oDESGOSTO said:

I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to suggest this. But while yes, it's possible, what I don't want to see is people start expecting that SWCCG will soon be in FFG's hands, and then be all up in arms with them when they find out this is not the case.

What I would love to see, though, is something very similar to what they seem to be doing with Android: Netrunner. Rather than copying SWCCG verbatim, with all its complications and flaws, they should take the same basic engine, but update the gameplay to reflect the advancement of the CCG industry. Kind of what Decipher themselves tried to do with WARS before that whole embezzlement thing destroyed them, except that this time, it's Star Wars again. Note that I am one of the four or five people who actually enjoyed Wizards' take on the franchise, but that being said, I recognize that Decipher's game was several times more popular, and FFG would be wise to secure that game's engine rather than build a new one wholesale.

Just give me a multiplayer option and I'll be happy.

MarthWMaster said:

I dunno what storm is coming but FFGs' decision to take back the SW:LCG after the playtest in GenCon…

You say you don't want another bit-by-bit take of SW:CCG as FFG done with GoT:CCG (and Netrunner) and I understand that. I guess the GoT: LCG was tuned to work a little better than GoT:CCG, as so it will be with Netrunner:Android. Assuming this FFG could do the same thing with SW:CCG into SW:LCG.

What turned me very disappointed was the fact that SW:LCG as presented in GenCon was LOTR:LCG "in spaaaace".

There are many opinions about it; PvP vs CoOp; CCG reboot vs new game; Original trilogy vs whole saga…

Right now I'm like Episode IV, just waiting for A New Hope!

oDESGOSTO said:

I don't think it's fair to say SW:LCG was just a reskin of LotR:LCG. When you really look at how the game was set up, you have to admit that there was quite a bit of Warhammer Invasion involved as well, what with the three zones, including a support zone that draws cards and an attack zone and a mission zone.

EDIT: I think it's more fair to say it's a solo version of WI:LCG, only with the mission zone expanded to cover the questing involved in LotR.

Ah now, it looked a Lot like LotR. Atleast, it looked less distinct from LotR than CoC does from W:I and as either of those do from LotR or AGoT. Maybe its just because if the co-op mechanic but it felt very similar, with the zones added for a little bit of extra flavour. Mixing two games doesn't necissarilly make it a new game >.>

I think FFG should buy the rights for Horus Heresy TCG and Stargate CCG and rework them as updated, streamlined LCGs. Then they will take all my money and I will have to work in a coal mine to pay off my huge LCG debts.

Seriously though, you guys are fun, this is basically what the discussion on the Thrones boards has been over the last month about reprints "FFG, Y U NO NEWS UPDATE?!" I think its just how the company works, they get really excited about a new product or development, blow their load before they're entirely sure of when they'll have more news and then we have to sit here in mixed anticipation and impatience. Its kind of cute in a way, like Designers Overeagerness or something? I say give them time, they'll tell us when the product is closer to completion. Even if they announced what the game was exactly Right Now would it make a difference if the product was another 6 months from release?

that said…. FFG! Y U NO UPDATE?!?!

DerBarchen said:

AFAIK, FFG already have the rights to the Horus Heresy CCG. They got all of Sabertooth's CCGs when they bought the company from GW.

oDESGOSTO said:

Is that really what I said? Actually, my intent was to convey the opposite desire. I do want them to bring back SWCCG's gameplay, as they have done with AGoT, CoC, and now Netrunner. But, as anyone who knows the game has to admit, SWCCG is not without its flaws. I speak mostly to the excess of rules complexity that came to be added over time, and as someone who played WARS during the brief period in which it was popular, I do think it would be possible for FFG to preserve the deepest "essence" of what makes SWCCG a lovable game to this day, and streamline it into something that offers a fluid, easy-to-understand bit of gameplay. It would need to be something that new players can enjoy, while also keeping enough of the original system in place to not alienate those who still play SWCCG.

If this is indeed the reason for the delay, I think it ought to be well worth the wait.

MarthWMaster said:

Sorry if I interpreted you wrong. I was talking about an exact copy with polished rules. I dunno if people would want that, some really do and some don't.

I wouldn't mind to play the SW:CCG revamped into SW:LCG, with polished rules. Although I must be honest, SW:CCG was a game that I have never played, and when it was demo'ed to me, after the first ten minutes of explanation I was "ok, great game, nice cards, let's play Magic" (this was around '97, when I was 17yo).

I totally understand what you've wrote, SW:CCG was one of the most complicated games I've seen. I never had the correct "mind state" to play that game and I'm an avid fan of SW (I'm wearing a SW t-shirt right now ). So maybe now I could enjoy that game, after all these years.

I would really be surprised to see a reboot of the Decipher game at this stage. They were sitting on the NetRunner license for two years before it was announced. WARS pretty well flopped, so I think it's clear that SWCCG was popular because people like Star Wars pictures, not because of Decipher's game mechanics.

