I started playing when Core 2 came out and it has been kitchen table casual the entire time, but since moving to another state and not wanting to play at hobby shops, I've started reading the forums more.

I remember old FAQs have changed card text before, but they've always seemed (to me at least) to be for clarification purposes rather than specific nerfing, or completely changing the original wording (Palpatine). Am I wrong? Have cards in the past received specific reworks like what we've seen in this most recent FAQ or is this kind of new territory for them? The Palpatine one in particular seems craziest to me since it isn't just adding a few words to the card but entirely changing the mechanic.

tl;dr Has an FAQ reworked cards so extensively in the past?

The biggest changes previously were making tactician limited and deadeye small ship only

Deadeye, Daredevil, Cluster mines, Heavy scyk.

The cloaking nerf was pretty significant, even if it didn't target specific card text. Some players were winning matches with 86 point squads using nothing more than Echo and Whisper.

Not quite so extensively, but nerfs have definitely happened before: making Tactician Limited, and making Deadeye Small Ship Only to name but two.

FFG have been gradually becoming more comfortable changing issuing errata text for cards. The early stuff was more or less all about clarification, or slightly rewriting a word or two in the text of cards to make sure that rules as written matched rules as intended. Things like errata's to Expert Handling fit that category.

The change to cloaking was the next big change, and it happened because the game was all but broken at a competitive level by Whisper. Once that happened, they loosened up considerably, but even then, the changes made before this had been relatively small - changes to the triggers (cluster mines, prox mines) or availability (deadeye, tactician) of upgrade cards. I would argue that the tactician change probably fits into the rules as intender/rules as written camp, and up until very recently,bombing lists were so rare that the prox and cluster mines changes were never likely to have much of an impact. Deadeye was all about stopping triple jumps, of course, and arguably in some metas (apparently particularly in Europe) they were almost as dominant as pre Nerf Whisper, so you could argue that was following the Phantom precedent.

Recently though, we've seen something unique. Again, you could argue (though it's harder) that the Zuckuss, X7 and maybe even Manaroo nerfs were about fixing oversights, but the Heavy Scyk and Palpatine erratas completely change the way the cards work, and it was done on the basis of cards and lists that were strong in the meta, but far from the level of game breaking dominance we saw in previous examples. That's new, and potentially fantastic for the competitive scene if FFG can keep their fingers on the pulse of the game. But it comes with a tonne of potential issues: new or casual players won't know about the changes, and are now going to have to take their opponents word that they can't use the card as its written, but have to use it in a completely different way; tournament players flying powerful, popular lists or pilots have to accept that their list might be pulled out from under them at any time; nerfs that are too powerful might see the complete disappearance of an upgrade from competitive play, or even require a potential future buff, resulting in not just two but potentially multiple different reprints.

It also opens up a bunch of questions. What, if anything, remains sacrosanct? Point costs? Upgrade slots? Pilot skills? Ship stats? If major erratas like these are going to be the new normal, anything could be on the table.

FFG freely changes rules text but is hesitant to do so with cards. Anything on a reference card was open season (cloaking, bomb effects, et cetera) but pilot and upgrade cards were a last resort.

There have been erratas to cards but they were mostly card restrictions or text intepretation where an FAQ wouldn't cut it, no real changes to mechanical intent. Essentially the pre-errata card worked the same with a few differences in the intricacies.

To put things in perspective the most extreme errata prior to this was Heavy Scyk.

8 minutes ago, Blue Five said:

FFG freely changes rules text but is hesitant to do so with cards. Anything on a reference card was open season (cloaking, bomb effects, et cetera) but pilot and upgrade cards were a last resort.

There have been erratas to cards but they were mostly card restrictions or text intepretation where an FAQ wouldn't cut it, no real changes to mechanical intent. Essentially the pre-errata card worked the same with a few differences in the intricacies.

To put things in perspective the most extreme errata prior to this was Heavy Scyk.

I wonder what exactly caused FFG to resort to such drastic measures, considering they have publicly said that they are against card errata and I don't really feel like any of these nerfs were the result of a "last resort" scenario .

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I wonder what exactly caused FFG to resort to such drastic measures

Manaroo and Zuckuss were meta warping. Removing them would leave Palpatine and TIE/x7 in a position of dominance through raw statistical efficiency so they had to be nerfed too.

3 hours ago, HammerGibbens said:

tl;dr Has an FAQ reworked cards so extensively in the past?

TIE Phantom's uncloaking has a case for saying it was the most significant nerf so far.

X-Wing is a living game and it's going to change. If not from nerfs, then from new releases.

19 minutes ago, TitaniumChopstick said:

I wonder what exactly caused FFG to resort to such drastic measures, considering they have publicly said that they are against card errata and I don't really feel like any of these nerfs were the result of a "last resort" scenario .

I would say they went little over the top with wave 8/vets in general. It looked ok back then when it was launched but almost a year later with new combos being invented it went crazy - so they had to banhammer it.

Plus lets face it -with all those pilots, upgrades and ships (and counting!) we should expect such scale errata once in a while.

The palpatine change is very much in line with the decloak change actually,

I'd say the change to the Heavy Scyk is really the first functional card change that completely altered a card. There had been some changes to thing like Expert Handling and Daredevil but those were to make the cards function as intended. One may say the change to decloaking is a major change and it is but that wasn't a direct change to the cards and what they did on the ships but more of a base rule correction. It's only since the Heavy Scyk changes happened that FFG is completely voiding cards you see on the board.

Point costs as written on cards (they're done discounts, of course) and ship stats as written on cards (though they've amended some cards that are basically never going to be un-taken like Heavy Scyk) are still unchanged.

