So You Want to be a Weeb? A Muramasa Guide (Patreon)

A Muramasa is sword crafted by Muramasa Sengo, who was a swordsmith who lived at some point in the Muramachi period (14-16th century) and was one of the highest quality crafters of their time. Their work rarely wandered outside of Japan and if you want to see it, you typically have to go to places like the Tokyo National Museum. 

Their blades are known for the use of a wave like hamon (the pattern formed by the hardening process, not magical breathing powers that are replaced by stands) and a "tangobara" (fish-belly) shaped tang (nakago).

Despite their reputation, position in pop culture and desirability - there is only one of these swords classified as an 'Important Artwork' and none of them are considered to be national treasures or important cultural properties. Because, in truth, they're not the most impressive swords Japanese culture has produced, they are just the ones that reached popular consciousness. 

The reason for this is due to the Tokugawa dynasty's relationship with the sword. Because of the sharp, clean blade and exceptional craftsmanship; Muramasa's were responsible for a great deal of death within the Tokugawa clan's lineage. This is not due to a real 'curse' as such, but because most Mikawa samurai wielded this swords; you were more likely to be killed by one of them and they were more likely to be wielding a Muramasa in the first place.

There are some very fun and tragic stories surrounding the relationship between the Tokugawa clan and the Muramasa though. Matsudaria Kiyoyasu was accidentally slain by his own vassal with a Muramasa; Kiyoyasu's son was stabbed by a Muramasa and then lost his mind with excessive drinking (those two events are certainly not connected) and when Nobuyasu (the great grandson of Kiyoyasu) committed sepukku, he was beheaded by a Muramasa.*

As time passed, things like this became larger than life and later generations began to consider the Muramasa a sinister or cursed weapon with a deliberate goal of destroying the Tokugawa dynasty. The Tokugawas banned ownership of the blades (in no small part because of how many insurgents would use them against the dynasty) 

*Keeping all of these relationships and names straight without directly cut and pasting from other sources was difficult, you may want to check I got all the facts straight, but regardless it's four generations having a lot of death surrounding those blades.

In popular culture it is this 'cursed' nature that has been taken and pushed, with the Muramasa being depicted as a blade often infused with demonic powers, or inhabited with a malevolent spirit. A weapon with a hunger for blood and death like no other. This is thanks in no small part to the American husband and wife team of Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook. At this point, what most people think of as a Muramasa is the pop culture version rather than the historical and cultural one.

This brings us to the sword one finds rarely in Kingdom Death's hunt phase, we can visually see that it is not a true Muramasa, both the sculpt and the artist's depiction fail on those fronts. But a great deal of the weapon's identity echoes and mimics the pop culture depictions of the blade, this is a brainchild of someone who has soaked their mind in the thick, heady juices of anime/manga rather than someone who approached this from a historical angle.

This version of the Muramasa is possessed by a spirit and is as deadly to its wielder as much as anyone at the blade end of the stick. It is also, in tribute to how inferior Japanese metals were (especially when compared to Milanese ones, which are still amongst the finest in the history of the world); the blade is frail and prone to breaking if it strikes something durable.

Gaining the Muramasa

This is a relatively straightforward experience; because the Muramasa is tied to one specific hunt event, you cannot even begin to gain it unless you draw that event in the first place.

The ways to increase the chances of gaining this are to draw as many hunt events as possible per hunt (L3s) and use anything that lets you manipulate the roll (Otherworldly Luck) or rerolls. This is pretty much the same strategy for any hunt event control, there's not a lot of options out there at the moment.

However, you only wish to do this when you are ready for collection. The event; as you can see above, is based around hunt XP. So you will want your survivors to be high level when they collect this. Fortunately, because it is not cursed, you will be able to collect it with any survivor who is "fast" enough and then pass it into your intended wielder at a later date.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Muramasa

The Muramasa has a host of strong abilities tangled up tightly with some staggeringly dense weaknesses.

Strengths

• Sharp
• Deadly 2
• 6 Strength
• Not irreplaceable
• 50% accuracy (which is a strength when we get onto the weaknesses below)

Weaknesses

• 6 Speed
• Frail
• Critical hits inflict 2 bleeding each on the wielder
• Sentient
• No Mastery unless you are playing with the Sunstalker and have hunted an L3 version (or are in People of the Sun).

The most overwhelming drawbacks are the bleed tokens and frail. If you are going to make use of this weapon, those are the two biggest stumbling blocks and there is no way to construct a build that cancels Frail, beating frail takes careful play and strategy.

Beating the Frail

So, the important part of understanding when you can use the Muramasa is coming to appreciate the ebb and flow of Super Dense locations in each monster. Some monsters have zero Super Dense locations (like the White Lion) while some have a complete smorgasbord of them (such as the Dung Beetle Knight). 

