Right now my one hope for this is that FFG doesn't go the route of other LCG core sets and doesn't require people to buy multiple copies of the core set in order to get 3x copies of cards.

"Play all your favorite heroes from the classic trilogy in Star Wars: The Card Game. This cooperative Living Card Game for 1-4 players* pits players against the Empire's vast military might as the Rebel Alliance once again finds itself in a race to complete a desperate mission.

* Players can create two standard tournament decks with the contents of a single core set."

Sounds a lot like how LOTR LCG was marketed, so I'm gonna bet that there will be only 1-2 copies of certain cards.

darthbalmung said:

They won't. I can't remember which, but one of the several blurbs about the game that you can find on this website confirms that one Core Set will be all you'll need. FFG knows they made a mistake, and they're correcting it. Now let's hope they go back and print 3x versions of the other LCG Core Sets...

EDIT: Aww darn, that's the same thing I read. I wonder why I interpreted it to mean they'll be 3x of cards. Wishful thinking, I guess.

MarthWMaster said:

Wishful thinking, I guess.

Yep. It is a shame that FFG do not understand that more people would buy more of their products if they didn't seem like it has a hidden cash grab agenda attached to it.

That may seem like I am attributing malice to FFG's marketing mindset, and it isn't.

It just boggles the mind how they can ignore how lossleaders produce more money in the face of their change of the LCG expansion packs to include 3x of each card.

Hanlon's razor applies here:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

The marketing approach is shortminded for the short term. The "quick buck" so to speak.

It would be wise to remember this when pursuing this as a gaming investment for the long term when the stewards of that license think in such short term ways.

darthbalmung said:

I'm not sure why people have rushed out and bought multiple copies of the core set. It seems to me that its only a matter of time before you can buy a Gandalf card on ebay for $.99 or whatever.

I was happy enough with the LOTR core set, I've had no problems with it. I will get a second at some point but it's not a priority and it was easily playable out of the box. I expect the same here as well

You don't need multiples of any of the core sets and if they made every card 3 copies of each it would reduce the amount of card variety. I would rather have a bigger mix of cards than 3 copies of a much smaller pool of cards. This has been discussed to death in every other LCG forum and the reasons for it can be found in several places.

Toqtamish said:

Exactly, I'd take 300 unique cards over 100 unique cards at 3x each any day. The main problem I had with LotR is that even buying multiple core sets deck building options are limited and with half the adventure packs taken up by encounter cards the player card pool expands very slowly.

Seems to me that this "living card game" idea is much more sensible than previous SW card games, where folks buy packet after packet and still don't get the cards they want. This system eliminates that mad random factor and gets rid off rare or chase cards. Crikey even I might get into this new SW card game as the random/blind factor is what has always put me off in the past.

this seems more like a grown up Top Trumps, and all the better for it

Well if it's like LOTR it will be more challenging NOT having 3x of every card. Two or three core sets makes the game too easy, IMO.

Although a part of me will miss chasing that exclusive rare or premium card, I'm glad it won't be randomized cards in each pack. Took me a while, but I finally tracked down all the SW CCG cards...except for the tournament foils. Still working on the TCG cards (although I didn't collect them when they were originally released since I was bummed about the license change at the time). Thankfully eBay and online single purchases helped me make sure I completed the minis sets.

What they could do instead is rule that you can only have as many cards in your deck as appear in the sets. It would mean that particularly powerful cards could be limited to 2 (or even 1) copy per deck. You would only ever need 1 of any product, but you could have some of the greater variety provided by not having to publish 3 of everything.

Borithan, that is what they tend to do with tournament decks anyway. Limit the number of 'killer' cards to fewer allowed than compared to lesser cards.

Toqtamish said:

And i'd rather the core set have a smaller card pool so the decks themselves are more consistent and provide a better foundation for deckbuilding from one set than having to pay multiples in order to get the same effect.

darthbalmung said:

Here here.

I'm hoping for a 3x starter or at least a "chapter 0" pack that offers the complements to the cards in the original game. (Meaning, if you get 2 wookies and 1 light saber in the base set, you get 1 wookie and 2 light sabers in the 'chapter 0' pack).

Quizoid said:

Something like that would be fantastic.

seeing as how we have been told repeatedly it is not going to happen for any other of the 4 previous LCG's including the biggest, AGoT, I would not hold my breath.

ImmortalJedi said:

When Call of Cthulhu went from CCG to LCG, I thought I would have a part of me that missed trying to track those cards down. However, as it turns out, I don't. I did a thorough check and NO PART of me is missing tracking down and overpaying for singles, let alone chase foils and promos. When I think of the colossal amounts of cash I put into Decipher (which apparently did neither of us any good), I want to cry. And once Decipher went down, most of my card friends got out of the biz entirely...so...useless piles of cards.

