I'm new to LCGs so I have a question for those of you who have been playing FFG's other LCGs: how does FFG avoid power creep?  Conventional wisdom says that eventually sets would need to be more powerful to sell.  Why else would you convince everyone to buy your new expansion if they're not going to use anything from it in their decks and why use things in decks when you already have equivalent or better options.  MtG handled this with the set rotation in Standard.  Decipher never really handled it with the SWCCG, and it was definitely a problem near the end of the game's publishing.  Does FFG usually avoid this with their LCGs, or can we expect to have to buy the latest expansion to be competitive?

If they stick with the current pod style of building a deck by choosing an objective card that then adds 10 cards to your deck then you'll want to buy them simply to get a different objective to work with, 

spirit said:

I agree.  Since you will have the inability to add individual cards to a deck, powercreep should be less of an issue (in theory).

But it does exist in all of the other games.  AGoT has introduced a banned list, a restricted list, and has a FAQ for specific errata and clarification.

 Power creep aside, FFG likes to add new mechanics as they go with big box expansions to go with the chapter packs, so expect to see more "things to do" alongside any potential power creep.

I'd imagine, by the looks of the Objectives and deckbuilding and such that you'll see different personas of main characters.  I've seen a picture of a card for Vader's TIE Fighter, but the card for Vader doesn't have text for using him as an Enhancement card, whereas there is a Black Squadron pilot that can attack to ships.  I would imagine there would be "Pilot Vader" to go with "Combat Vader", and with uniqueness, you could only run one or the other on the board at once.

SW CCG did it all the time.  If you wanted a beefy Falcon combo, you went with Captain Solo from the Cloud City set.  If you wanted some ground combat power, you could run Han with Blaster Pistol for the extra battle destiny combo and attack, or General Solo from the Endor set if you were doing a Scouts deck.

They all had their uses and focus.  That said, the original Han Solo from Premiere fell out of vogue when Captain Solo appeared, but later became useful for maximum Force Retrieval when played as the captive Han in the "You Can Either Profit By This…" Objective.

At a high level play tournament scene though, there were obviously better choices for to powergame your way across the finish line, but in terms of playing for fun, they never really killed the different personas of cards in any appreciable way.

I think Leia was the only card I ever really started using when her Daughter of Skywalker persona came out.  You could use her instead of Luke for Jedi Training decks which opened up all kinds of crazy alternate universe shenanigans.

Hopefully FFG will take this approach rather than just making a "better" Vader, Luke, Han, etc.

Here's hoping they still keep the game text that mechanically let's Han always shoot first.  Not that I'm an angry SW fan about that bit in the movie, I just think it's a fun little mechanic that keeps the spirit of Star Wars in the game.

Also, here's hoping for "Special Edition" Greedo that shoots first against Han just for the fun of it.

cleardave said:

With all those different card names, how was character uniqueness established?

I think the pod system actually allows for a considerable amount of leeway when it comes to designing powerful cards. If FFG wants to introduce a particularly awesome effect, they can include it in a pod with five other miserable cards. So, you may get that Boba Fett that just wrecks everything, but he's bringing a bunch of dead weight with him. 

Now, I don't know whether this would frustrate players unduly, but it certainly offers a way to mitigate the overall power of decks (if not of individual cards themselves). 

MarthWMaster said:

Sounds like the old WotC minis game - weren't there 14 Darth Vaders, of one name or another? I forget now, but I remember that game had the text 
Unique (counts as Darth Vader) 
or something similar. 

This post is probably of no use whatsoever…

starhawk77 said:

I have no real idea about just how balanced each pod will be (I know some guys on BGG have managed to group together at least two of the pods from the cardgamedb post), but I'm sure the other cards won't be that bad… 

MarthWMaster said:

MarthWMaster said:

It was part of the rules, covered as "personas"

So "Han Solo" from Premiere was a unique persona of Han Solo, as was "Captain Solo", "Han with Heavy Blaster", "General Solo", "Jabba's Prize", etc.

