So the news of XWM2.0 has been out for about a day now, and there’s been lots of discussion about what we know, with people expressing both positive and negative opinions. But almost all of it has been focused on what has been announced as wave 1. We know a little about what to expect in the future, Resistance, First Order, and Epic ship conversions. They have already released Wave 1 content that’s analogous to the Wave 1 v1.0 content we got 6 years ago in the X Wing and Y Wing. We’ve been assured that we don’t need to buy these expansions if we get the conversion kits as there won’t be any new cards between the two. But what about what goes on after that?
I can see a few different methods of future releases. For simplicity sake, I’m just going to reference rebel stuff from here out, with the understanding that all three core factions are similar. Let’s talk about what I would consider worst case to begin with. FFG needs its players, both the new and the old, to continue buying more stuff. So is wave 2 (or wave 3 if W2 is exclusively the Resistance stuff) going to be v2.0 releases of the A wing and Falcon? And if so, will those ships come with new cards that existing players need to purchase? It makes sense such that it’d be a way to ensure purchases are made, but I feel like purchases would be made at the expense of their customer base, and risk pissing people off… Not only did they buy all of their ships in v1.0, but they bought upgrade packs for all of them, and then they’re being forced to buy the v2.0 ships to have the latest and greatest upgrades (and/or pilots). Had the X wing and Y wing had cards unique from the upgrade packs, I would 100% expect this to be the case. Though if this *was* going to be the case, I’m a bit surprised that they even have an upgrade pack available. It might be cleaner to just include two dials and cardboard packs for the ship you’re releasing in every release. That way you can control when ships are “tournament legal,” and ensure that players continue to buy new products. That would be a way to do it more streamlined, and sure there would be gripes about “wtf, I have 3 X Wings already, now I need to buy 3 more in order to play with all of them?” But no solution is going to be a gripe-free solution.
I truly hope this isn’t how they do future releases though. It’ll be difficult to justify continuing to play the game when I already have all of the A Wings and Falcons I want (actually, I have more Falcons than I want because of HotR), and paying $20 for yet another A wing seems excessive to me for what ends up being a card pack (since I don’t want/need the model). But something needs to be done to provide new cards and therefore continued purchases. Could XWM2 go the route of card only packs? I know at one point they said that was not their business model, and I don’t really think it’s a good model either. But you can throw out everything we know about their business model as XWM2 presses the refresh button on all practices. Heck, one could argue the existence of the upgrade packs indicate that they’re willing to do card-only expansions. Though one could also say that that only exists as a one-off special scenario. But what would a card pack look like? If we consider that they already have stated that they will be tying into a squad building app, that means that casual player has 0 reason to purchase a card pack. It would be exclusively for the tourney players, which is a small subset of XWM1 players. Furthermore, they would have to include cards that players felt were practically mandatory in order for most to purchase, that or be limited edition releases. Otherwise you wouldn’t bother purchasing a card pack until you were going to a Regio-er… a Hyperspace event with a list that required it. I don’t see card-only packs as being a good business plan for FFG.
Which brings me down to my hopeful future. I could see the A Wing and Falcon and other already existing ships getting v2.0 expansion packs via reprints. Next time the A Wing hits the printer, it gets upgrade to a 2.0 release, and the expansion just replaces the 1.0 on the shelves of stores. The cards included in the exp pack are already included in the conversion kit, so there’s no incentive for existing players to purchase them. But it means that newer players can pick up an A wing without having to grab the conversion kit as well. Ace packages would no longer be reprinted, and when they’re out of stock, they’re out of stock. That doesn’t address how new content will be handled though. In this scenario, I believe that we would continue to get new ship releases, and new cards along with these ships. I would think there might be an emphasis on the Resistance ships, so perhaps the new A Wing, which would be treated in a similar manner as previous V1 releases. There will be upgrade cards that are designed for the Resistance A Wing, but can be used on other ships, so players of all factions will be enticed to pick up all ships. This makes a bunch of since, especially since they will now have 5 factions, so they’ll unlikely have 5 new ships each wave, but hopefully everyone gets at least new upgrade cards to play with. It does mean that they’ll either have to continue to delve further into the EU-obscurity, or migrate into the prequel trilogy era (which is my guess, otherwise why bother separating Resistance from Rebels?).
What are your thoughts? Do you see any other method of continued content?