I did get to eyeball Jeremy’s Crab deck and it looks like there’s a ton of money rares in there that I either can’t find or can’t afford. However, I think with the cash I have spent on the cards I got, I have a pretty decent deck. Now I just need to make time to play it.

It seems the new edition of AEG’s Legend of the Five Rings, called Celestial Edition, was just released. Something about starting from scratch with a game I started playing back in Gold Edition is appealing. I seem to do this just about every edition since with me playing the game for varying intervals.

One of the things that drew me back in is the redesign of the cards. Man, they look really awesome now. While I have had a bit of trouble identifying some of the card types, I think I’ll get it under control pretty easily. The cards look somehow more “serious” (except for some of the anime-style art that I hate) and professional. I really dig the new look.

In the past, I have always played Crab and usually played Phoenix as a secondary choice. Back in the end of Samurai, I did the opposite. I’m sticking with that trend in Celestial as I read that the Phoenix have been redesigned a bit to allow for less loss of your Shugenja when doing the Shugenja/Samurai split. So I bought a starter and 5 boosters. In a couple of my boosters I got duplicates of a Crane Personality, which I will likely never use. I was able to build a deck from these cards, though I didn’t have enough copies of some of the more cool Actions (now called Strategies). I was able to throw down a game with one of the local guys, Mike, who had only bought a starter and a few boosters as well to build a Lion “Blitz” deck. I didn’t want to really play any of the guys who bought whole boxes of cards as I felt the playing field would have been too skewed in their favor. At 9pm, we called the game a draw with me having several more Personalities than he, yet having lost one Province.

I really like some of the rules changes in this edition. One thing is that you start with one or two Holdings in play depending on whether you are going first or not. One of those Holdings even allows you to get a new Dynasty draw. Another thing that is a change for the better, is that you start with 6 cards in hand instead of just 5. For the most part, everything else is pretty much the same.

I noticed several cards from way back making an appearance, though I can’t think of them now, so I’ll need to go through my old cards and find copies of those.

I hope to be able to play this game a bit more as I remember our old group from back in 2001 or so having a ton of fun playing this game.