This "Limit 2" is, from a non Tournament player point if view, a very good and easy way to fix some abuses.

Per example...this afternoon we will play a long Epic game. Today 450 pts, 3 players per side. Imperials launching a Stormtrooper Assault, Lambdas aproaching a Hot LZ and camouflaged AA turrets on the table, hidden set up.

On the Imp side 2 named Defender pilots with the X/7 title. Rebel side 2 generic Gold Squadron with TLTs to act as "mobile" AA turrets.

Imagine one Epic fight... If you own a fleet large enought you can field 12 Y Wing TLT. This is a game. Things must be funny. And this is a superb game to have fun

7 hours ago, Verlaine said:

They came up with the name 'Mauler Mithel', am I correct? Maybe they introduced the whole idea of giving imperial pilots nicknames, which has been a huge influence in our game.

Anyway, I have some memories of playing that game, but it wasn't a hit with me. Still don't know if Han Solo worked against Tarkin...

Yeah, I guess so!! I kinda remember the call number title instead, but it is in the flavor text!

Boy you want to talk about a game with balance issues, this one had to be the worst. All strategies were Mains and Toys, stormtroopers and every other Common card meant squat (tournament players used about 100 out of thousands of cards), and since cards were life, once you started losing, you lost the very resources to stop from losing.

We created a 4-player team homebrew because it was the 1990s, and there was nothing else Star Wars. OTOH, it has to be the worst game I ever played. I played it maybe once the "real" way. And to add insult to injury, just after the prequel movies started coming out, Decipher lost the license to SW and the game was abruptly cancelled.

Y'all think X-Wing is out of whack?? Try this game and get back to me.

17 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Agreed.

Well, it makes no sense from a "in-universe" perspective, but it is a valid game mechanic. OTOH, at 100 points, you are right that "limit 2-3" is pretty much built into the game.

Decipher's SWCCG. Wow, that's digging back into the archives!

It still exists

1 hour ago, Darth Meanie said:

Yeah, I guess so!! I kinda remember the call number title instead, but it is in the flavor text!

Boy you want to talk about a game with balance issues, this one had to be the worst. All strategies were Mains and Toys, stormtroopers and every other Common card meant squat (tournament players used about 100 out of thousands of cards), and since cards were life, once you started losing, you lost the very resources to stop from losing.

We created a 4-player team homebrew because it was the 1990s, and there was nothing else Star Wars. OTOH, it has to be the worst game I ever played. I played it maybe once the "real" way. And to add insult to injury, just after the prequel movies started coming out, Decipher lost the license to SW and the game was abruptly cancelled.

Y'all think X-Wing is out of whack?? Try this game and get back to me.

Yeah, Decipher didn't know a thing about balance, but then again neither did Wizzards of the Coast or any other CCG maker out there. Power was hidden behind rarity and you had to get a lot of cards in order to get in.

Still the whole everything was in your deck from randomization to life counter to economy was one of the most innovative mechanics out there and it is a shame that you see more and more CCGs using tokens and dice and other outside tools added into a standard game. It had the potential to be one of the best games, unfortunately Decipher was just garbage in making them and that's why they went bankrupt.

1 hour ago, Marinealver said:

Power was hidden behind rarity and you had to get a lot of cards in order to get in.

Still the whole everything was in your deck from randomization to life counter to economy was one of the most innovative mechanics out there and it is a shame that you see more and more CCGs using tokens and dice and other outside tools added into a standard game.

Eh, I think M:TG was one of the exceptions to this. Not saying that Rares weren't the better cards, but it is one of the few games where Commons are viable to a very large extent. "Tim" (I can't even remember the card's real name: blue tap for a point of damage), is one of the most cheap and powerful mechanics in the game, and it is a Common.

The game that really annoyed me about dice was ICE's Middle Earth CCG. You had to spend your dice mod cards before you rolled, meaning that many times you used a card and rolled well (a waste) or didn't use a card and rolled badly (meaning you failed even though you had the resources to succeed). Very frustrating to play sometimes, and I'm not sure what the advantage of rolling after mods was in game design.

15 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

Eh, I think M:TG was one of the exceptions to this. Not saying that Rares weren't the better cards, but it is one of the few games where Commons are viable to a very large extent. "Tim" (I can't even remember the card's real name: blue tap for a point of damage), is one of the most cheap and powerful mechanics in the game, and it is a Common.

