, Togashi Acolyte — are conflict characters, not dynasty. That is precisely why you can play them as attachments instead. Half my first Dragon decks were illegal on this point.

Strengths

• Togashi Yokuni copies any character's ability, making him an answer to whatever the format is doing
• Let Go is the cleanest attachment removal in the game, and every clan wants it
• Enormous single-character ceilings, especially with Ancestral Daishō and Kitsuki's Method
• The Kitsuki package reads the opponent's hand, which converts into near-perfect play

Weaknesses

• One big character is one Assassination away from disaster
• Slow, and genuinely bad at defending several provinces at once
• The monk and bushi halves compete for the same deck slots
• Card draw is mediocre outside the Kitsuki cards

How they changed

High House of Light, from the 2019 clan pack, gave Dragon their best late-game engine: Togashi Mitsu sends a character home every conflict and the stronghold readies him to do it again. The Dominion cycle pushed the Kitsuki investigation theme hard. The final year got strange and good — Perfect Land Believer and Militant Faithful are peasants who have rejected the clan's teachings entirely, which is a bold thing to print for your monk faction.

If you are building one

Do not spread your fate. Dragon decks that buy three medium characters lose to Dragon decks that buy one huge one. Keep Let Go for the attachment that actually matters, and remember that Tranquility and Indomitable Will are how you survive the turn your tower gets targeted.

Lion

The Emperor's right hand. Numbers, honour, and no subtlety whatsoever.

Who they are

The Kami Akodo wrote the book on war — literally, in the setting's terms — and the Lion have been the Emperor's right hand and standing army ever since. Where the Crane hold the courts, the Lion hold the field.

The Akodo are the generals and strategists. The Matsu, founded by a woman who beat Akodo in single combat and joined him anyway, are the berserkers and the clan's largest family. The Ikoma are historians and bards, and their role matters more than it sounds: in a culture where a name outlives a body, the family who records deeds holds real power. The Kitsu are shugenja who speak with the ancestors directly.

Honour is the Lion virtue and they hold it more rigidly than anyone, which is both their great strength and the lever every other clan pulls. A Lion who cannot refuse a challenge is a Lion you can lead somewhere.

Lion command the Imperial armies and behave like it. They are the military swarm clan: many characters, all of them slightly better than they should be, marching into your provinces in numbers you cannot answer.

The core loop is simple and has barely changed across the game's life. Flood the board with cheap bushi, buff them collectively with Honored General or Way of the Lion, and attack until something breaks. For Greater Glory doubles down on it — it rewards you for having more characters in the conflict than your opponent, a condition Lion meet by default.

The Ten Orders

The clearest window into how Lion actually played is a July 2018 guest article at Imperial Advisor by a Lion Hatamoto, built around Hisu Mori Toride — the Lion one, not the Unicorn stronghold of the same name, which is a genuinely easy mistake to make.

That deck's plan is worth describing because it is not what people expect from Lion. It wins a military conflict by five, sacrifices a character to the stronghold, and declares another conflict. It cheats characters into play rather than paying for them. And it deliberately runs provinces that punish an attacker, because it does not intend to defend at all. The author works through all five possible splashes and settles on Crab, for Spreading the Darkness and Reprieve.

Strengths

• Best-in-game board width, and cards that scale with it
• Real honour gain, giving them a second win condition most military clans lack
• Master of the Spear and Vengeful Oathkeeper appear from hand mid-conflict, so their attacks are bigger than they look
• Battlefield attachments in the later sets gave them a genuine second archetype

Weaknesses

• Almost no card selection; they draw what they draw
• Board wipes and mass bow effects hurt them more than anyone
• Their characters are individually unimpressive, so a single tower can hold a province
• Pride and honour-loss effects can turn their own win condition against them

How they changed

Lion started strong and spent a long stretch of 2018 being told they were the weakest clan — the Imperial Advisor article's own tier list puts them last, and its comment section argues about it at length. Take that as one player's snapshot rather than settled fact.

The Emperor's Legion in 2019 gave them Kyūden Ikoma and the returning dead: Champions of Yomi come back from the discard pile, and Hall of Victories pays honour to whoever wins a conflict, which in a Lion deck is usually you. The Dominion cycle's battlefield attachments — Prepared Ambush, Makeshift War Camp, Logistics — gave them a positional game that looked nothing like the swarm, and Master Tactician plays cards off the top of your deck while a battlefield is out.

If you are building one

Count your one-drops. Lion decks live or die on whether the board is wide by turn two. And take the honour win seriously — a lot of Lion games are won by a player who was never going to break the fifth province and knew it.

Phoenix

Rings, spells, and the argument that fighting is beneath you.

Who they are

The Phoenix are the Empire's spiritual authority — the clan of shugenja, scholars and the elemental Kami themselves. The Kami Shiba founded them, then knelt to the mortal Isawa, and that inversion still defines the clan.

