Shattered Empire:
... In With The New (Part 1)

Hello, all, and welcome to the first, Dynasty focused, exploration of some of the new things you'll be seeing in Shattered Empire.

On the Event side, ultimately three 'new' Events made their way into ShE, as well as, of course, a new set promo.

In Onyx Edition it was decided that each of the Clans would have "Clan Holdings", based off the Time of the Void era Unique Clan specfic Holdings. However, many of these ended up either underperforming or largely being ignored, primarily due to their lack of Gold production, or their focus on Samurai exclusively. We decided to make adjustments to those that we felt needed to be kept, and to add ones for Clans that didn't get one (Akasha and Mantis) or had ones that were no longer suitable for storyline reasons (Spider). 

Minor alterations were made to other Holdings, usually keyword additions to make them more viable or more accurately reflect their flavor, or to remove mechanics that ultimately proved unneeded. We also opted to replace the often confusing Barracks of the Asp for a simpler Follower supporting Holding.

When deciding how different we wanted ShE to be from Onyx, we went through several iterations. One thing that didn't change, regardless of iteration, was our desire to put out new "tentpole" Personalities for each clan's subtheme. While these existed in Onyx, they weren't often focused on supporting that subtheme, inasmuch as they simply fit within it (most of the time, anyway). We wanted these upgraded Personalities to more clearly act as 'sub' Champions for their respective themes, while also not being exclusive to those themes. It was also necessary to replace some Personalities that died or otherwise exited the card pool for storyline reasons. We also needed to include Personalities for the Mantis.

One of the other necessities, spurred on by the storyline more than anything, was that none of the Onyx Clan Champions were serving in that role, mostly because they're dead or missing. Many had replacements in ROU, and for those that did, we simply slotted them into the existing character spots, tweaking some as necessary.

In the case of five factions, it was necessary to give them new 'Clan Champions' to reflect the storyline accurately. For the Akasha, the Qamar stepped down from singular leadership in favor of a 'Council of Bloodlines', so a new uniting force has emerged. The Crane, of course, are being ruled by the regent Doji Meiji. The results of GenCon 2024, in which Yoritomo Minoko's faction emerged victorious, needed to be reflected. For the Phoenix, even though they have an ROU Champion, he is young, inexperienced, and far from the Phoenix homeland. For the Spider, Hantei XL has appointed the yojimbo of his infant daughter as Champion of the Spider Clan in his stead. 

It was also necessary to replace certain other Personalities that had died or been otherwise removed, that a reprint simply wasn't feasible to find. In that case, we opted to design entirely new cards, either to provide similar functions to dead Personalities, or to support themes that didn't exist when Onyx was originally designed way back in 2014.

However, there remains a plethora of Personalities 'new' to the ShE environment that many fans of the game will no doubt recognize, over 30 Personalities in total among every faction in the game, and several existing Personalities have gained tweaks, such as keyword upgrades, to make them more useful than they were in Onyx Edition as well.

The replacements and upgrades were not limited only to Holdings and Personalities. We ultimately decided several of the Strongholds would need adjustments, based on two years of data collection and field testing by members of our team in playtesting and the larger environment. Some were simple rewording tweaks to reflect things like Icons or terms not in use during Onyx, or the addition of what we felt were appropriate keywords. Only the Lion Stronghold we felt was in a position where it didn't need any kind of tweaking, and the Mantis SH simply required art. None of these changes were made lightly, but we hope it results in an overall more enjoyable and interesting game environment.

Only one Stronghold has completely changed, and that was the Dragon Clan. Frankly, we never felt entirely comfortable with the Onyx Edition Dragon Stronghold's ability, and this version better reflects the current status of the Clan, after taking in large numbers of Brotherhood refugees.

We hope you'll join us next week, when we discuss changes to the Fate side and Sensei of Shattered Empire. 

Thank you all for your continued support of this project.