MarthWMaster said:

Yeah, whenever you preface a statement with "I don't mean to be rude/insensitive/racist but…" you can't help come off that way, but honestly, I didn't mean anything by it. I just don't see how you could get into SWCCG and not have some fun Star Wars-y moments.

This is the whole thing with a theme-heavy game based on an existing license. A Star Wars game based around the original movies needs to feel that way, so the game needs to find a way to recreate situations and ideas from the movies.

Thus, you can do a whole deck around occupying Cloud City, forcing the Light Side into your trap. "Bring Him Before Me" was another good one, where you have to capture Luke and turn him to the Dark Side, thus winning the game.

There were other things you could do that weren't expressly in the movies, like ISB Operations, the Occupation objectives, etc as well, so you could go that way too. They even made a Black Sun objective, and a comparable Light Side objective with non-Rebel smugglers.

The best times I had were when you had a fun "what if" scenario, like feeding Obi-Wan to the Rancor.

That does sound like a lot of fun, and I'll admit that there have been times where I've very much craved to see them adopt the WARS engine, given the unlikelihood of Decipher doing anything with it in the future.

I will also say that I'm surprised by the fact that they didn't go with a setup that would have your heroes traveling to different worlds to accomplish your objectives. That just makes the most sense to me, and gives starships and characters a specific role in the game, that does not require them to be fighting each other directly.

MarthWMaster said:

Your point about the starship/character interaction touches on what I would probably look at as the one big flaw in the SWCCG; interactivity.

If you have a deck that is almost entirely focused on ground or space, and your opponent happens to have the opposite going, it almost turns into a solitaire experience where the two decks are in a race to out-drain the other in order to win. It can get a little boring, but at least it'll be over quickly.

If there's no such obstacle in SWLCG, then you're always going to have to meet your opponent head on.

Even so, ships and characters do different things, and accomplish very different types of tasks in Star Wars . This should be reflected in the game somehow. I think that the pod system could be one way of forcing strongly encouraging players to run each in a deck. I can't really say how one would make both useful in their diverse capacities, without rewriting the game's design from the ground up, at which point I would again lean towards the attractive choice of reimagining the SWCCG. (Edit: Sorry about the background color. I wanted to include strikethrough text, and the forum again proves its uselessness in cooperating with me.)

MarthWMaster said:

Who doesn't like a good strike-through gag? Anyhow, at a glance, from the cards we've seen, you can count on having different types of effects on each character; attacking characters, attacking objectives, or placing focus tokens on other cards.

I think this way, at a glance, the Light Side will have to include a lot of cards that damage Objectives in order to get to their victory conditions. While the Dark Side doesn't have to attack Objectives, it could still be in their interest if the effect is powerful enough, but they may want to worry more about stopping the Light Side cards with attacks or focus tokens.

However you want to look at it, until we see the concrete rulebook and more card images, it's hard to really say how awkward and abstract the starship vs character battles may go. It looks like they've at least preserved the flavour of what the card "represents", so Palpatine can drop focus tokens, Coruscant Defense Fleet has a ton of combat damage to deal out, etc.

Funny the topic of starfighters should come up again. This is something I was thinking about on the bus today. It would require some changes to the game, but what if they included starships but they couldn't directly battle. I mean they couldn't damage or be damaged by characters. Instead, starships would act as some sort of buff or resource generator, or something new and unique altogether. It would be neat if they could do something to give starships a unique place in the new game without A) having the two-battlefield problem of SW:CCG, and B) having rancors destroy frigates (and stuff like that).

More on the topic of this thread, what I've read in the past two days has made me a lot less hostile toward a SW:CCG remake. That game could have been so fun if I were not a pre-teen who didn't have any money when the game came out. I never really got many cards past Premier, and didn't even understand the concept of rares at the time. FFG's fixed distribution would be great for the SW:CCG so that rare-hunting was eliminated. I think the theme of the SW:CCG would get me much more excited than the abstract game we saw at this past GenCon.