I for one am perfectly happy with the idea of card errata in a game like this. Errata are prettyy common in living collectible games, no-one gets everything right first time, and I'd prefer active and aggressive balance correction to laissez faire ;eading to bad meta situations.

I'm pretty new to the game, only jumped in late spring 2016. But I like that they're doing this. Seems sensible to me.

They changed their ideals on what they can faq/errata after the Jm5K completely screwed everything. I imagine if they would have balanced that box better we might not have any hard changes at all, since Palp is strong hes still workable and x7s were a little on the strong side but still workable, while 90% of the crap the Jm5K introduced was nigh impossible barring insane luck or dumb player on the jm5k side.

They HAD to errata that thing, it was too powerful and in a way that introducing other cards wouldnt fix. And since they already cracked the door for that one they might as well just open the floodgates and fix everything, whether it technically needed it or not. x7 felt like it was the only card that assigned a token in that fashion, everything else (i can think of anyway) is an action or has an anti-bump clause so that change is more of a normalize than a nerf. The palp one makes no sense to me and i imagine they only nerfed him because theyre nerfing everything else thats "meta" so why not.

I never really understood the hesitancy for these kinds of errata anyway.

The hesitancy *should* come from people using cards in ways other than as written. The errata to cards like Daredevil don't really matter, the card still does what it says (basically). Errata to Palpatine, x7, Manaroo, and Zuckuss is an entirely different thing. We're talking about 4 significant cards which now do not work as they are written. This creates strange feelings when kitchen players show up. They have a cool list with Palpatine in a Decimator, a Delta x7, and maybe a Phantom. They sit down to play their first ever match in a local store and suddenly none of their cards work they way they're written? Wouldn't that sound suspicious to you on your first trip?

I don't know but I think for balancing the tournament scene errata is the wrong move, banning or restricting is much better. The cards should do what they say and if what they say is too powerful you either limit them or ban them completely.

14 minutes ago, Stefan said:

I never really understood the hesitancy for these kinds of errata anyway.

I would imagine they take into consideration that this is a physical game with printed, paid for material and not a computer game which is easily patched. Therefore errata is a very serious thing to do when you can't easily update a product.

Looking at cycles like Magic the Gathering, player exploitations in the meta are limited, in their case it's usually 2 years. Miniature games have much longer cycles. Warhammers Fantasy & 40k have a core rules cycle of 3-10 years while faction cycles may change 3-15 years (and they won't change at the same time). Warmachine/Hordes has a cycle of maybe 5 years. Then they release a new version of the core rules and faction packs. Both of these require the purchase of 75$ or 50$ core rule books and codexes of 50$ or 30$ respectively. Then, additional materials (character cards (like ship cards) for Warmachine/Hordes) on a per faction basis. In the Warhammer games, factions have been nerfed for 5+ years at a time. Fantasy Flight has used errata to balance the game with mild tweeks (yes, affecting one card to reduce a build's propensity is mild). This is much more responsive than most miniature game companies. At other times, if they thought the meta wasn't too powerful but people were complaining and having a hard time dealing with it, they wrote articles to explain how to defeat it (e.g. Swarms). The meta in a game should change, but other games use it as an excuse to push new product on us and allow for power-creep. X-Wing is very balanced, and part of that is the ongoing efforts they put into it after the fact. My disappointment is I have no idea what I'll be flying against in my next tournament.

21 minutes ago, wfain said:

The hesitancy *should* come from people using cards in ways other than as written. The errata to cards like Daredevil don't really matter, the card still does what it says (basically). Errata to Palpatine, x7, Manaroo, and Zuckuss is an entirely different thing. We're talking about 4 significant cards which now do not work as they are written. This creates strange feelings when kitchen players show up. They have a cool list with Palpatine in a Decimator, a Delta x7, and maybe a Phantom. They sit down to play their first ever match in a local store and suddenly none of their cards work they way they're written? Wouldn't that sound suspicious to you on your first trip?

I don't know but I think for balancing the tournament scene errata is the wrong move, banning or restricting is much better. The cards should do what they say and if what they say is too powerful you either limit them or ban them completely.

I get that part, but seriously, this doesn't mitigate the problem of your first-timer at tournament. Now he can't use his list at all instead of not the way it says on the cards. Hooray....?

1 minute ago, Stefan said:

I get that part, but seriously, this doesn't mitigate the problem of your first-timer at tournament. Now he can't use his list at all instead of not the way it says on the cards. Hooray....?

Isn't it easier to explain to someone "look, these were too good so they've been banned" than "look, these were too good so they've been rewritten to do something only slightly resembling what you think they do"? I get that chances are kitchen players don't have x7 or Palpatine and maybe not the Scum stuff at all but tournament bans seem an easier sell to me personally.

8 minutes ago, Stefan said:

I get that part, but seriously, this doesn't mitigate the problem of your first-timer at tournament. Now he can't use his list at all instead of not the way it says on the cards. Hooray....?

However if you read the tournament regulations, it clearly states that tournaments are played with the FAQ in mind. I did read up on tournament rules in my first tourney.
I would expect new timers to do the same! :-)

I'm not a tourney player outside of local store tournaments and I have everything that's been released. I don't think you give enough credit to the kitchen table players.

I can't remember which interview but there was one where an FFG rep said that FFG was strongly opposed to erratas. As in only make them if it is absolutely necessary. The Cloak nerf was the first major eratta but it was a change to a rules supplement not a pen & in change to a card. All the upgrades and pilots still read the same words. The first pen & ink change to a card for balance was tactician giving it the Limited restriction. That was to prevent the triple tactician build on the YV-666 so in a way it was a change not for balance but before a release so there was no complaints. The Heavy Scyk title was the first in pen & ink change for a ship that was already in the game giving it a hull upgrade.

I think it is safe to say FFG has discarded that policy on restricting erratas.