Conquest Faction Focus: Yoroni

It can be difficult to talk about the Yoroni – their basic design is a big box of unsorted Lego. Where traditional armies make intuitive sense – put the spearmen in front of the archers – Yoroni gives you a deep freedom to customize almost every detail of the army. Accordingly, I’ve broken this article into parts, where instead of analyzing warbands or unit types I go through the concept space Yoroni is operating in and tries to provide guidance about how it all fits together.

Ideals

The design of the Yoroni ideals is pitch-perfect ‘easy to learn, hard to master’. As a result I’m going to go through this section in considerable depth.

The first rule is: There are five types of Ideal Cards [Ka], [Chi], [Fu], [Sui] and [Mu]. Example: A Regiment of Shikigami has the [Mu] Battlefield Role. This means that it would add a [Mu] Ideal Card to your Command Stack.

This means that you are incentivised to build ‘themed’ armies around a limited number of Ideals – usually two. Two is an important number because you can get an edge by having an off-element character embedded in a regiment; a Fu Kitsune gives you options in a unit of Ka Oni. Happily, this does not mean your off-element models don’t have a place – instead, they’re often perfectly placed to fill out extra slots in Modular Regiments.

The second rule is: ANY Ideal Card can Activate ANY [Character] or Regiment that has not yet Activated this Round, regardless of Name, Type or Battlefield Role.

Keep this in the forefront of your mind at all times. Any regiment, any card, any time. There will be times when matching Ideals is extremely important and the core of your strategy, but there will be times when none of it matters and you can just free-activate. Free activating is an incredible advantage, and the most basic way that it is good is it means you never get put on a receiving tempo.

What do I mean by that? Consider this case: You have units, A, B and C fighting units X, Y and Z respectively. You order your command stack ABC and your opponent orders their stack XYZ. Your opponent wins supremacy, so X attacks, and then A attacks, and so on. This means that your opponent gets to land all of their blows before you do, inflicting casualties and killing regiments, meaning that your own counterattack is reduced in power. One turn on receiving tempo can be crippling, multiple turns of it back to back feels catastrophic.

With Yoroni, you get *bonuses* for pairing regiments with their Ideals, but at any point that bonus can be less than getting out of a receiving tempo and moving into an attacking tempo. This is especially the case for Ka and Fu ideals, which have to do with movement and charging – if you’re locked in combat already those bonuses mean nothing so you lose nothing by going to freestack! Now you can reflexively reorder your deck to BCA – meaning that you get two first strike hits in to your opponent’s one, meaning that despite losing Supremacy you’ve stolen the tempo advantage. It’s an amazing ability, and it’s why everything in Yoroni is so expensive.

The third rule is: When an Ideal Card Activates a Regiment of the same Battlefield Role, it confers Special Rules to it as seen later, until the end of the Round.

These ideals fit into the following categories, with alternates:

Mobility Tricks:

Ka (Force) – The Regiment gains the Impact (+1) and Brutal Impact (+1) Special Rules until the end of the Round.
Fu (Unfettered) – The Regiment adds +2″ to its March Distance for the first March Action it performs during its Activation.
Fu (Alternate) – The Regiment gains the Fluid Formation Special Rule until the end of the Round.

These both have to do with regiments moving and charging, and cease to be relevant once lines are locked. These are very useful and important in early turns, but cease to be relevant once the lines are locked – although alternate Fu is fantastic for exploiting breakthroughs.

Defensive Buffs:

Chi (Resistance) – The Regiment gains the Indomitable (2) Special Rule until the end of the Round.

Chi (Alternate) – The Regiment gains the Hardened (+1) and Oblivious Special Rules.

Mu (Void) – The Regiment adds +1 to its Evasion Characteristic (to a maximum of 3) until the end of the Round.

Mu (Alternate) – The Regiment gains the Loose Formation Special Rule until the end of the Round.

These are all initiative hungry defensive buffs, operating on more or less the same logic as the Bastion special rule in other armies – although on that note, a lot of the time Indomitable (2) is going to be worse than Bastion, which is in turn a 25 point upgrade, so don’t sacrifice tempo to chase the buff. Mu, likewise, if you’re not being attacked by Cleave it literally does not matter and you can just go directly to freedecking. In Ideal circumstances you get these up one action before your opponent attacks the relevant unit. Hardened+1 and Oblivious is one of the better and most generally useful buffs in this set, especially on a Kami-Kami-Oni unit.