I believe it was a piece in the rules about each card having the ubiquitous unique dot, and it calling out that it was Han in the flavour text, or elsewhere on the card.  I don't have them in front of me, but you get the idea.

So Luke Skywalker, Commander Luke Skywalker, Son of Skywalker, Luke with Lightsaber, Luke Skywalker Jedi Knight and Luke Skywalker Rebel Scout would all be considered "Luke" for deployment restrictions on uniqueness, as well as card effects.

What was really interesting were the card effects that required specific personas.  So Echo Base Garrison lets you pull "Hoth Series" Luke because it specifically shows the expansion symbol for "Hoth" (which was the planet Hoth, in case you were wondering).

If I remember correctly, you could always deploy out another version of the same persona that overides and replaces the card you had out originally, and in a very flavourful twist, in the Cloud City expansion, you had a Dark Side and Light Side Lando card that could be converted, representing his changing sides in Empire.

I think the Dark Side got a Lobot in the Special Edition set that stopped the Light Side from converting Lando.

Wacky, wacky fun.

 In SWCCG, different cards representing the same character (or starship or weapon) were considered the same persona and could not be on table at the same time (if unique). Usually it didn't take much work for a reasonable person to handle that rule, but the complete game rules included persona lists for the unreasonable people.

dbmeboy said:

As if that needed to be explained, but you know that Rules as Written guy at every gathering would be a giant dick and talk about some loophole that lets him use 2 different Hans if he could, and damn the spirit of the game.

I get why they had to spell it out in such detail, it would just always make my friends laugh because if we ever played against that person at a shop, we'd just laugh them out of the room and nobody would play with them.  Sportsman-like conduct goes a long way in keeping the little communities in each town going.  Trying to lawyer your way into some weird BS powergaming moment, especially in casual play is just not cool.

Like when I was learning to play Call of Cthulhu LCG with a friend, I had made some oversight a couple of turns in, about a deployment, which I realized as he pointed it out.  I went for a do-over and he was hopping around like "haha, you screwed up, I'm not letting you do it".  It was literally the first time either of us played the game.  It set me back, but I won the match, and from then on, I just stopped explaining in depth every move I was doing and raked him over the coals so bad every game after.

Then he was throwing up his hands about losing every time, and it was frankly because I didn't feel like pointing out an obvious mistake he made in not using an ability or something, because clearly he felt the need to play cut-throat from the first card we ever picked up.  I'm all for cut-throat when you're talking about two experienced players squaring off in a serious match, but on the first time out, we should all allow a wide margin of error.

Back on topic, I'm sure there's going to be a persona rule for Star Wars LCG as well, because I can't see them being so uncreative to have different Luke cards all being called just "Luke Skywalker".

cleardave said:

Well I was disappointed when I found that alter-egos in the LotR LCG were all called by the same name. Both Aragorn cards are just called Aragorn instead of Aragorn and Strider. You lose some flavor by keeping it simple that way. I'd prefer a clause that says, "Counts as Aragorn."

Budgernaut said:

Or had the "Aragorn" resource

Budgernaut said:

The 'alternate' title is in the subtitles.

starhawk77 said:

That's exactly why I'm not really for the pod-building mechanic. No deck builder ever wants dead weight in their deck.

herozeromes said:

I don't think it will ever be dead weight per say, just cards that maybe aren't the greatest depending on how you build. For example, one of the pods that looks to be complete is:

The Emperor's Web objective, Emperor Palpatine, Emperor's Royal Guard, Sith Library, Force Lightning, Force Choke

So I think it will more likely be thematic batches like this.

But then depending on how you build the rest of your deck maybe some of these cards then aren't the greatest that you want included. Though even then, I'm fine with this as it's kind of like a risk you take for taking certain other cards, and you can always just use these cards in the edge battle.