Though, to be honest, the 2011 GenCon game trumps them all.

Budgernaut said:

Well, it'd also be nice if the starships still could battle each other. But anyway, I like the idea of giving them a special effect for the game.

MarthWMaster said:

Well, they do kind of have a special effect in that I think I heard someone say that the ships are the ones that do more of the objective damage. So yeah, some of them will blow up characters or each other (or occasionally land and get smashed by a rancor apparently, heh) but mostly they'll be swooping in to blow up the objective targets.

Kind of reminds me of the Rogue Squadron games.

Budgernaut said:

This wasn't a problem at all. In fact, it was precisely why the game worked in the first place. It nailed the Star Wars feel because in Star Wars there were always 2 or 3 different battles going on simultaneously. In RotJ, there was the Endor ground battle, the Space battle, and the Lightsaber duel. By keeping them separate, a balanced deck could really nail that epic feeling. If you can find them, I would recommend picking up a Light Side and Dark Side Death Star II Starter Deck (Well, even if you can get a hold of the Premiere Introductory, Empire Strikes Back Introductory, or Special Edition Stater Decks). These were balanced well, were great at introducing the concepts AND they were more fun to play against each other because they guaranteed deck interaction.

SWCCG also has plenty of ways built into it to reward players for playing 2-theater decks. The most obvious being the Battle Plan/Battle Order defensive shields (which means they Disney count against your deck limit and could be played for free). They make it so that even most "single theater" decks have to maintain a presence in the other arena, and if only one deck could do that it would have a huge advantage. So I really don't see that interaction problem so much in the game currently (I will admit that it used to be an issue, but that was over a decade ago).

See one of the things I loved so much about the star wars decipher was that you could make any themed deck u wanted. I have played Jawa decks, Tusken decks, Smugglers, Ties, Ewoks, Abyssins,(that deck was freakin powerful actually), stormtroopers, scout troopers, dark jedi, jedi, bounty hunters, black sun ect. I mean the deck combinations were endless. It was really easy to base themed matches around events from the movies, and the EU. Now from what I am hearing they are taking the deck building away from the new game so I am a bit bummed about that. But yeah far as the old decipher goes that was one thing i just loved.

yagyu said:

This is false. You still will build your own deck. Just in batches of six. And you will probably love the deckbuilding in this based on the list of thematic decks you just listed because the batches seem to be mainly grouped by theme. Like Emperor coming with Force Lightning, Royal Guards and such.

We also need to remember that so far we've only seen some of the cards from the demo decks of what *might* be just a part of the core set. I don't think there was many awesome thematic decks that we were able to pull off in Decipher Star Wars CCG when it was only the Premiere set. Decks like Stormtroopers or Tusken Raiders, etc sucked real bad back then.

I'd wait to see what's even in the core set and what kind of stuff will be coming in the adventure packs before judging too harshly.

Mattr0polis said:

Exactly. As great as all of those themed decks were in SWCCG, none of it was a Premiere-only build. The deck I used with the most Premiere-heavy card composition was probably an Echo Base Operations X-Wing swarm build. 10 or so X-Wing Cards, Millenium Falcon, Kessel, a couple of Kessel Runs. Everything else came from Hoth (for the Hoth locations, Rogue squadron speeders/pilots), Special Edition and various other one-offs, like the Reflections 2 packs for Dash Rendar/Leebo/Outrider, etc.

It took many expansions for SWCCG to flesh itself out provide all the options to do things from the movies. If you look at each cycle of packs as part of one complete expansion, it'll take years to do "everything" in SWLCG, which doesn't bother me for two reasons;

1)It took that long for SWCCG, and we still had fun every step of the way

2)You get to grow with the game, and not be overwhelmed by the giant card pool as a barrier of entry.

Also, if you listen to the Team Covenant demo video, Corey makes a comment that there is a Dark Side Objective "block" (which I realize is what he calls "pods" that everyone is referencing here) that is all Stormtroopers.