And, by most standards, I'm a fan of the SWCCG. I played a draft event at Gen Con last year, and in a constructed tournament a few years ago. While it can make for some fun games, there is also the potential for boring non-interactive games. It wouldn't transfer to the LCG format very well because there are so many cards you would only want to run one copy of AND you'd need to build two decks. This will be a bit of a problem for NetRunner, as well, but at least there's no uniqueness factor and the deck size is a bit smaller. I never thought SWCCG did terribly well on the thematic front, either, especially pre-objectives.

cyberfunk said:

There are two things wrong with this statement. First, WARS wasn't dropped because of poor sales. The CFO for Decipher had been embezzling large amounts of money from the company, which totaled something like $9 million over the course of three years, and forced them to drop most of their existing properties. And second, having Star Wars in the game is not sufficient to guarantee success. For this, one need look no further than SWTCG, the card game Wizards created once the license shifted over to them after being taken away from Decipher. That game received tremendous flak from players who had enjoyed Decipher's game, a danger that is less likely to occur should FFG produce their own take on the game (since they could not do so without rights to the WARS Engine which IIRC Decipher offered to Wizards but was declined), but the truth is that there are still many players who remain fanatically loyal to the SWCCG mechanics, and would likely get into this game if, and only if, it was based on the WARS Engine.

Make no mistake: I don't think the WARS Engine is the best expression of the Star Wars saga in card-gaming form (I am with you on that front). But I would play it, and I do think it's the option that would give FFG the strongest likelihood of lasting success with the license, until their other upcoming products in the Star Wars line-up are revealed/released.

Yeah, I'm familiar with the embezzlement saga at Decipher. It's possible WARS would have succeeded without this obstacle, but I doubt it.

Even casual game-players were the minority among SWCCG customers. Most people bought the cards to look at them. A few people played. A few of those played in tournaments. A few of those were willing to try another game based on the one they had already played.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see Decipher loyalists as representing a significant portion of FFGs player base. I'm sure there are some.

Would anyone else be interested in setting up a thread purely to fantasize about what this game could be like, assuming it uses an entirely new gameplay setup? That sounds like something that could amuse me for some significant length of time.

I thought that's what the thread "IGNORING all previous games What should we hope for?" was all about.

I'd be cool with a SWCCG rules reboot. The mechanics are solid, and with a retooling including a limited hand size, 3x card limit, and 50 card deck it'd be great in the LCG format. Take the idea of starting characters from any of the Middle Earth themed card games and make unique characters truly unique. Forced discard to the used pile both increases and stresses the importance of efficiency(and gets rid of the need for Reactor Terminal). It creates a whole new experience with fluid strategies. Heck, I may dig out the old cards and try it out.

FFG, PAY ME.

Also, the WARSCCG is bad. This is due to too many starting factions and a bland universe.

i get confused.. do you mean he WoTC or teh Decipher ?

booored said:

Decipher

AAAaaaaaaaarrgggggggghhhhhhhhh. Neeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwssssssss. Plllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaasssssssssssseeeeee.

*muttermuttermuttermuttermuttermutter*

Yes, Spirit, my thoughts exactly.

Let's see . . . there was about a 6-month period between announcement and the first "update", so I'm wagering our next update will be in August again! Great! I'm so excited!

[Yes, that cheesy smile is for sarcasm].

qwertyuiop said:

There were five factions. This is normal, and one fewer than the number of factions in AGoT, FFG's best-selling LCG.

Nor is the universe bland. Or at least, the acclaimed Star Wars writer Michael A. Stackpole didn't think so when he signed on to write for the property. He was enthusiastic about the WARS project because, as he pointed out on the DVD interview, in many sci-fi properties, extra-terrestrial races tend to define themselves as singular, hive-minded entities, whereas the five factions in WARS are characterized more by individuals, who are every bit as unique as one would expect in a future extrapolated from our diverse present. Even the Shi and Quay, for the limited screen-time they got in the short fiction run, demonstrated individuality within their respective cultures. When one looks at the Shi overview, one assumes that they are all going to be arrogant, selfish creatures who have no interest in "lesser" races and exhibit about as much diversity as a species as the Goa'uld do in the original Stargate film. But the Stackpole-written short story, "The First Arrow Was Light, But the Second Went Deep" throws that assumption right out the window as Dhanake-Tilak demonstrates a fascination, even fear of the human forces opposing him. I hope to see more of this individualism when the Grail Quest treatment of the setting proceeds far enough to re-introduce the alien factions.

MarthWMaster said:

Okay, but that's different than saying the setting is bland. It'd be more accurate to say it's unoriginal. I personally would disagree, but I can see how the setting can feel derivative, by virtue of its pitting aliens against humans.

Something I've noticed nobody has addressed-or at least that I've seen-is that if FFG remakes SW:CCG under the same card distribution template as every other LCG thus far, we would lose the ability to make a swarm deck.

For instance, if you wanted to run an X-Wing swarm Echo Base Operations deck back in the day, you probably had 10 or so generic X-Wings in the deck. They were common cards, so if you had been buying many packs up to the release of Hoth (when the Echo Base Operations Effect was released), chances were you had a sizeable X-Wing surplus to pull it off.

