24 card starter decks

By Robin Graves, in Star Wars: Destiny

Something struck me as odd:

The game is played with dice and a deck of 30 cards. Yet the starter set comes with only 24.

Why not include 6 more cards so you get a "legal" playable deck straight from the starter pack?

"The Rey Starter Set is an excellent starting point for you to enter Star Wars: Destiny. Here, you’ll find a fixed set of twenty-four heroic cards with nine premium dice, alongside tokens and a rule sheet—everything you need for one player to take command of Rey and Finn while fighting for the light side across the Star Wars galaxy."

"In addition to your characters and their dice, you also have a thirty-card deck of event, support, and upgrade cards that you’ll use to enhance your characters and turn the tables in your favor. Events like The Best Defense… "

Well, in this way people will start buying boosters from day 0

They probably have a "beginner" mode that only needs 24 cards (probably listed in their instruction manual). But to play a tournament legal deck, you need 30, which means you will probably have to buy a few more starters. It's good marketing, IMO; making you buy more right off-the-bat.

Something struck me as odd:

The game is played with dice and a deck of 30 cards. Yet the starter set comes with only 24.

Why not include 6 more cards so you get a "legal" playable deck straight from the starter pack?

"The Rey Starter Set is an excellent starting point for you to enter Star Wars: Destiny. Here, you’ll find a fixed set of twenty-four heroic cards with nine premium dice, alongside tokens and a rule sheet—everything you need for one player to take command of Rey and Finn while fighting for the light side across the Star Wars galaxy."

"In addition to your characters and their dice, you also have a thirty-card deck of event, support, and upgrade cards that you’ll use to enhance your characters and turn the tables in your favor. Events like The Best Defense… "

This happens in other games, as well - less material in starters than what you need to play a legal game. This model sets up the idea that you'd have to buy more product to tailor your deck to be legal, since you'd need six more cards. Since I've seen this in Magic, Heroclix, Games-Workshop, etc it doesn't phase me as a practice.

All good points, but they should have at least included one blind booster.

Pokemon, Yugioh, MTG: they all have starterpacks that give you a "legal" deck (40-60 cards) Magic's intropacks even have additional boosters.

Edit: not dice masters. was reading from 1st ed rulebook. sorry.

Edited by Robin Graves

They did this in the Harry Potter TCG. 39 card decks when 60 were needed.

They did this in the Harry Potter TCG. 39 card decks when 60 were needed.

Wow, that's one from a long time ago. Odd that it never cought on as much as it should have...

They did this in the Harry Potter TCG. 39 card decks when 60 were needed.

Wow, that's one from a long time ago. Odd that it never cought on as much as it should have...

It had a lot of fundamental flaws. Got a starter set as a gift, didn't buy many packs since it was already dead when I got into it, though the game was quite fun (if a bit flawed).

Edit: This was pre-LCG era.

Edited by Toenail

It's pretty normal for any game with expansions. I'm reasonably sure you can't make a legal deck with a single AGOT core either.

The X-Wing core sets don't have close to enough stuff to play a 100-point game.

Also keep in mind that the 24 cards include the Finn and Rey cards (or Kylo Ren and First Order Stormtrooper), which are characters and are not included in your deck. Also, it probably comes with at least one battlefield card. So you are likely playing with only 21 cards in your deck.

I agree with Julia that this gets people buying boosters right away.

Most of their LCG boxes don't actually provide you a full size deck, either. LOTR bugged me a lot because they only provided about 30 cards when a deck was at least 50.

Most of their LCG boxes don't actually provide you a full size deck, either. LOTR bugged me a lot because they only provided about 30 cards when a deck was at least 50.

I'm pretty sure there are more than 30 player cards in the LotR core set...

I would gues that you will play with 15 card decks in the starter game.

The remaining cards will be the starting heroes and locations.

I assume you will get all or most of the locations from these two starter sets and won't find any or only very few in the boosters.

I would gues that you will play with 15 card decks in the starter game.

The remaining cards will be the starting heroes and locations.

I assume you will get all or most of the locations from these two starter sets and won't find any or only very few in the boosters.

Interesting...

Now personally I wouldn't mind getin battlefields in boosters.

Most of their LCG boxes don't actually provide you a full size deck, either. LOTR bugged me a lot because they only provided about 30 cards when a deck was at least 50.

I'm pretty sure there are more than 30 player cards in the LotR core set...

IIRC there's 30 cards per affiliation, making legal "one colour" decks not feasible. I think all LCG core sets require you to use more or less shoehorned in "alliance" or "mixed affiliation" rules to make legal decks out of the box. It's less of an issue with LOTR, since IMO most of the time you'll want to build two or three colour decks anyway with how the game works. Conquest is worst for this I think, since it has the cards spread around so many factions, even when using the alliance rules you'll be forced to pad out with fairly unplayable neutral cards to build a legal deck, and I don't think you can even build two legal decks out of one core set.

The 24 TCG actually utilized 24-card decks (plus a "Directive" card that started out in play), and was one of the few exceptions to this marketing trend that I recall encountering. It wasn't around for very long (for this very reason, perhaps), but it was among my favorite designs, second only to AGoT.

Edited by MarthWMaster

Most of their LCG boxes don't actually provide you a full size deck, either. LOTR bugged me a lot because they only provided about 30 cards when a deck was at least 50.

I'm pretty sure there are more than 30 player cards in the LotR core set...

IIRC there's 30 cards per affiliation, making legal "one colour" decks not feasible. I think all LCG core sets require you to use more or less shoehorned in "alliance" or "mixed affiliation" rules to make legal decks out of the box. It's less of an issue with LOTR, since IMO most of the time you'll want to build two or three colour decks anyway with how the game works. Conquest is worst for this I think, since it has the cards spread around so many factions, even when using the alliance rules you'll be forced to pad out with fairly unplayable neutral cards to build a legal deck, and I don't think you can even build two legal decks out of one core set.

You have to "mix factions" a bit but you can actually get proper decks out of the starters, not good ones, but (legaly) playbale ones. With destiniy i'm "come on guys just include 6 more cards."

I've been thinking:

Maybe it's even a packaging thing: as in the packs can just accomodate x amount of dice, rules and tokens and there just isn't enough room for 30 cards (unless they completly redisgin the packaging, wich cost time and money so they aren't gonna do that.)

I've been thinking:

Maybe it's even a packaging thing: as in the packs can just accomodate x amount of dice, rules and tokens and there just isn't enough room for 30 cards (unless they completly redisgin the packaging, wich cost time and money so they aren't gonna do that.)

Nah, I can't see it being a box so packed that you couldn't fit a dozen or so more cards. That would be like the first time ever in boardgaming history that would happen. If there's any technical consideration, it might be the number of cards that fit on a sheet for printing. But I doubt that TBH, it's just a customizable game marketing tradition to give you a technically incomplete first taste in the starter set.

Most of their LCG boxes don't actually provide you a full size deck, either. LOTR bugged me a lot because they only provided about 30 cards when a deck was at least 50.

I'm pretty sure there are more than 30 player cards in the LotR core set...

I think he's talking about the preconstructed decks in the manual.

On topic:

If I had to guess we'll be playing with 20 card decks in the starters.

2 Characters, 20 cards in deck, and 2 battlefields to choose from.

With 9 dice this would give us 7 cards in deck with matching dice.

I've found a lot of time games scale back to 50% or 75% of size, this would be 66% of the normal game size, so in between those two options.