The game that really annoyed me about dice was ICE's Middle Earth CCG. You had to spend your dice mod cards before you rolled, meaning that many times you used a card and rolled well (a waste) or didn't use a card and rolled badly (meaning you failed even though you had the resources to succeed). Very frustrating to play sometimes, and I'm not sure what the advantage of rolling after mods was in game design.

Now, yes they have moved a lot of the power from Rare and into common and uncommon cards (they make up for it by invalidating those cards in type 2 in a couple of years), but back in the day I mean way back like in the 90s there were a lot of rares that was simply better. The mana curve wasn't as developed so you had quite a few that simply gave you all the mana, rushed you down too fast or just grew up into an unkillable monster.

That's one thing I'll say coming from a CCG background I've always loved about FFG - even if some upgrade cards are "rare" because they're only in one pack (Tactician and Autothrusters comes to mind) you still know exactly what's in each release and know how you can get something and FFG has been getting slightly better about distributing upgrades across factions so you don't have to cross buy as much (Double stealth device in the U-Wing, releasing VI again both in the Shadow Caster and in the newer Rebel TIE, etc). And if it's a "fix" upgrade to a specific ship, so far it always comes with the mini of that ship so you have at least one to field, if not likely two because you bought the prior release already.

12 hours ago, UnitOmega said:

I mean, that's basically what I said, but obviously the point scale is 300 instead of 100. Well, at least that's the math I did on "25 tie fighters" was. Because a lot of ship costs are balanced somewhere around the 100 point format, you may need artificial limiters when you change how the points are. (Again, because I mean, that's a lot of TIEs. Sanity limits need to be imposed, that's not about "I think 4 TLTs sucks too much, but I don't want to limit it to just 1 TLT")

Theoretically after C-ROC comes out, Scum might get close with 12 light Sycks and 12 Banana Pirates but If I actually saw somebody actually bust out that many models on purpose I'd probably give them a funny look. It makes me twitchy just thinking about that many ships on the board, and how easy it would be for them to just go everywhere with one wrong move. Ech.

And your 50pt Ramming GR75 takes them all out in one move....

1 hour ago, Marinealver said:

Now, yes they have moved a lot of the power from Rare and into common and uncommon cards (they make up for it by invalidating those cards in type 2 in a couple of years), but back in the day I mean way back like in the 90s there were a lot of rares that was simply better. The mana curve wasn't as developed so you had quite a few that simply gave you all the mana, rushed you down too fast or just grew up into an unkillable monster.

I started in '94, so I missed the Black Lotus and Mox days if that's what you are talking about.

Looks at this:

TSA blue gloves!! My friend used to eat peperoni pizza and then touch his Lotus!

19 hours ago, UnitOmega said:

Epic uses a different point scale, so it has to balance out the fact that you could take like 25 naked TIEs. That's way too many TIEs for anybody. Does anybody even own that many TIEs? The logistics would be terrible.

That's true. No, it's not. Yes ("mistakes were made"). Um, the set dials phase does take awhile. . .

13 hours ago, UnitOmega said:

I mean, that's basically what I said, but obviously the point scale is 300 instead of 100. Because a lot of ship costs are balanced somewhere around the 100 point format, you may need artificial limiters when you change how the points are.

No. you don't. Dilution takes care of most things. TLT carriers are swarmed and destroyed (or evaded--you now have a 3x6 battlefield). Arc-Dodgers can't. Powerful one-use upgrades are puffs of smoke in a long game. And Palpatine has to choose the most advantageous time out of 10-20 tosses of the dice per turn to decide ONE to modify.

300-point Epic is a completely different beast; you will lose if you try to apply the 100-point meta to it. I should know. . .I used to and lost all the time.

An the best part about 300 points is that "underpowered" ships and pilots are great. Generics rule, and X-Wings and Scyks are your friends.

1 hour ago, Darth Meanie said:

That's true. No, it's not. Yes ("mistakes were made"). Um, the set dials phase does take awhile. . .

No. you don't. Dilution takes care of most things. TLT carriers are swarmed and destroyed (or evaded--you now have a 3x6 battlefield). Arc-Dodgers can't. Powerful one-use upgrades are puffs of smoke in a long game. And Palpatine has to choose the most advantageous time out of 10-20 tosses of the dice per turn to decide ONE to modify.

300-point Epic is a completely different beast; you will lose if you try to apply the 100-point meta to it. I should know. . .I used to and lost all the time.

