Had the pleasure of playing a tournament with Mercenaries enabled and one of my two lists contained Saito and Uhahu. While I was expecting to make use of Uhahu, throughout the tournament she performed roughly to the expectations of a Celestial Guard. But Saito... I think I've figured this one out. He gave me two victories and a third match where I didn't manage to push enough points forward against a very well-deployed Combined player - but Saito set me up for a potential victory that the CA clawed away from me. (Fourth match failed because of a Crane link hogging all the points and getting bogged down, but enough about the Crane.) Since we were tracking crits throughout the match, I can also reveal that I wasn't rolling stellar with Saito, either. Out of over 15 models killed and maybe 20 attack rolls made, he only generated roughly 4 crits, at least one of which was with smoke grenade. Saito and Shinobu have the fantastic thing where they have smoke and good damage. Shinobu will be missed, normal Ninjas can't pick up the slack due to no smoke, now that it's beginning to click for me regarding maximum use of marker states, when to smoke, and what targets are worth taking a chance against. I will have to regard these as not only excellent "defensive" pieces against hard targets, but also very good at clearing backfields, something Yu Jing is now completely missing.
"Ninjas do exactly what Oniwabans do. You're complaining over nothin." - CB did nothing wrong fanboy club. lul