The more units you have that rely on these the more hits will leak through, especially if you have both Mu and Chi cards. Generally, you want to specialize in one or the other.

Sui (Adaptability) – You may choose a Stand in the Regiment and have that Stand’s Command Rules replace the current Command Rules until the end of the Round.
Sui (Alternate) – “The Regiment immediately performs a free out-of sequence Spellcasting Action as if its Command Stand were a Spellcaster, casting either Blossom in the Wind or Misery of Failure Envisioned. The Spell is automatically successfully resolved as if it had scored the amount of successes required.”

Sui is a bad ideal. Consider the following unit of Kappa with an Oni stand:

Sui ability: Change the Command Stand of the unit

Kappa ability: Benefit from any Ideal Card

You use a Sui card on your Sui unit to change the command stand to the Oni, gaining its attack and charge bonuses. This unit has not been activated with a Ka card, meaning it is only Impact (2), making it worse than a pure unit of Oni in the same role.

You use a Ka card on your Kappa unit, which gives them +1 impact and brutal impact. There is essentially no Command Stand bonus, meaning you are not getting the automatic 11 inch charge and +1 attack that the same unit of Oni would have in the same situation. Again, just straight up worse for no particular gain. And it gets worse! Now you’ve got a Sui card in your deck that was generated by the Kappa at round start. Now you have to use that Sui card on a non-Sui unit, meaning your Oni unit won’t get its ideal either.

It’s not any better with defensive ideals. Using a Sui card on a Kappa/Kami unit for the defensive buffs means that now the baseline always-active defense that a normal Kami regiment would have is now reliant on you spending a command card on it before your opponent attacks it, and given how you’ll likely have many such units on the table this just stresses your defensive resources even more for no reason. None of this is worthwhile. Kappa are perfectly fine units on their own, though, comparable to the Oni in terms of damage output – but they should under no circumstances be the command stand.

But you know what is worthwhile? The Sui alternate ability. This rules, actually – autocasting a spell that inflicts -1 resolve is essentially an extremely flexible Terror (1) that bypasses Fearless and can benefit multiple units in a round. Blossom in the Wind is less universally relevant, but it can be extremely good situationally – and most notably, one of those situations is into Old Dominion, who do not care about Resolve but have some extremely strong triple-activation units and abilities.

The fourth and fifth rules are: When an Ideal Card Activates a [Character] of the same Battlefield Role, the Regiment the [Character] is currently attached to benefits from the Ideal Card’s Special Rules until the end of the Round regardless of its Battlefield Role. This means that a Regiment can be under the effects of multiple different Ideal Cards but cannot benefit more than once per Round from the same Ideal Card.

Regiments in this Army cannot perform Entourage Activations.

The immediate logic here is put a character of a different type in each regiment; a Fu Kitsune should lead Chi Kami, an Chi Oyabun should lead Ka Oni. All the combinations have something to recommend them.

But the followup to this is: Activating a character means a dead/buffing activation. Sometimes this is good, such as the early game when you want to stall or bait your opponent into charging first. Sometimes it is very good, such as when your opponent is out of activations and you get to leisurely charge up your unit for a devastating charge. Other times, when the lines are locked and everything wants to attack as soon as possible, it means you’ll naturally activate your characters last and you won’t get much benefit out of this. As an implication, that generally means that it’s slightly advantageous for your characters to have Mobility ideals as opposed to defensive ones.

Yoroni characters are mostly extremely capable duelists – but because they can’t perform Entourage activations they can often find themselves in an awkward situation where challenging an enemy character means they’re at the mercy of the enemy regiment getting an unopposed hit in against them. Duelling at the bottom of the round is often low value because your opponent can simply refuse and the morale debuff resets before you can get use out of it.

The sixth rule is: When a Regiment or [Character] is destroyed, at the end of the Round, remove as many Ideal Cards of any kind and in any combination as the number of Regiments and/or [Character]s that were destroyed this Round.

Just to emphasize: You do not need to remove cards matching the destroyed regiment.

A lot of the time, you’ll want to – but you don’t have to. If you’re looking to power up a Genya No Yokai with a full spectrum of buffs, then you can cycle those otherwise useless cards out of your deck the moment they’re attached.