An the best part about 300 points is that "underpowered" ships and pilots are great. Generics rule, and X-Wings and Scyks are your friends.

Dilution doesn't take care of most things. Nor does it always balance things out. Sure Soontir which used to be the Terror in X-wing is a hack when it comes to epic. Dilution will reduce uniques quite a bit because you can't copy it. Now for you that might be what you may call "taking care of" especially if you are such a critic of the so called Ace-wing meta, but for me it removes some of the characteristics of X-wing. Sure having Biggs face off against TIE Defenders goes against the cannon but so does anything in the Legends so who cares about cannon.

5 hours ago, Marinealver said:

Yeah, Decipher didn't know a thing about balance, but then again neither did Wizzards of the Coast or any other CCG maker out there. Power was hidden behind rarity and you had to get a lot of cards in order to get in.

Still the whole everything was in your deck from randomization to life counter to economy was one of the most innovative mechanics out there and it is a shame that you see more and more CCGs using tokens and dice and other outside tools added into a standard game. It had the potential to be one of the best games, unfortunately Decipher was just garbage in making them and that's why they went bankrupt.

Decipher was always highly innovative, and I think their games became even better as time went on. What I would call their 'second wave' of TCGs (Star Trek 2nd Edition and the Lord of the Rings TCG ... sadly Star Wars could not be added to that roster) completely banished the concentration of power in rares and were beautiful, clean, elegant designs - simple without being simplistic, strategic, and wonderfully thematic, the same as I would describe X-Wing as being. (Unfortunately, I wasn't old enough at the time to invest heavily and play in tournaments, so I can't speak to whether the high-level balance was there, just to the ground-level player experience, which I found to be excellent - even now better than MtG, which I also enjoy.) I don't think it was that Decipher was garbage at making games - quite the opposite: they lost their best licence for reasons unrelated to their stellar sales performance, then (IIRC) a slump in the TCG/gaming industry hit, then one of their employees embezzled $1.5 million from them and they were forced to lay off employees en masse at an already-small firm, being reduced to using their very talented lead Star Trek designer for LotR, a game he knew nothing about, with obvious consequences. They ended their LotR run six sets - two years - before their published release schedule promised and then closed down Star Trek as well. Surprisingly, the company still exists and is apparently still working on a new How to Host a Murder release - I suspect their longevity may have something to do with the market research services branch of their company I once discovered that I don't think gamers ever really knew about. But that's quite a digression.

Someday I still hope to go back and buy my ideal decks for at least Star Wars and LotR, just to play with my brother sometimes when we break them out. If only I had been older then, and had had the resources to collect more!

17 hours ago, DagobahDave said:

I think the fact that Outlaw Tech is limited defeats any "but lore" argument and makes any "thematic scarcity" explanation unnecessary. Is there really some good lore reason why I can't have two outlaw techs on my ship, assuming I have enough slots?

Well the Lore argument could be that 2 techs modifying the same ship would have "professional disagreements" and be counter productive, and Tacticians would be giving conflicting advice (how many of us have team games where we want to do one thing but someone else thinks a different move is best, and you have to decide which strategy to use or you get chaos)

Outlaw tech is probably the most case of mechanical to thematic difference, but in general limited upgrades seem to be a lot of things where while multiple ships in your team can have those upgrades, but your ship could only fit or benefit from one. So you can only stick one booster on your engine, you can only have set of smuggling compartments, if you have two gunnery teams - well I don't think both of them can do their job at the same time, etc. Only one EM because once you convert space for extra munitions, your munitions are already extra'd. You already have 1 EM emitter or backup shield generator that doesn't necessarily mean adding more will do anything, etc. Tailgunner is weird because I think the only ships which can use and benefit from it have only 1 crew slot anyway but I mean, it kind of makes sense you have only one special person to actually use your rear guns. So future proofing.

1 hour ago, Gundog8324 said:

Well the Lore argument could be that 2 techs modifying the same ship would have "professional disagreements" and be counter productive, and Tacticians would be giving conflicting advice (how many of us have team games where we want to do one thing but someone else thinks a different move is best, and you have to decide which strategy to use or you get chaos)

It's not hard to come up with a lore explanation for why things are limited or not, but there's no point trying to do that with Tactician because it wasn't limited to begin with, but was later changed by FFG when it was realized that it could be abused. The 100 point cap couldn't fix it. There were already ships in the game with two crew slots when Tactician was released, so right out of the gate it was possible to spam them. It wasn't until players figured that K-Wings and stresshogs could pile up obnoxious quantities of stress tokens on their targets that FFG took measures. Rebel K-Wing-based control squads got nerfed, but probably just enough to keep them balanced -- if not for turrets (and bomb spam from those very same ships, hmmmmmmmm).