One of my early worries of this game was swarm style decks would lose their flavour, with the standard "3 of each card" limit from the other LCG's. This way, with 2 copies of each Objective, if you had an all-Stormtrooper block, and are able to take 2 copies of it, that's 10 Storm Troopers in your 50 card deck. Remember, of the 60 cards in your overall deck, 10 of them are in a side pile, so your Reserve Deck (or whatever they'll call it) is 50 cards.

I really don't see how this Core Set will be any less playable and flexible as the SWCCG Premiere Set. Just because you could make a deck out of random Stormtroopers, Tuskens, and Jawas doesn't make it a "good" deck if your opponent takes something a little more focused, mechanically. I think if we're going to review this game, and draw comparisons to SWCCG on fun-factor, theme, and customization, we need a couple of conditions to exist;

1)SWLCG Core Set needs to actually be released, or we at least need access to the full card spoiler list and game rules.

2)We need to compare apples to apples here; SWLCG Core Set to SWCCG Premiere Set

Remember kids, SWCCG (released in 1995) didn't give us everything we wanted out of the gate;

"Anikan's Lightsaber", the matching lightsaber for Luke, did not appear until the Hoth expansion, a year after the Premiere Set

Chewie and R2D2 did not appear in Premiere, and instead were released in the first expansion, A New Hope

Executor, Jedi Tests, and Yoda came with the Dagobah expansion in 1997, but you could not train Luke up to a Jedi Knight until Death Star II in 2000

Boba Fett did not appear until Cloud City in 1997

Third Anthology, released in 2000 provided Objectives to make viable decks to recreate the Battle of Yavin from either perspective

…and so on

MarthWMaster said:

I would like to see something like flying creatures from magic or in this case a tie fighter would have the spaceship ability and not being targetable(?) by rancors or C-3PO's. Or you could have two different playing zones, one where you play characters and stuff and the other where you play starships and starbases etc. Both could affect the other but maybe more passive or indirect. For an example if i play my Star destroyer i could choose to blast my opponents x-wings to smitherens, i could destory my opponents objective or if my opponent doesnt have any starships in his space zone i could get some benefit for having air(space) superiority(like, +3 in all edge battles).

It probably wouldnt be that easy to fix but i rather see that than "my frigate got eaten by a rancor"-scenario… eventhough the image of it would be pretty funny.

Bolfa Fluffbelly said:

Based on what we know about the game, there isn't a whole lot C-3P0 can do in a battle, other than potentially win the edge. That said, you can oppose a C-3P0 attack with a chump blocker, commit nothing to the edge and then…wait for it…NOTHING HAPPENS. C-3P0 does not have any blaster icons to damage a character, no tactics icons to damage an objective, and no focus icons to add a focus token to a character.

His real value is in his text, which reads, "Interrupt: When an Event card is played, focus and sacrifice this unit to cancel the effects of that event card."

He also does have one power icon, so he could theoretically be a part of an attack and contribute +1 to the edge total, you really ultimately use him as a bullet shield for an opponent's event card.

The Rancor vs Frigate issue though, is still puzzling; as it stands if the Rancor was fighting the Redemption frigate, and wins the edge battle, thus striking first, it will apply all 4 of its blaster icons of damage to Redemption, killing it outright! This does seem a little odd, but perhaps we're missing a ruling somewhere that has to do with their card types; Rancor is a "Creature" and Redemption is a "Vehicle" and "Capital Ship".

Of course, Rancor has one power icon, vs Redemption's 3, so it would still require the Dark Side player to win out the edge battle, at a 2 point handicap to one-shot it. The Rancor, like C-3P0, really shines with its effect text, which lets it eat a non-vehicle unit in play.

cleardave said:

cleardave, do the force icons on the characters in battle count towards the edge battle total, for sure? I was under the impression that only the cards played from hand counted for the edge battle?