Characters

It’s hard to talk about Yoroni characters in the same way as other factions; there’s no neat progression of battlefield role and warband to go through. As is the faction’s theme, you could just grab any of them in any combination and it’d work entirely fine – that ‘easy to learn’ floor is really solid. So rather than giving a big overview of each one, I’m going to talk about how they exist in relation to each other.

Daimyo

Deadly melee attack. Reliably kills combat characters in duels.
The ability to free-select an Elemental Ideal, and so far the only way to get the Ka Disciplines
Lord of the Roaring Flames allows 1/turn replace of you Warlord’s ideal with Glorious Charge. This is strictly worse than a Ka card’s +1 impact/+1 brutal impact, and without a Ka card behind it Yoroni units are only Impact 2, making this pretty low value.

Oyabun

Forward Force, a valuable source of flank
Quicksilver Strike. Quicksilver, 6 attacks, Clash 3 and Cleave 1 does *not* reliably one-shot a Defense 4/4 wounds infantry character, which is the most important breakpoint to shoot for, and with 7 wounds it’s vanishingly unlikely a Yoroni character would die on the backswing. This is therefore not enough to compensate for the overall lower damage output compared to the Daimyo or Bakasu.
Lord of the Eternal Mountain gives a 1/turn +1 Hardened and Oblivious. This is very good, it stacks with a Mastery for Hardened 2 on a Defense 4 unit of Kami (buffed by a Jorogumo spellcast), and cuts morale damage down to a minimum. If you’re looking for a centerpiece brick of a unit, this is the Supremacy to go for.

Kitsune Bakasu

Absolute close-combat blender. She’s very comparable to the Daimyo, but with a different use case – Deadly Blades will do worse against Untouchable and Cleave 2 will do worse against Evasion.
Can bring Domaru Damashi, which are fantastic Lights.
Mistress of Azure Gales gives you 1/turn Fluid Formation, usable on any unit during her Supremacy turn. This is probably the best Supremacy in faction and is an absolute build-around – the restriction of only being able to do it once per turn entirely acceptable compared to the ability to have it exactly where you need it.

Kitsune Onmyoji

A beautiful and pure-hearted shrine maiden who would not hurt a fly (derogatory)
A weird spellcasting set. These effects are all powerful, but they’re all a bit sideways and situational. There is enough scope here that at least one of them is going to be useful in any given round, unless you’re fighting melee-only Old Dominion lead by an Archimandrite who have pushed you off every objective zone.
She can also take Domaru
She is also a rare source of Interference. Yoroni has several instances of Tenacious against ranged attacks, and these do not apply to spells, so this represents an important defensive layer that is otherwise hard to get.

Jorogumo Geisha

This is the stabby giant spider lady, with Deadly Blades, Terrifying (2) and three extra attacks.
Monster Inspiration gives you an 8’ bubble of either +1 Evasion or Loose Formation. While this is very good, the Jorogumo doesn’t have a huge footprint so this can actually feel like a pretty limited radius in play. You’ll only realistically be able to support 1-2 regiments with this at a time – not least because the Geisha is a combat monster who’ll want to break ranks and make aggressive charges rather than sitting back as a perfectly positioned aura bubble.
Mistress of the Ghostly Reikai gives a 1/turn replacement of Mu’s +1 Evasion with Loose Formation. This is a real hard one, because despite Loose Formation being fantastic +1 Evasion is also extremely important a lot of the time, especially on things like Domaru who are D2/E1 – and of course, sometimes neither will be relevant! I wouldn’t often make her the Warlord unless I’m in an extremely ranged-saturated meta.

Jorogumo Mahotsu

4 point heal with a 12 inch range! That 12’ is really important – a Spires Biomancer has 8’ range and you really feel it a lot of the time.
+1 Defense with no strings attached, all timer of a spell.
The opportunity to sometimes totally mess with your opponent’s head by disabling a retinue activation. If you *can* force a dead activation at the top of the turn after winning Supremacy then you essentially have two points of tempo advantage and can walk away with the entire turn. It does feel like the sort of thing that doesn’t work twice against the same player, though.
She can also opt to cast two spells in a round, which is very good given how effective her range is.
A genuine sidegrade to the Geisha. Bring one of each, they compliment each other nicely.