You can probably see where I'm going with this, but if FFG re-did Decipher's game this way, best-case scenario, you would have to buy 3-5 Adventure Packs to get the desired number of cards to replicate it. The worst-case scenario would be that those X-Wings were in the Core Set, which would be highly likely, since it was a Premiere Set card, and the dollar cost to buy those extra Core Sets to have 10-15 copies of a card for gameplay would be outrageous.

This also leads into the next point, which is that the LCG trend is to a)provide 3 copies of every card, Core Sets notwithstanding and b)have a rule in place that limits deck construction to a maximum of 3 copies of any individual card, thus allowing FFG to provide players with a complete toolset to build any possibly competitive deck at any time, provided they keep up with the Adventure Packs.

So right off the bat, this major SW:CCG deck design genre would be a major turn-off to some players because it requires them to ultimately buy lots of extra packs than they would like, which seems to fly in the face of the spirit of the LCG. If you thought having to buy 3 Core Sets to have a complete set of Unexpected Courages in LOTR:LCG was brutal, you'd flip your lid if you needed 5 SW:LCG core sets to run an X-Wing swarm.

I would really love to see SW:CCG Redux, because I'm really digging what FFG is doing with Netrunner, so unless there's some sort of in-game work-around to provide the same basic flow of a Common Spam deck without buying multiple copies of the same Adventure Pack, I think I'll ultimately feel better about whatever route they take.

I like card games a lot, and I've enjoyed LotR and CoC. I dabbled in GoT, but it just didn't grab me, mechanically. I'm not slighting the game at all, I guess I just needed someone to better get me into it. I've yet to play Warhammer, but I've heard good things, and I'm pro-Netrunner from what I've seen. With that in mind, I'm sure that functionally, SW:LCG will not disappoint, but only if we can let go of any preconceptions we have (PvP vs Co-Op, etc) and just wait patiently until FFG lays out something more detailed about the game.

Play some Diablo 3 or something. There's plenty of controversy with that game, and it's actually available for consumption, so all the speculation and praise and bellyaching can at least be grounded in actual experiences with the game.

cleardave said:

I don't really understand this. Do you expect that there will be only one type of X-Wing card throughout the game's run? The X-Wing is the backbone of the Alliance fleet. It's a safe bet that there will be several versions of the ship to round out a proper swarm deck - one just may have to wait until a few sets are released. Moreoever, all of FFG's LCGs thus far have had a card limit (3x in each case IIRC, though I could be mistaken), so there is no reason to assume buying multiple copies would help you, especially for a game whose mechanics we don't know yet.

MarthWMaster said:

I'm not sure if you ever played SW:CCG before or not, but the idea of the swarm deck was using Non-Unique cards, and was usually facilitated by an effect that provided some bonus to Power, Deployment, etc and specified that the card type had to be non-unique. So, in the Echo Base example, the card "X-Wing" is a non-unique card, and SW:CCG would allow you to run as many as you want in your deck.

By contrast, they had cards, like "Red 5", or semi-unique X-Wings like "Red Squadron X-Wing" (which you could deploy 3 of) that qualified as being an X-Wing, but not a non-unique X-Wing.

I have no doubt that FFG's game, assuming it is NOT a SW:CCG remake, will have countless X-Wing type cards, but my example was illustrating how copying the Decipher game to the LCG format, based on packaged card distribution and a 3-per-deck limit would make those classic deck types impossible to play.

My point was merely speculative, to perhaps allow the hopefuls for a SW:CCG remake to be a little more realistic and realize that it isn't likely to occur, given the current LCG distribution and deck building model trend.

My analogy of the swarm deck just highlights one obvious hurdle for making Decipher's game run on the LCG model; you either remove the per-card deck limit of 3 out and allow for the 10+ copy swarm deck to be legal, which breaks the common thread of the LCG's and requires us to spend more money than we would on another LCG, or you keep the deck limit in place and players bemoan the inability to run swarms.

I am more of the "wait and see" camp, and I really just want to get a read of that rulebook so I can see what it's all about. It will all be revealed in time. I would definitely say that the smart money is on FFG not remaking the Decipher game.

As most of you are well aware, I'm against a SW:CCG remake. But to follow the current topic, I think they could facilitate a swarm deck by having "Rogue Squadron X-wing" and "Red Squadron X-wing" and "Blue Squadron X-wing", for example. This would give you 9 non-unique x-wings without requiring a purchase of multiple packs and maintain the limit of 3 of each card per deck. You'd probably have to wait a few cycles, but you could run a swarm deck eventually.

Budgernaut said:

Exactly. It could totally be done, using your example as a workaround, it just couldn't be done with the literal Decipher cards, as they stand. It would lead to much re-tooling and then we probably wouldn't be left with that classic Decipher feel.

That's why I'm anti-remake. If Fox decided to bring back Firefly in a rebooted series that involved the same characters and situations, it could be an objectively good show, but if it didn't involve Whedon, Fillion, et al it would forever be pigeonholed as inferior by the cult fanbase.

I'm going to toss up the flame shields because I just realized I proposed a Firefly remake sans-original cast could be theoretically good.