Command Card Wish List/Ideas?

By Rogue Dakotan, in Imperial Assault Skirmish

What command cards do you wish were in the game? Do you have any ideas for command cards?

Unrelenting:

Mercenary Only

Cost 2

Limit 2:

Play when an enemy unit suffers STRAIN. You may choose whether that unit must suffer a damage or discard a card.

Lone Wolf:

Cost 3:

Limit 1:

Play at the end of your activation. If there are no friendly units within 6 spaces, you gain an extra action.

Or maybe recover some number of damage.

Grizzly Execution:

Mercenary Only

3 points

Limit 1

After you defeat an adjacent enemy figure, each enemy figure who had line of sight to that figure suffers one STRAIN.

and an idea for a skirmish upgrade:

Like Minded

-2 points.

You may only use this card if each unit in your army shares a keyword.

Edited by RogueLieutenant

These are cool! I haven't played Skirmish enough to have any idea of how powerful these are, or come up with any of my own, but it's an interesting idea (and probably easier to balance than custom groups).

One thought - for Lone Wolf, "the end of your activation" is not a well-defined timing window, that I'm aware of. Maybe you could reword it to: "Play after resolving the second action of your activation."

And if you're worried about people performing 2 moves, then using it, you could even say: "If there are no friendly figures within 6 spaces, your movement points are reduced to 0, then you may perform 1 action."

What I'd have liked to see isn't a specific Command Card, but a different design philosophy applied to the Command Card/Figure Trait mechanic. FFG seems very shy to introduce new traits into the game, and I believe that to be a wasted opportunity. We still only have the same traits we got in the Core Set.

When the Bantha was first previewed with the Jundland Terror card, I was bummed by the wording of the card that made it specifically work with Tusken Raiders and Bantha Riders. This means that should the designers ever fancy to go back to Tatooine and do, for example, a Tusken Chieftain unique to maybe enable an all-Tusken list, it wouldn't be backwards compatible with the card. They could have easily 'future proofed' that by making 'Tusken' into a figure trait. They have closed that door now.

More figure traits would have made it very easy to 'fix' unbalances in the game. Currently, eTrandoshan Hunters are a tad overpriced, while rTrandoshan Hunters are pretty much inferior to eTusken Raiders, who do functionally the same thing (close-to-medium range brawling) at the same price while being harder to kill and having access to better cards (Trandoshans can't Pummel and currently available Hunter cards are so-so). Sure, they have the strain thing which will be boosted by Duress in a few weeks, but I still think that won't be enough. Duress is nice, but it deliberately can't be pants-on-head crazy good for Trandoshans, because it affects more stuff than just Trandoshans and might break some other thing somewhere else.

OTOH, if Trandoshans had a set of traits that went "Trandoshan-Hunter-Brawler", FFG could have easily released a Trandoshan card to boost them. I don't know, call it Lightning Regeneration - you and all adjacent Trandoshans recover 2. Or anything else really. That would allow for an easy precision fix for stuff that's broke, but wouldn't affect stuff that ain't broke. As it stands, I feel like FFG is purposefully wasting a very useful and very straightforward design and balancing tool.

Then again, it might have just been because at the time, they made skirmish as a throwaway thing thinking that no one would really care about it over the campaign, and now they've painted themselves into a corner.

Edited by Don_Silvarro

Unrelenting:

Mercenary Only

Cost 2

Limit 2:

Play when an enemy unit suffers STRAIN. You may choose whether that unit must suffer a damage or discard a card.

Personally, I think that Unrelenting should cost 1. It's only 1 damage, so it's not a big deal. An alternative would be this:

Unrelenting:

Mercenary Only

Cost 1

Limit 1

Play when an enemy unit suffers STRAIN. That enemy suffers another STRAIN.

This way you double the effect of strain for an attack (or a Bleed effect). When you add Under Duress with it, then it suddenly means 4 Command Cards being discarded in order to prevent 2 damage. If it worked this way then I think that you could only allow 1 of these in a deck.
Here's an option for a Skirmish Upgrade card:
Against all Odds
-2 points.
You may only use this card if all of your Deployment Cards are Unique.
At the end of each round, one of your figures may interrupt to perform a move.
It does a lot to encourage unique-only squads, and it also helps to overcome one of their weaknesses, which is a lack of board/objective control.

The lando expansion is already coming with a card that encourages unique only. Called Heroic Effort. It wasn't a negative point cost so I'm not sure they'll do that or not for uniques.

I liked the idea of taking the choice out of your opponent's hand for strain.

The lando expansion is already coming with a card that encourages unique only. Called Heroic Effort. It wasn't a negative point cost so I'm not sure they'll do that or not for uniques.

FFG's response to the weakness of Single Figures vs Groups seems to be to make better Single (Unique) figures rather than patch in Skirmish Upgrades. The Bantha is a great start and I know lots of people are excited about Bossk, Lando, and Blaise in Bespin so let's agree to see how these and the next few expansions turn out and then return to the idea of patching things with Skirmish Upgrades later...

I LOVE "Like Minded"!!! Really helps a theme list (like mine, all creatures) shine:

  • Bantha Rider - (9)
  • Nexu x2 - 6 (12)
  • Nexu x4 - 4 (16)
  • Last Resort (1)
  • Beast Tamer (1)
  • Devious Scheme (1)

Adding "Like Minded" for -2 points would allow me to add a much needed "Punishing Strike (2)" for all those wasted bleeds.

Edited by Fizz

A skirmish uppgrade I thought about go make uniques better is:

Fully stocked, if your squad only has uniques you may take 4/5 (?) points of skirmish upgrades for free.

This will allow you to make your uniques better with High Command for more command cards, balance of the force for more unique command cards. Then load up on targeting computers and possibly Company slits.