As far as Disciplines go, there’s enough to be interesting without any clear build-arounds. Way of the Kensi is a transformative pick that lets you blow out most characters with a Daimyo or Bakasu, but it requires a Ka Daimyo which can be an ask. Kenshibu Dancer is also extremely relevant on Yoroni bruiser characters – an enemy that rolls poorly against a Kitsune Bakasu’s Deadly Blades can face an absolute blowout of a Resolve check. Trial of Hakari Ishi is very good becase moving Kami from Tenacious 1 to 2 makes them very resistant to a large category of threat types. Horagai Master gives a generous Unstoppable bubble, which can either be useless or game-saving. Unyielding Kata can stack with the alternate Chi ideal, for Hardened+2 Oblivious Kami, which is genuinely hard to shift especially if buffed by a Jorogumo. Other things are various small nice-to-haves if you happen to have some points left over..

Units

This is going to take a little bit of doing to talk about coherently. First, your building blocks.

Kami Ayakashi: They’re probably the least of the Modular stands, but they make decent Command stands. Their offensive output is poor, but they are good backliners with Trample and come with Tenacious that helps them against chip damage.

Oni Ayakashi: The damage-dealers. The third stand in almost any unit should be an Oni, and a pair of them together makes a vicious and effective little module.

Kappa Bushi: As discussed previously, there is no value in making them the Command Stand, but they’re very comparable to the Oni in terms of damage output as the third stand in a unit.

Origami Warriors: Each one represents six Lethal Demise wounds for 60 points. That’s enough on its own, but I think that these are actually fantastic and a core strength of the faction. I recommend completely ignoring In The Fold – Vanguard 3 is not nearly as worthwhile as putting an Oni in the unit.

Tengu Ayakashi: These don’t feel like they quite make it. They’re very expensive and very fragile single-role archers operating in a faction where everything is Size 2 which limits their sight lines a lot. I wouldn’t say that they’re bad, just that I’ve always found them to be extremely finicky pieces that I’d prefer to be anything else.

Tengu Bushi: Incredible stands, a pair of Tengu Bushi represents probably the most effective and versatile unit in the faction. Blade Masters makes them exceptional at cracking armour, they’re fast, tough and reliable, their one sin is that they’re rubbish at carrying characters.

Following that, most Modular units are going to be two or three stands. Two stands have about the offensive/defensive ‘weight’ of three to four stands of another faction’s medium troops; three stands represent a serious commitment of force with a price point in line with most other faction’s heavies. Going above that becomes increasingly impractical.

This leads me to the following modular unit archetypes.

Kami Kami Oni Character: This is a durable brick of a unit, designed to get into a brawl on a center objective and weather some incoming fire while putting out serious damage. The bigger version – three Kami/two Oni/Character – feels like it’s an over-commitment of points into a single unit. That’s a quarter of your army at that point and it’s very easy to stall or outmaneuver, unless you happen to be playing on a scenario with only one objective zone. You can of course swap the Oni for a Kappa for about the same effect.

Origami Origami Oni Character: This is in my mind the best module in faction; it deploys as a light, scores like a medium due to the character, hits like a dumptruck, and does Lethal Demise wounds on the way out. Supported by excellent Domaru Damashi and able to turn on a dime with the Kitsune Bakasu’s Supremacy ability this can represent the core bunker of your force. It’s also very resistant to the sort of early game ranged units that might normally push back a unit like this.

Tengu Bushi Tengu Bushi: An independent, fast, maneuverable takes-all-comers purveyor of violence for a reasonable price, these modules can keep up with your Origami bunker, score points and take fights against anything in the game.

Oni Oni: These are countercharge/zoning threats, projecting a reliable 11 inch bubble of Don’t Go There. It’s fantastic to have one or two of these on hand, but more than that and you start to put yourself at the mercy of the table’s Hindering terrain setup. You sometimes might add a third stand but that’s just more of the same.

I don’t think any other configuration of these stands goes the distance. Kami Kami is begging to be given some offensive output – if you just want a defensive speedbump, Origami will do the same job cheaper, faster and with Lethal Demise. Teams of two feel ideal – Yoroni stands are very expensive and getting above ten activations can be hard especially if you want to bring a monster.

There are a few more unit types to talk about, though.

Domaru Damashi: Possibly the scariest Light unit in the game, putting out six attacks with Flurry, speed 7 with Unstoppable, Tenacious 2 against ranged attacks, and most importantly cheap as chips. You can put nine stands in a list and feel great about it. The limiting factor at times might feel like the assembly process, but it’s only really Pose 1 which is unnecessarily complicated – Poses 2 and 3 go together fairly smoothly.

