Seriously?

I keep running into mention of people honoring out at the start of their turn 4, but try as I might, I haven't even come close to that yet - beginning of t5 is when I get lucky, and it can be much worse.

So if someone could explain to me just how someone gets to 40 in 3 turns...

I've seen it done with recursion dueling. With a good opening dynasty flip I can do it with my Kitsu Tombs honor runner (turn 1 or 2 Toju). I'd assume their are some combo honor bombs that can go off that early.

ok, recursion dueling I could see doing it. I thought it was robo-honor doing it, though, and I have yet to be able to figure it out even with Crane, who *should* be good at robo-honoring as far as I know.

Kitsu Tombs...really? I mean, sure Toju can gain a lot, but even assuming he goes up on first turn, you only get to use him twice before your T4, so that's only 8 honor, maybe 9 if you pack Focus...leaves you with 30, 31 to gain (depending on if you use dark moto to bank on cheaper Toju, or not).

Even getting a Shinsei's Shrine on T1 (15 honor), and, somehow, boxable 3ph lion on both T2 and T3 (21), you'd still have to gain 19 off events and actions. With only 8 dynasty cards and 5 fate cards to go through (the other two are discards for Toju), that hardly seems all that likely...

You're neglecting the absurd amount of card draw/search and unbow available to a shugenja deck.

Toju is not once per turn so it's simply a matter of can you draw enough unbow and other stuff to let Toju hit 40.

The deck is basically trying to get Toju and at least one other shuggie on turn 2 and then draw the deck and win on turn 3.

My friend's Kitsu Toju fun deck has Honzo and Allegiance to the Shogun. Just 1 Honzo attached lets you use Toju's ability 4 times!

Satsu Bomb, the deck I'm trying out now, can do it too. (Theoretically for me since I've yet to do it myself ).

The biggest barrier is Satsu's gold cost of 13 or 11 discounted. You can buy him third turn with a steady but ordinary gold progression. But hopefully you'll have Merchant Caravan, Inheritance or Restoring the Doji Treasury to speed it up.

The only problem with the Satsu Bomb deck (if I'm correct about which deck you mean, the one with 'Honored Hostage', right?) is that you'll lose to every Dragon Clan opponent, because with those, Satsu will cross over to the opponent.

Don't make any large bet on it.

Sure, the other dragon player gets a Satsu out of it, but a properly set-up hostage bomb (can be done without Satsu, just not as reliably due to Miyoshi goodness) will probably be winning the game by the time you get Satsu.

I'd have to play around with it but Satsu seems unnecessary to make honored hostage bomb work in Legacy.

The reason it was played out of Dragon during LE was that Dragon had the house guard and that was the easiest way to boost chi. In Legacy it is a lot easier to pump up chi and I can think of several factions that could likely drop an HH bomb deck. The ancestral and Celestial swords lose their bonus when the hostage is taken so that might be the best way to go.

Crane have a couple of 8 chi peeps which makes for a lot less chi pumping required. Lion might be able to go breeder plus sword as could spider using Yakamo's Claw. Ratling breeder needs a combo to create a multi faction rat swarm to pump a sword.

And that's WITHOUT looking at Kamis.

Or just At'tok'tuk Sensei.

If a Satsu HH bomb runs into another Dragon deck, it can also stick Shogo's Gift on Satsu so he can't switch sides.

Running the HH bomb out of Dragon also lets you use HHoL to assure access to HH when you want to bomb out, without using up any other fate/dynasty slots. And Satsu is pretty good at drawing cards if you run it out of some other Dragon box. Satsu also comes with high stats to effectively use chi-boosting Kiho regardless of what stat they look for or whether they look at the caster or the target.

He does not, however, get much of anything off of the Sword, because he's probably your only guy on the board.

The biggest problem, I think, is that w/o the right events flipping, the deck can't win without giving the opponent 4 turns to play with.

There is also the deck with the Shogun's Advsiers and enmity and stuff that was able to gain 20 something off a duel in Lotus. Add in some more bonus honor gainers and search from Open, and voila, quick rocket bomb.

One of the classic mistakes for Dragon is the fascination with HHoL for combo honor decks. Try House of Tao starting Void and 3x Sacred Hillside. You can add Somesia Sensie and monks for even more insurance that you get to use Void every single turn (and you are going to run Meeting the Keepers, of course)

There are a number of ways to construct the fate deck (I am talking non duelling here) that allow you to get off any number of different combos to cross on your 3rd turn. The most common involves chi pump action and then playing Honored Hostage, but there are other things to be done.

As Ken said, Toju can get you there pretty easy. Abusing the lack of once per turn on certain old cards (hi! Wasting Disease) is a very effect general legacy tactic, and can be applied to honor decks without much effort. For instance if you want a Crane honor deck example, look into multiple uses of Kaikta Shijin.

It is also worth mentioning that while plenty of honor decks can and do cross on 3, there is an argument to be made that the decks would be better if they were a turn slower and had a touch more defense. Personally, I think honor's best chance is raw speed, but others hold differing opinions, these folks tend to favor the duel based approach that cross on 4 like they did in Lotus.

Paul Ashman

The only thing making the Tombs Toju deck work is drawing so much of the deck lets me hang on to a lot of defensive stuff. It's still pretty depressing how often it loses after crossing 40.