Conquest: Yoroni First Impressions

Yoroni as a faction occupies the interesting design space of ‘Conquest without Conquest’.

At first glance the faction looks like it has taken all of the building blocks of a real faction and then thrown it all out in a disorganized heap. No command stack programming, no dance of mainstay/restricted regiments, not even internal coherence within a single regiment. It’s the easiest thing to put together two thousand points out of anything you happen to have and start playing games. It definitely hits the beat of ‘easy to learn’.

The flipside of this is that it has also hit the note of ‘hard to master’. Because everything is so flexible you have an unprecedented ability to customize the structure of your units, and because the ‘correct’ structure of everything is so unclear it demands a lot of thought to extract maximum value. The synergy between the Gilded Legion and Longbowmen is obvious – put the archers behind the pikemen and shoot as you pike. Picking the balance between Ideals, whether to go all in on one, mix multiple, or flip between them reactively – is far less obvious and will require a lot more practical experimentation. This faction has a long way to go before it is solved.

ARCHETYPE 1: BRUTE STRENGTH

Whenever coming to grips with a new faction, especially a complex one, the best thing to do is understand it in terms of brute strength.

Leave all the subtlety aside; let us write a list of pure Ka and Chi. That gets us two Oyabun and 22 stands of Kami and Oni blended to taste – I like two units of 5 oni carrying the characters and 6 units of 2, which gives the list ten activations and a range of distributed threats. The whole list is Medium with two instances of Forward Force, everything activates off two cards, 11 inch threat ranges across the board and the ability to play your entire turn adaptively with minimal concession to the command stack.

Despite this being the listbuilding equivalent of putting a brick through the front window, this isn’t to be underestimated. Other factions can do brute rushes – a Spires all-Avatara list for example – but it’s not going to be as solid on its merits as the Yoroni version. It is also very easy to mix in one or two Tengu archer units which provide some ranged pressure, if that’s a thing you find yourself missing, or a Jorogumo Geisha warlord which you can use to give a large bubble of your units loose formation or +1 evasion without losing the underlying spirit of the list.

There is also version of this that uses Ka/Fu and combines ranged pressure with devastating counter-charges, but I think it is less straightforwardsly powerful as Ka/Chi.

ARCHETYPE 2: ADAPTABILITY

For those looking for a slightly less neanderthal school of listbuilding, you can go deep into Kappa and the Sui Ideal. This is the ‘smart’ way to play Yoroni, but I actually think it’s a significant step down from the Brute Force technique.

Activating a Kappa off a non-Sui card sounds good in the moment, but there is the fairly immediate problem that now you have a Sui card in your deck generated by those Kappa which you’re going to *have* to use to activate a non-Sui unit. So each time you use this ability you’re guaranteeing that some other unit of yours does not get their Ideal bonus this round. You might get to line things up to add +2 inches of movement speed to a march, but that comes at the cost of having guaranteed 5 inch charges all the time in addition to the +1 impact/+1 brutal impact that’d come with just running Oni and activating them off the Oni card.

Then, with this ability a wash, you can instead use Sui cards on Kappa units to alter who is the command stand in the unit on the fly. This is also a problem because one of the most common alterations you’d want to do is to put a Kami in charge for the defensive bonuses – which is intensely initiative hungry and awkward compared to having that defense up to begin with – or put an Oni in charge for the guaranteed 5 inch charge – which will now have to be carried out with the baseline pittance of Impact 2. This whole process feels like so many steps to recreate the Brute Force list but worse.

ARCHETYPE 3: RAINBOW GODZILLA

This one is simple: A Jorogumo Mahotsu, a couple of Oni and Kami units, and then three Genya No Yokai. Alternating the cards going through the Yokai rapidly results in Evasion 3/Indomitable 2/Impact 8/Brutal 1 killers. You might also add a Kitsune Bakasu warlord to give your monsters Fluid Formation with Fu cards, making them weirdly mobile and responsive.

This feels like an extremely fun way to play, alternating powering up your giant monsters and using the full spread of cards. It is very hard to say that this is going to be good, at least until I’ve tested it a bit more, but it does feel like by far the most entertainingly way to play so far.

Sample List:

This is my preferred all-rounder Yoroni list so far; two big units of Oni, two small units of Tengu for archery, and two powerful monsters. It deploys extremely smoothly, with more than half of the army guaranteed on the field on turn two, Flow on the Oyabun allows the archers to follow in close support, and it puts a reasonable number of activations on the field.