The Isawa are the greatest shugenja in Rokugan and, through the Elemental Council, hold the clan's actual power. The Shiba rule in name and serve as yojimbo, guarding the very shugenja who outrank them in practice. The Asako are scholars and henshin, pursuing enlightenment through study. The Kaito keep the shrines and the mountain passes.

Peace is the Phoenix ideal, and they are sincere about it — but they command the most destructive magic in the setting, and everyone knows it. The clan's recurring tragedy is a Phoenix who decides that some peace is worth a great deal of fire.

Phoenix are the scholars and shugenja of Rokugan, and their card pool argues — with some force — that the correct number of conflicts to win is however many gets you the rings you wanted.

They are the clan most likely to beat you without ever breaking a province. Ring manipulation, card draw and defensive attachments let a Phoenix player sit still, accumulate resources, and win on honour or on the opponent's exhaustion. Display of Power resolves a ring effect you have already claimed, which in the right board state simply ends games.

The deck that won Worlds

Jose Luis Saenz's Winter Court 2019 list is in the deck archive, and it is a good study. Kyūden Isawa, Seeker of Void, a dynasty deck packed with cheap Solemn Scholar and Ethereal Dreamer bodies, Forgotten Library and Kanjo District for economy, and exactly one Display of Power as the finisher. It is a deck built never to be in a hurry.

The Emerald Dojo's October 2020 guide describes the archetype's habits well: bid one on turn one, put opponents under immediate dishonour pressure, hold ground rather than attack, and grind the game out with Shiba Tsukune in the late turns. It also notes a Scorpion splash to protect key courtiers.

Strengths

• The best card draw and ring manipulation in the game
• Pacifism and Cloud the Mind neutralise a key character for one fate
• High glory, which means the Imperial Favour is usually theirs
• Isawa Tadaka and the Elemental Masters offer late-game effects nobody else has

Weaknesses

• Genuinely poor at attacking; province breaks come slowly if at all
• Many key characters are fragile and rely on attachments to survive
• Vulnerable to being rushed before the engine assembles
• Their answers are narrow — the wrong hand against the wrong deck does nothing

How they changed

Disciples of the Void arrived in April 2018, unusually early — before the Elemental cycle, which makes Phoenix the one clan whose clan pack precedes its own cycle. It brought Kyūden Isawa, recycling a spell from your discard every turn, and Fushichō, who returns from death because of course she does.

The Elemental cycle then gave them the ring-manipulation suite that defined them: All and Nothing, Wholeness of the World, Asako Azunami. The Dominion cycle pushed a stranger idea — Phoenix rewarded for passing, with Asako Lawmaster and Mediator of Hostilities profiting from conflicts that never get declared. And the final release, Under Fu Leng's Shadow, gave them Twin Soul Temple, which rewrites an element symbol on any card in play, bending every ring effect in the game to whatever you need.

If you are building one

Phoenix punish impatience in both directions. Do not attack because the turn feels empty. But do not durdle either — the deck needs to actually close, and a Phoenix player with fourteen cards in hand and no win condition is losing slowly.

Scorpion

Everyone lies. The dishonour clan, and the game's most complete toolbox.

Who they are

When the first Emperor saw that his reign would need deeds no honourable samurai could perform, he asked the Kami Bayushi to do them. Bayushi agreed, and the clan has been the Underhand of the Emperor ever since — spymasters, blackmailers and, by their own account, patriots.

The Bayushi lead and scheme. The Shosuro are actors and shinobi, and the distinction between those two things is thinner than it appears. The Soshi are shugenja specialising in illusion and misdirection. The Yogo carry a curse: they will one day betray whoever they love most, which is the sort of family history that makes a clan useful to an Emperor.

Scorpion wear masks constantly, and the reason given is that a Scorpion's face is not their own to show. They are the villains of the Empire on purpose, and the vow that made them so is the thing they are proudest of.

The Scorpion primer at the Emerald Dojo opens with Bayushi's vow to the first Emperor — that he would be the villain so that someone else need not be — and then notes, drily, that Scorpion players can be found regularly at the finals tables. Both halves of that are the clan.

Scorpion are the dishonour clan, but that undersells them. They cancel events, steal attachments, discard characters, drain honour and mill decks, and they do all of it from characters costing one or two fate. The primer's list of strengths is really a list of everything a control deck wants, and it is hard to argue.

How dishonour actually wins

The engine is Way of the Scorpion plus a wide base of cheap courtiers to fire For Shame!. A dishonoured character has reduced skill, costs its owner honour when it leaves play, and becomes a legal target for I Can Swim and Noble Sacrifice. Each individual piece is small. The accumulation is not.

The closer is Backhanded Compliment. The primer's framing is the right one: once you know it exists, your starting honour is effectively three lower than the number printed on your stronghold. There is no answer to it other than a cancel.