My point might be getting lost here. I think there's ample evidence that card quantity controls like 2- or 3-of-a-kind limits don't have to be supported by lore. Like what's the lore reason for us always having 100 points worth of ships? How many times does Biggs have to die fighting Kylo Ren before we come up with a plausible lore explanation? And why, uh, are we trying to kill each other, regardless of faction or clones? (Okay, if I saw my clone I would kill it, so that's fine.)

If FFG looks at TLTs and agrees with me that they're a little obnoxious, but not so bad as to be made unique, where do they go to better balance those things? They can adjust card prices, which I think most of us would not want to see. They can errata the card texts to do something different, which in the case of TLT isn't what I want (I think it's a good card that is priced correctly, it's just overused). Introducing 2/3 limits would just be a continuation of what they've been doing, and seems to me that it's about the easiest way to rebalance a few gameplay elements.

10 minutes ago, DagobahDave said:

If FFG looks at TLTs and agrees with me that they're a little obnoxious, but not so bad as to be made unique, where do they go to better balance those things? They can adjust card prices, which I think most of us would not want to see. They can errata the card texts to do something different, which in the case of TLT isn't what I want (I think it's a good card that is priced correctly, it's just overused). Introducing 2/3 limits would just be a continuation of what they've been doing, and seems to me that it's about the easiest way to rebalance a few gameplay elements.

The question is: in what sense is it over used? I don't think that a list (in a 100 point game) with 3 or 4 of them are OP- or even particularly good.

I do think there's a problem in that they're basically all you see on Y-Wings and HWK-290s. That- to me- isn't a problem with the TLT so much as it is with basically every other secondary turret in the game. And that's been made even worse with Autothrusters. But I don't think this is a problem your idea fixes.

40 minutes ago, Punning Pundit said:

The question is: in what sense is it over used? I don't think that a list (in a 100 point game) with 3 or 4 of them are OP- or even particularly good.

I do think there's a problem in that they're basically all you see on Y-Wings and HWK-290s. That- to me- isn't a problem with the TLT so much as it is with basically every other secondary turret in the game. And that's been made even worse with Autothrusters. But I don't think this is a problem your idea fixes.

The problem of the secondary turret kinda lies in the fact that most of the ships that equip them use them as their primary form of attack, so they need to be great value to make those ships be used. On the VCX, the autoblaster turret is sometimes used because it's inexpensive compared to the overall price of the ship but it's not worth it to put on a HWK or Y-wing which need their turret slot for the offense.

17 hours ago, Punning Pundit said:

The question is: in what sense is it over used? I don't think that a list (in a 100 point game) with 3 or 4 of them are OP- or even particularly good.

I do think there's a problem in that they're basically all you see on Y-Wings and HWK-290s. That- to me- isn't a problem with the TLT so much as it is with basically every other secondary turret in the game. And that's been made even worse with Autothrusters. But I don't think this is a problem your idea fixes.

Turrets are overused generally. I think they're the main reason tournament play is so different from the starter game.

I might go so far as to establish a 1 turreted ship limit for the 100/6 tournament format. I think turrets would still be a major factor in the metagame, but not auto-includes, which I think they are for Scum and Rebels that really want to make the elimination rounds at large events.

(That Rey + Jan Ors HWK list with the 5-6 damage attacks is the tipping point for me. A turret should be a support mechanic or your one big hitter, but not both. RIP Miranda+Dash, Galaxy Note 7, Parattanni. I'd remember them as fondly as I do pre-nerf Whisper + mini-swarm and point-vaulting Fat Han. All great squads in their time, and the first players who arrived at those designs and won big tournaments with them are awesome X-Wing players no doubt. The rest of us are netlisting hacks who will work with whatever 1-turret squads the really good players cook up for us. It's normal, it's fine.)

Beyond that, I think some minor nerfs are needed: Palpatine (Range 1-3 only), Zuckuss crew (only works when unstressed), Biggs (only once per round), and to make TIE/x7 unique (because it's currently just a bit overpowered, but it would murder everything in a 1-turret-max meta).

