I am hearing a lot of complaint against zero cost upgrades, as if they are ultra powerful.

A number of people have said things like Force Speed or Fast Hands should have at least a 1 resource cost.

What I think these people are missing are the downsides to these zero cost upgrades.

Firstly, they do no inherent damage and rely on character or other upgrades to be useful. While they may assist with action economy, simply having a string of actions is not all that unless there are good damage dice somewhere in the mix.

Secondly, because they cost zero they are useless for ramping into 3 or higher cost upgrades. SoR seems to have a number of great 3 cost cards, which may be too costly for the average aggro deck.

If I have a zero cost, a 1 cost and a 3 cost upgrade in my starting hand, in a number of cases the 1 cost upgrade will be a better option to ramp into a turn 2 upgrade of 3 cost, unless I am confident of gaining resources.

I predict that the game is going to evolve into 2 different deck strategies. Strategy one is to string multiple actions together each turn and ensure you claim the battlefield.

Strategy two will be to have a deliberately slower deck that seeks to do more actions overall, via supports and through resolving a variety of different dice sides, as apposed to all ranged or melee damage. These decks will not worry about the battlefield and will seek to do their real damage after the opponent has claimed the battlefield.

Decks that may suffer to the rapid action decks are mill decks, as the rapid deck will get enough rerolls and resolve dice before losing cards becomes a problem.

Upgrades don't help you ramp (except against Distrupt, which is not particularly popular). They may help you manage your resources by taking away the temptation of using it on something else, but they don't accelerate you.

And I don't think anyone has a problem with some upgrades being free. They have a problem that some zero cost upgrades are well above the power curve for being a zero cost upgrade - the jury is still out on Force Speed, but Holocron is clearly ridiculous in it's current form. It may not be 'broken', but the potential economic advantage is huge for very little risk.

The other issue is that they mostly seem to be enablers - cards that let you break the normal rules/flow of the game in some way. We're not getting things like Promotion/Scout with a worse dice. People wouldn't be complaining if we got something like Infiltrate as a zero cost card, because it's kind of a generically useful dice without actually being particularly powerful.But we're getting things that enable you to instant kill characters that can't be stopped etc. Why are those effects on free cards?

Over the course of a single game, I'm far more worried about a first turn Jetpack than I am Sith Holocron or Force Speed.

9 hours ago, Alphastealer said:

I am hearing a lot of complaint against zero cost upgrades, as if they are ultra powerful.

A number of people have said things like Force Speed or Fast Hands should have at least a 1 resource cost.

What I think these people are missing are the downsides to these zero cost upgrades.

Firstly, they do no inherent damage and rely on character or other upgrades to be useful. While they may assist with action economy, simply having a string of actions is not all that unless there are good damage dice somewhere in the mix.

Secondly, because they cost zero they are useless for ramping into 3 or higher cost upgrades. SoR seems to have a number of great 3 cost cards, which may be too costly for the average aggro deck.

If I have a zero cost, a 1 cost and a 3 cost upgrade in my starting hand, in a number of cases the 1 cost upgrade will be a better option to ramp into a turn 2 upgrade of 3 cost, unless I am confident of gaining resources.

I predict that the game is going to evolve into 2 different deck strategies. Strategy one is to string multiple actions together each turn and ensure you claim the battlefield.

Strategy two will be to have a deliberately slower deck that seeks to do more actions overall, via supports and through resolving a variety of different dice sides, as apposed to all ranged or melee damage. These decks will not worry about the battlefield and will seek to do their real damage after the opponent has claimed the battlefield.

Decks that may suffer to the rapid action decks are mill decks, as the rapid deck will get enough rerolls and resolve dice before losing cards becomes a problem.

The reason you needed overright with Upgrades before is most of your Events also cost resources. I counted and 34 or the roughly 50 some odd commons are ZERO cost. Meaning its going to get a lot easier to save up the 4-5 resources needed for some cards. With what is in SoR the Curve, the average cost of all cards played in a deck, I suspect is going to come down quit a bit.

8 hours ago, WonderWAAAGH said:

Over the course of a single game, I'm far more worried about a first turn Jetpack than I am Sith Holocron or Force Speed.

Is that before or after the Holocron turns into a Force Throw, and makes the opponent not even want to roll the Jetpack for fear of copping it in the face? Or into a Mind Probe, which is clearly a better dice than the Jetpack, and they can still roll the Mind Probe and come out ahead on resources?

How about when they play Force Speed, still have two resources to play the Jetpack, then use Force Speed to roll out the character with the Jetpack and shoot you in the face before you can do anything about it?

I can understand valuing the straight damage and consistency more, but I'd never be particularly worried about a Jetpack unless they god roll and you can't do anything about it.

Jetpack does things on its own. The other cards don't.

9 hours ago, GamerGuy1984 said:

The reason you needed overright with Upgrades before is most of your Events also cost resources. I counted and 34 or the roughly 50 some odd commons are ZERO cost. Meaning its going to get a lot easier to save up the 4-5 resources needed for some cards. With what is in SoR the Curve, the average cost of all cards played in a deck, I suspect is going to come down quit a bit.

I'm playing Jango, Veers with 30 resource cost from my hole deck. I have one 3 cost card and when I get the next set it's looking like I may be able to get that down to 25 or even 20 resources. By time a 5 cost card makes the table an opponent is most likely going to be down their main character.