Strengths

• Best cheap characters in the game, with abilities far above their cost
• Calling in Favors steals rather than discards, and appears in essentially every Scorpion deck
• Multiple in-clan cancels, so their key turn is hard to disrupt
• Card cycling through Favored Niece and Master Whisperer lets them run situational answers

Weaknesses

• Military characters are thin; they lose straight fights
• They dishonour their own characters constantly, which cuts both ways
• No glory at all, so the Imperial Favour needs working for
• Their plan is slow, and a fast military deck can end it before the drain matters

The most-punished card pool in the game

Scorpion have more entries in the Banned and Restricted history than any other clan, which is its own kind of review. Forged Edict was restricted in May 2018 and banned in January 2021. Bayushi Liar, one of the best one-drops in the game, was banned outright — the primer calls the decision bizarre, and it is not alone in that. The Inheritance-cycle Bayushi Shoju was restricted after dominating a season. Duty, A Fate Worse Than Death, Mark of Shame and Cunning Magistrate were all restricted too.

Read that list as the record of a clan whose design space was consistently just a little too good.

If you are building one

Drop your own honour on purpose. It feels wrong and it is correct: Alibi Artist and Forgery both need you to be the less honourable player, and Bayushi Manipulator exists to get you there on turn one while drawing an extra card. Then be patient. Scorpion do not have a turn where they win; they have eight turns where you slowly stop having options.

Unicorn

Speed, movement, and questions the opponent has to answer right now.

Who they are

Eight centuries ago the Kami Shinjo took her clan — then called the Ki-Rin — beyond the Empire's borders to see what lay outside. They came back changed: mounted, foreign, speaking languages no one recognised, and Rokugan has never entirely accepted them since.

The Shinjo scout and lead. The Utaku battle maidens ride the finest steeds in the Empire and hold their mounts sacred. The Iuchi practise meishōdō, name magic learned abroad, which more orthodox shugenja regard as something close to heresy. The Moto joined the clan during the journey and brought their own gods and grudges with them. The Ide are diplomats and traders, and their patience carries the clan through a great deal of Rokugani condescension.

The Unicorn are the outsiders inside the walls. They have the Empire's best cavalry, its widest horizons, and the constant low-grade suspicion of neighbours who cannot forget that they left.

The Unicorn returned to Rokugan after centuries abroad and nobody has quite forgiven them for it. They are the cavalry clan: fast, mobile, foreign, and built to make the first four turns of the game as uncomfortable as possible.

The Emerald Dojo's primer puts the clan's character well — Unicorn pose questions rather than give answers. They have no in-clan cancel, limited attachment control and no targeted character removal. What they have instead is speed, and multiple ways to switch a conflict to military so their cheap pumps land where they matter.

Hisu Mori Toride

Hisu Mori Toride is the clan. Win a military conflict while outnumbering your opponent and you get another military conflict, immediately. It cascades. A Unicorn player who triggers it twice in a turn has broken three provinces, and Moto Chagatai exists specifically to make that outcome worse.

The primer is clear-eyed that this stronghold comes with a demand attached: if you cannot win a military conflict with more characters than your opponent, you are left with a weak political attack and nothing. Hence Captive Audience, which flips a conflict to military for one honour, and hence the whole clan's obsession with putting extra bodies into a fight after defenders have been declared.

Strengths

• The fastest starts in the game, and cards that get better on the attack
• Cavalry Reserves recurs characters from the discard pile at roughly half price
• Utaku Tetsuko taxes every card the opponent plays, which can shut a hand off entirely
• Deep movement and ready effects, so the same character fights repeatedly

Weaknesses

• No in-clan cancel, so their haymakers get answered by Voice of Honor and Censure and trade badly
• Heavy conflict-card reliance, with the draw phase as the main refill
• Weak late game; most Unicorn cards buy skill for one conflict, not permanent value
• Fragile provinces and, in Golden Plains Outpost, a genuinely poor core stronghold

How they changed

The primer states it plainly: Unicorn were by far the least competitive clan at launch, and improved steadily to become a solid mid-tier. Golden Plains Outpost was, in its assessment, relegated to the binder the moment Hisu Mori Toride arrived — a rare thing to say about a core stronghold.

Warriors of the Wind in 2019 brought Shiro Shinjo and the meishōdō talismans — foreign name magic, mechanically a talisman-tower archetype the primer describes as a stronghold of potential more than a stronghold of results. The Dominion cycle brought rally and the White Horde. The final sets gave them Khanbulak Benefactor, a real economy engine, and the Dire keyword, which finally rewarded Unicorn for the thing they always did anyway: putting characters into play with no fate and accepting they will not last.

If you are building one

Attack on turn one. Unicorn decks that play a careful opening turn have already given up their advantage. Accept that some games end with you exhausted and out of cards — that is the trade — and build so the first three turns are as violent as the card pool allows.