Yep, happy to own that approach, and I like how it works. I think that the relatively short reach of JSA just necessitates having more Orders, simple as that. I will say though that having a good sized Order pool doesn't necessarily mean putting your focus on just a handful of models... Pretty much every model except my baggage bots receive Orders and perform useful actions in my games. Ryuken-9, Rui Shi or Kempetai MSV2, Keisotsu heavy weapons, Yojimbo, these are all good combat-capable units that can perform a useful role at need. Still trying to get a handle on the Samurai approach.
I was just memeing at first (and I mean, no one can really criticize your approach given how well you do it) but I then realized exactly what you said -- there wasn't really anything I wasn't going to spend orders on in a scratch version of the list I put together (I was feeling cheeky and managed to get 15 orders with a Musashi Tanko haris but then revised for 15 + Yojimbo). I've been playing lots of HI until pretty recently, I may start playing more ninja stuff after playing around with what you can do with them list-wise.
Well, the first thing is that named characters in Infinity aren't significantly better than what they started as. They're usually just a little different. Like actually being Ninja with smoke. Shinobu and Saito have different targets. Shinobu (and Oniwaban in general) are big game hunters. You send them after the big tough things, like a TAG or Dogwarrior. Saito is more of an HI killer. If you're playing with the destructible scenery rules, Saito also makes a nice door-opener (though I prefer Oyama for that, due to the extra wound). Distract with TAG, murder with DoTanko link. Hacker casts Fairy Dust, Doc and Engineer pray and/or Suppression Fire the DZ. Yojimbo throws or shoots smoke to cover the advance on one side or the other, usually the TAG side.