Dai Yokai: It is hard to love this one at a glance. For the price of four Oni stands you get a monster with the offensive and defensive stats of maybe two and a half. The selling point is Sweeping Step though – it allows to Yokai to move right through an enemy unit and come out the other side, hitting it along the way. This can position you to make a run at backfield objectives, menace enemy archers or get onto a scoring zone you were being forced out of. Do keep in mind that the unit you ran through will be able to simply reform-charge into your exposed rear, so make sure you’re not doing this against anything with big impact attacks, fluid formation and/or you’ve got something else to threaten or pin them to prevent them from doing that.

Genya No Yokai: We cannot help but love this; the idea of collecting Ideal cards to power up your super sentai demon swordsman is such a beautiful conclusion of the faction’s mechanics it feels like a shame not to bring it. Unfortunately, the Genya is let down by the following things:

Sui is worthless.
You can’t attach Supremacy-modified cards.
Ka and Fu are pretty marginal effects on this model.

This means that your super powerup sequence *really* means getting +1 Evasion and Indominatable(2), maybe Brutal Impact 1 if the timings work out. That’s a big letdown compared to the fantasy. Sadly, I must recommend that you just take four Oni instead.

So these are the core strengths of the faction right now. This leads me to the following conclusion

Putting It All Together

The conclusion that I’m excited to have come to is that Yoroni is a rushdown faction.

The core strengths of the faction lie in its lights and very fast Mediums. The ideal army feels like it comprised of some combination of Tengu, Domaru, and Origami/Oni modular units with perhaps a Jorogumo or two. This results in a force that hits the ground fast and early, takes fights on the opponent’s side of the table, and tries to table the enemy before they have a chance to deploy defensively. It’s a faction very resistant to ranged skirmishers due to a prevalence of Tenacious (2) against ranged attacks, can aggressively make use of reinforcement lines due to how easy it is to wheel 2-stand units, and offers the ability to crack armour or deal volume hits reliably. During a Kitsune Bakasu’s Supremacy turn, an Origami/Oni unit can unfold, wheel in and pull off a long distance charge and wipe a unit. From there the Yoroni player can maintain a tempo advantage and prey on units as they deploy. With support from a Jorogumo Geisha coming in off the reinforcement line then the Yoroni player can back this push with potent healing giving it more sustain than expected. It feels like a beautiful and dangerous way to play.

Switching stances to a more defensive, attritional gameplan will, I think, doom a Yoroni player. They’ll always be out-Activated, and they’ll always be burdened under the disadvantage of having their entire army be Size 2 and thus exposed to enemy archers. Kami Ayakashi are the same price point as the Order of the Ashen Dawn and won’t win a slugging match against them, or against the Heavy bricks of other factions. Your advantages are the ability to frontload the game and switch into freedecking to ensure you always have the initiative advantage, and both of those lose value if the game turns into multiple turns of careful positioning for advantage.

Some communities have reported early success using ‘gear check’ Yoroni lists that are built around big, durable Kami blocks. Unfortunately, my local meta has long been exposed to my attempts to build big, durable blocks in a variety of factions and had the counters already prepared when I began trying the same thing with Yoroni. As a result, I think that particular avenue is something of a dead end and I think that once people adapt to it the archetype will be very hard to sustain.

There are slightly more pure versions of this list possible, but this one frees you from building a forth Domaru box and gives you a little bit of variety in model types. The biggest decision you’ll make when coming onto the table is the location of your Oni unit – this is the slowest thing in the list and represents your finishing blow after your advance units start to wither.

=== The Last Argument of Kings ===

The Rushdown [2000/2000]

Yoroni

== (Warlord) Kitsune Bakasu [130]: Horagai Master

* Modular Regiment (3) [200]: Origami Warriors (L), Oni Ayakashi, Origami Warriors

* Domaru-damashi (3) [140]:

== Jorogumo Mahotsu [300]:

* Modular Regiment (2) [150]: Tengu Bushi (L), Tengu Bushi

== Daimyo [110]: Fu

* Modular Regiment (3) [240]: Oni Ayakashi (L), Oni Ayakashi (2)

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Conquest Faction Focus: Yoroni

Ideals