[ThrasherDarkrai]

Honestly, Shiori (AoA) barely seems better than regular Shiori. 110 points is a lot to spend on a figure with only 4 life and 3 defense who's heavily dependent on hitting a 35% Kieru chance to survive anything, and Ninjutsu Mastery doesn't seem like it has great damage output unless you have a singular unrevealed order marker on her. Beyond that, there are a few things that rather confuse me about this card:

1. Why doesn't Shiori have 4 defense? One of the neat ideas people came up with when making customs for Shiori (AoA) was to give her 4/4 attack and defense, to represent her learning to permanently maintain her Concentrated Will buff from Swarm of the Marro. It's kind of a shame to miss out on a clever little touch like that in the official release.

2. On that note, the whole "one unrevealed order marker" thing didn't work well for Shiori the first time. It wasn't even really any fun to try to make it work, since it introduces an irritating, somewhat volatile minigame with barely any payoff. Why try it again?

3. Just_A_Bill mentioned this in the "Heroscape is Coming Back!" thread, but there are a lot of things odd about Shiori's sculpt. It seems to have no mechanical relationship to the card (a Mirror Image power of some kind would have made more sense) and creates a weird situation where seeing the two "clones" doesn't enable you to shoot Shiori, but Raelin seeing the two "clones" does enable her to grant a defense buff. He nailed it on the head when he said that it seemed like something Avalon Hill - and now Renegade - went with because it looked cool, not because it makes sense with her mechanical design.

Ultimately, though, what kills me is that Shiori is a unit who really should have been cool, but was undermined by being both bad and fiddly on the board; never a fun combination. I had hoped that Shiori (AoA) would be, if not amazing, then at least good enough that I could justify putting her on the table. Unfortunately, I suspect that she's going to see just as much playtime as the OG Shiori, which is not much.