Which makes me want to get involved with this game even more: collecting and deck-building without the fear of it becoming extinct as long as I want to play it.

jgt7771 said:

Absolutely. I used to love opening boxes of randomized packs. Sure, I'd spend a fortune on boxes and only get four of the ten cards I was actually looking for, but when I found those four it was exciting. The problem with that is it's only exciting to find those cards because it's so frustrating to open pack after pack of cards you don't want or need.

PWBrian said:

As a former Magic player and a current boardgamer, I can say the satisfaction, dollar for dollar, of opening a board game far exceedes the satisfaction of opening packs of Magic cards.

There was a card in the Star Wars Trading Card Game (Wizards' game, which you could only play if you had at least average luck with dice-rolling), the Executor, of which there was only one version made prior to the game's cancellation; they may have made more later as virtual cards, IDK. This is the card that you basically had to have if you were going to play a competent Imperial deck, because the game generally crucified you if you restricted yourself by continuity, and this was a good enough card to get around that problem. And I always prefer decks that make sense. They don't have to be "theme decks," per se, but I would rarely put Jango Fett and adult Boba Fett together, for example.

Now unlike SWCCG, SWTCG had only standard rarities throughout its lifespan, so this card shouldn't have been so difficult to grab. But the card was an absolute female dog for me to pull out of packs, and nobody was willing to trade even a single copy of it, ever. I could only acquire one copy online, and I can't even remember where I got it from. But the one copy, as most people know, is generally not enough to build a 60-card deck around.0 cards. So eventually I gave up. Now that I don't care anymore, they're pretty easy to find on eBay and such.

I can't say I will ever miss not having cards I need to have in order to play the game properly.

It seems pretty clear that FFg won't ever make a 3x Core set. What we need to hope for is something like the AGoT Core Set Model where you get (roughly) 1x of every card, so if you do want to buy a 2nd or 3rd core set, you don't have much redundancy. Whatever they say about it, the LoTR core set card distribution was either stupid or greedy. For a second Core set, you already had massive numbers of redundant cards, and anyone wanting a full playset of the 1x Cards was going to end up buying an entire box for about 12 useable cards.

1x each so we can get variety, fine, just not 1x 2x and 3x randomly spread between cards.

Mighty Jim said:

Agreed. It's an "either or" situation.

Either gives us 3x all the way across so that we can easily get a full playset with reduced variety out of the box or just gives us 1x as came in the Call of Cthulhu LCG with increased variety where redundancy was only to be had in extra domain statues, 10 story cards and extra boards when attempting a full playset..

The crap in between is sad.

I understand why more variety was to be had in the AGoT and CoC coresets since those games far predate the LCG marketing, but in the case of newer LCGs it smacks of money grab with such a seemingly haphazard mix.

As much as I lamented buying multiple core sets of CoC LCG, I much prefer that over the price of redundancy being passed on to the consumer on top of owning extras that nobody wants so basically get thrown away. A shameful waste of paper resources.

So I had a thought about the core set, and I'm pretty sure it won't happen, but please hear me out. When I first heard about this game in August, I read that the core set was for two players and, as mentioned above, you could make two tournament decks with it.

Then I found out that the two decks at GenCon were Military and Rogue strategies. That made me assume that the core set would come with one complete Military and one complete Rogue deck. I thought we'd have to wait for Force packs to start building Operations or Tech strategy decks.

Then I read about LotR and how it comes with 4 decks, one for each sphere of influence, but none of them are big enough for a standard tournament deck -- you have to combine two spheres of influence which makes the deck harder to use (so the Amazon.com reviews say).

So then I thought, wouldn't that be great if they released two core sets! (not two corsets, mind you) They could do one that was Military and Operations, and another that was Rogue and Tech or some other combination of two deck strategies. This way you could actually have a functional standard tournament deck out of the box. I think it would be awesome. There's something about buying two separate starters that appeals to me much more than buying two of the same starter. I don't know if this distribution method would help alleviate some of the frustration at card ratios, though. It would just make it more palatable to buy two starters.

Yeah, but wasn't the problem with the LOTR-coreset that you had all these (more or less) useless encounter deck and quest cards? So if you want to have two different starters, you would also have to include two different sets of encounter cards to make this distribution work.

At first I didn't buy a second one, but the longer I had waited for the adventure packs the bigger my desire for proper 50 card decks got... and FFG won in the end...

I'm hoping for a more player-friendly distribution, but my hopes aren't very high. Which is sad, because you'd think FFG know their crowd and listen to their suggestions. What I don't want is this kind of situation: You bought your second LOTR-coreset and you still only got two Unexpected Courage, but six Rain of Arrows... That was annoying!