[Micah]

Jomon could probably still use some love even after the patch, but their mages, which uninspiring, are functional. S2 provides a useful mage, regardless of other paths. The master shugenja are a bit more of a gamble, but you don't need tons of them.

Jomon's problem is that they combine a lot of individual uninspiring elements and come up with something uninspiring on the whole, that then gets ganged or rushed to death. One of the other problems they have is that they don't have any low-resource troops, which constrains their early options in terms of production scale and/or pretender selection, and a good, diverse pretender would go a long way to smoothing out their wacky randoms. Maybe looking at adding a new troop (similar to the o-bakemono in design, high gold, low resource, functional for expansion and then never bought again) would help smooth things out for them instead of messing with their magic?

Regardless, settling on one aspect of jomon and blaming all its ills on one factor doesn't seem like the way to go.