I think a 3-card limit on generics would be totally workable, and would prevent some of the squads that tend to eat up a lot of the clock and have a low fun factor. They're also not very good, so preventing new players from heading down the path to the spam side is probably doing everyone a favor.

In the interests of encouraging more well-rounded squads that have fewer hard counters, a 2-card limit on generics is not out of the question for me, but it's probably going too far. There are only some generics that are overused to such a point that I think they deserve that distinction.

It would make sense on inquisitor, give him limit three instead of unique.

I was not expecting that.

I think this is a very interesting topic. The point cost system works well pricing the power of single cards, but not for iterations: for example, due to token depletion the effect of 4 TLTs and Triple U-boat (RIP) is far more demolishing that the sum of its part. We can see similar escalation in other spams like triple x7.

On the other hand, some of the most "obnoxious" lists to play against consists in spamming the same pilot/upgrade to abuse of its mechanics, so limiting some cards to only 2/3 for squad not only would be nice for game balance but for increasing diversity and (in my opinion) fun.

6 minutes ago, xDarKnight said:

I think this is a very interesting topic. The point cost system works well pricing the power of single cards, but not for iterations: for example, due to token depletion the effect of 4 TLTs and Triple U-boat (RIP) is far more demolishing that the sum of its part. We can see similar escalation in other spams like triple x7.

On the other hand, some of the most "obnoxious" lists to play against consists in spamming the same pilot/upgrade to abuse of its mechanics, so limiting some cards to only 2/3 for squad not only would be nice for game balance but for increasing diversity and (in my opinion) fun.

On the other hand, the strongest lists only use 2-3 ships, so they're probably not going to be bothered by this restriction. In terms of diversity, swarms might become less attractive, and we're not seeing a lot of those at the moment anyway. So in the current situation, I don't think limits of 2 or 3 will increase that diversity.

4 hours ago, Verlaine said:

On the other hand, the strongest lists only use 2-3 ships, so they're probably not going to be bothered by this restriction. In terms of diversity, swarms might become less attractive, and we're not seeing a lot of those at the moment anyway. So in the current situation, I don't think limits of 2 or 3 will increase that diversity.

The scope of this restriction, in my opinion, shouldn't be only those few cards that are unbalanced in +2 copies, but those that made clone lists of 3-4 ships overusing a mechanic. For example: making X7 limited to 2 copies and we would see more palpa+defenders or ace+defenders instead of tridefenders. These lists are still strong, but now the squad has ships with different strengths and weakness that that can be exploited with a non defender-counter squad and making the meta look less rock-paper-scissors.

Another example is the Contracted Scout. The triple U-Boat shaped the metagame making several stablished squads unfeasible competitively. FFG didn’t took the most elegant solution correcting two upgrade cards instead of the pilot: with elite, crew, 2x torpedo, salvaged astromech and illicit all in one cheap and sturdy platform they will need to watch carefully any new designed card to not unleash a new spameable combo. Instead, if they had restricted the number of those cards in a squad list we would have more hybrid squads and much less impact in the meta.

I don't see how this helps much. The point of the limit in ccgs is to force your deck to composed to have randomness in it, combined with a deck size minimum. In X-wing it's just a reflex 'ban thing i don't like' change.

7 minutes ago, xDarKnight said:

The scope of this restriction, in my opinion, shouldn't be only those few cards that are unbalanced in +2 copies, but those that made clone lists of 3-4 ships overusing a mechanic. For example: making X7 limited to 2 copies and we would see more palpa+defenders or ace+defenders instead of tridefenders. These lists are still strong, but now the squad has ships with different strengths and weakness that that can be exploited with a non defender-counter squad and making the meta look less rock-paper-scissors.

Another example is the Contracted Scout. The triple U-Boat shaped the metagame making several stablished squads unfeasible competitively. FFG didn’t took the most elegant solution correcting two upgrade cards instead of the pilot: with elite, crew, 2x torpedo, salvaged astromech and illicit all in one cheap and sturdy platform they will need to watch carefully any new designed card to not unleash a new spameable combo. Instead, if they had restricted the number of those cards in a squad list we would have more hybrid squads and much less impact in the meta.

But 'spammable combos' are one of the few assets that (some) generics still have. For example, Green Squadron Pilots: if, say, Snap Shot or Crack Shot would be limited to 3 it would hit them. Same goes for Black or Omega sq. pilots. My impression is that generics are already unpopular (but others have been beating that drum far longer than me).