The trick here is to use patience, you need to sit tight and hold with the Muramasa until you have seen the Super Dense locations scrubbed into the discard pile, that's the moment when you can go - this is because there's no way you can effectively cover 5+ cards with HL scouting, the current "cap" is 4 with the Necromancer's Eye. That means if you roll very high, you're going

While we're here, can we just briefly acknowledge that the monster you'd most want to fight with the Muramasa because it's cool as heck, is the Dung Beetle Knight - the one monster with the highest number of super dense locations out there right now? 

Beating the Bleed

Dealing with the bleed that the Muramasa deals is straight up a team effort; while the wielder can carry some good passive/active bleed removal options. They absolutely cannot use them in the middle of an attack because attacking survivors cannot use survival actions. This means that the Bloodskin (promotional item from the White Speaker, highly recommended white box) is the best option for the wielder, it is almost as effective as Bandages, but it doesn't require activations to use.

However, if you position one or more survivors holding bandages adjacent to the Muramasa's wielder, they ARE able to use survival actions at the correct opportunities (See the rulebook for these, but they include critical wounds). This means they can surge to remove bleed tokens if the count gets too high and keep the Muramasa's wielder up and alive.

Unconscious Fighter is your best friend for this as it gives you a whole extra 2 bleed tokens, which increases the threshold of how many critical wounds kills you by 50%, so it is a candidate for putting onto Sculpture (it's also just a REALLY good fighting art). But you may also want to look into Purpose as a back up to help with this. It is in essence a Green Charm that works only for bleeding.

You can also consider Green Charm itself in this kind of build, it's a bit of a ??? how exactly it interacts with lethal levels of bleeding (most games have an FAQ for this kind of thing, but that's not boutique enough for APG), but it would be reasonable to assume that the Green Charm works in the same manner as Purpose above does.

Deifying the Storm

Instead of building a complicated phalanx of survivors busily mopping up your Muramasa, you can instead go for a single survivor build. This strategy, which is typically only used by RRoD Builds (Red Ring) involves use of a normally underpowered innovation - Momento Mori and its combination with the Fighting Art: Last Man Standing.

The strategy here is to load up one super survivor with a big pile of evasion tokens and other durable items, ensure they have Last Man Standing and some other cool fighting arts and then get everyone else to flee from the showdown using Memento Mori's "Run Away" after they've done whatever useful things they can.

This is very much a fun, silly, high risk strategy, because unlike the bandages route above; you're left with a single survivor who has no way to scrub Super Dense locations away and has to just hope they do not hit them. 

It's something that works well when the monster cannot Super Dense your weapon, but even a single Super Dense location is a massive problem when your weapon hits (on average) 3 locations a turn and could climb up to 6.

The honest truth is, if we had a way of ignoring Frail on the Muramasa this strategy would be more viable and enjoyable. But as it stands, it is mostly a meme you break out on the odd occasion and if you really want to solo monsters, just go with the Red Ring builds.

What Gear to Support?

Outside of bleed management, you want to select a typical Sharp DPS armor set for this weapon, so Dragon Armor & Phoenix Armor are your top two candidates (as always, Dragon Armor is the better choice if you have to pick one), with Dancer Armor making for an excellent alternative. If you get the Muramasa earlier, Leather is also very acceptable with its Insanity gains ensuring that you can keep wielding the blade. 

A survivor with a shield and Shield Mastery is very desirable for the bandage style of playing, because not only can they surge bandage as required, but they are also able to wear very tanky armor and take the hits for a more lightly armored, offensively orientated, Muramasa user.

You many want to consider Sunspot Lantern for +1 Accuracy if you have access to that item, moving to a 5+ is a great improvement without making the weapon too accurate and giving you wild, problematic attacks. You will also likely want to run a Lucky Charm, yes this increases the range of hits that inflict bleeding on you, but if you are running the Bloodskin with supporting survivors on Bandage/Surge duty that should never be a problem. The main importance here is giving the attacking survivor more hits that do not trigger reactions.

The Blue Charm is another possibility, due to the number dice you are attacking with each turn, the Muramasa is more  likely to hit the trap than any other attacking type of survivor. With the Blue Charm you have a chance to avoid this situation and shuffle the trap back into the HL deck. If you are fighting a monster where you need to 'scrub' a Super Dense hit location before the Muramasa is online, avoiding the trap reshuffling too much is pretty neat.

If you are playing with Katana Mastery (and you should be, because it's SO COOL), then you will want to use the Eye Patch gear that is given out with the Edged Tonometry timeline event. This turns on the amazing Katana specialisation ability, while also looking badass.

If you're not sure how to trigger the blind result in order to get the badass bonus, max courage gives you what you seek.

And there we are, that's a lot of the top options you're wanting to consider for a Muramasa user, the main limitations are; once you get the weapon, plus the bleed control, plus armor, you only have 2 slots left, which is not a lot of space for flex options on personality. However, if you can get your hands on Crystal Skin, there's a host of other options that swing wide open for you. Once you don't need to spend 5 slots on armor, the world is your oyster, and you're a shiny little pear!