Some cards to consider

[barrysheppard at eircom.net]

Firstly a card which I recently re-read, it was most likely only me that got mistaken but just in case.

Defend your Honor.
Political Reaction: Play this card when another player's action makes you lose Honor. Negate the Honor loss. One of your unbowed Samurai Personalities may then "challenge the player's honor." The player must either target one of his or her unbowed Personalities to accept the challenge, or refuse the challenge. If the player refuses the challenge or his or her Personality loses the duel, the player loses an amount of Honor equal to the amount you negated.

Shame is big in the enviroment, we have problems with it due to our lack of all samurai. Defend your honor can just cancel that loss, there is an option (this is what I didnt get, that its an option) to challenge the opponent to a duel to make them lose a similar amount of honour. So if you dont have any samurai just cancel the loss, if you have a samurai and your opponent has no unbowed (he has to target to accept) personalities challenge away or if reju is sitting around and no opponent has 5 chi or greater it amounts to a free winds truth of that honour loss.

Secondly is the preview card from APC displayed at 
http://members.aol.com/iguesi

Acquiring Favor
Political Reaction: Bow your Stronghold and play this card to satisfy a cost of using the Imperial Favor.

There are a bunch of cards that let you use the favour usefully, using this card you get the following effects.
Miya Yemi: Bow stronghold gain 4 honour.
EUH: Bow stronghold to get rid of card.
Considering just the winds.
Toturi Sezaru: Bow stronghold to get an extra card during the end phase.
Toturi Tsudao: Bow stronghold to send home an attacker.
Akodo Kaneka: Bow stronghold to refill provinces.
Hantei Naseru: Bow stronghold to negate honour loss or Bow stronghold and begining of turn to half honour gains during a phase.

Tsudao is kinda iffy, as is Sezaru mainly because its a waste of gold.
Kaneka is interesting, pay four gold to change a bad draw into a less bad one, could  be useful.
Naseru is the fun one, at least in my opinion. When honour running against crane (the honour runner to beat) we can bow our stronghold to cancel all honour gains during the dynasty phase, duel a bit, bow a few sancts and (hopefully) get the favour off them for the next turn and in so doing beat them. Ive seen the crab strategy of honour running off holdings and using naseru to lock down dynasty gains while they can, we could possibly try a similar approach using fist of osano-wo to take out holdings and duels/shames and deeds to get ahead.

A perfect cut is shaping up to be very interesting, cant wait for it to hit the shelves.

Hitomi Hokosaki
www.dragonstrategy.net