Mattr0polis said:

I'm pretty sure it's a combination of both. Between the cards in the battle and the ones you play from your hand, you basically count the dots and total them. So Vader is strong on the field, but also just as useful as a card for an edge battle.

Response to cleardave * my ipad doesnt want to quote

Thanks for claring up a few things! Looking at it like that the frigate-rancor debacle can easily be a ruling error.
I'm starting to like this version more and more. It helps when people who are pro-thisversion and/or have played the demo actually describe why they like it/how it works instead of just getting angry at the sceptics and telling them they're wrong. Not saying it's just here, it happens everywhere.

Finally i can have a Rancor devour Yoda!

Bolfa Fluffbelly said:

Only if Yoda is the lowest deploy-cost Light Side character. He deploys for 3, so maybe if your opponent had Luke (Deploy 4) or something like that, on the table as well. Rancor eats the lowest-cost non-vehicle unit in play. Note, that this doesn't say "opponent's lowest cost, non-vehicle unit", so it could theoretically be YOUR unit the Rancor eats.

If there's a tie for lowest cost, the active player chooses, so if you want to run Rancors, it probably wouldn't hurt to use medium cost characters, just in case, remembering, that even in a tie, in your opponent's Refresh phase, your Rancor will still eat your own character.

The Rancor card looks like it could introduce a lot of chaos into the game if you can manipulate the board, from both sides of the Force. I'm assuming its a Dark Side card, but maybe there's a Light Side one in another block? Either way, it sounds like it would work well to counter an opponent's swarm deck of low-cost characters. Just make sure you keep high-deploy cost blocks in your deck to be safe.

cleardave said:

Maybe it's a neutral card. You know, the neutral side of the force?

Bolfa Fluffbelly said:

Well, I haven't heard a confirmation of whether or not if the card backs will be different for the Dark Side and Light Side of the Force, so that will obviously have an effect on which player can use it. As it stands, there is no faction symbol on Rancor, but then again there isn't one for R2-D2.

Time will tell…

cleardave said:

Everybody and their mother knows that R2-D2 is secretly in league with the Emperor. When he's not helping the Rebels that is.

cleardave said:

A friend of mine who played the demo says it's only the Force icon dots on the cards you play from hand, which seems to make more sense to me because it seems like it would be very hard otherwise for like a few Stormtroopers or something to ever have a chance in a battle versus someone like Luke or Yoda to get 'the edge'. And while thematically that's probably true, it'd make for some pretty subpar gameplay if I want to build something like Stormtroopers and know outright as soon as I see a Light Side main deploy that I won't ever really have a chance at winning an Edge battle and getting my extra icons ever.

But I guess we'll have to wait and see how it really works.

Mattr0polis said:

I skimmed through the demo video again, and it looks like it's just the icons from the cards you bid with. This actually makes me think the opposite to be true, thematically; like, Yoda vs a Black Squadron Pilot, and only adding in the icons from cards you bid, the Black Squadron Pilot could easily win the edge in a battle versus Yoda?! That just seems a little off, thematically. Also, in that scenario, the Pilot would cause 1 point of damage to Yoda, who would respond with no damage. That just seems a little strange.

Unless, what we're missing, is the deeper tactics of edge battle management, like making sure you have a decent amount of fate cards mixed in to help out with battles. Most of our knowledge is from analyzing card images and demo reports, but without the Rulebook and the Core Set card spoilers, it's really difficult to connect some of the tactical dots in this game.

Like I said earlier, time will tell how this all comes together…

cleardave said:

Yes, but it did give the feeling like waiting for the next movie to come out. The expansions were released as the movies were and it was brilliant. The main thing I DON'T like about the new LCG is that what we have seen is thematically jumbled. You have New Hope cards on the table with Return of the Jedi cards right out of the gate. This tells me that there will never be things like Jedi Training, or That Thing's Operational. At least, not in ways that make playing feel like the movies.