|
Boxes of On The Edge are on sale on the Atlas Games website, for cheap.
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2022 06:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 07:21 |
|
|
I wondered if that was a web site glitch at first. If it’s really true, those boxes have been sitting in the warehouse (or possibly John Nephew’s garage) for upwards of 20 years at this point. That’s some sunk cost. Still, if it’s on your bucket list to just phone a game company and buy all of a CCG, I can’t think there’d be a better opportunity..
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2022 06:47
|
|
|
hyphz posted:From what I recall, the killing difference between INWO and regular Illuminati was the difference between INWO's "action tokens" and Illuminati's "money". The fact that you couldn't save up resources in the same way in INWO meant that attacking always made you vulnerable, which tended to make games painfully rote. Yeah, that was one of the big differences, the other being that in regular Illuminati there's only one deck each for plots and groups, and groups end up in an "uncontrolled" middle pile that anyone can try to add to their power structure. There's actually a variant rule to play INWO with One Big Deck, that plays quite similarly to regular Illuminati: http://www.sjgames.com/inwo/rules/variants/onebigdeck.html It's kind of like the MTG Cube format, in that you tailor the deck to the experience and power level folks want. And yeah, tournament-wise, they managed to print quite a few degenerate combos where, IIRC, one could win on the 2nd or 3rd turn with about 90% confidence (providing 11s and 12s weren't rolled, and the initial draw went in the player's favor). It happened first at the 1996 EssenSpielfest tournament, with the Oil Spill deck http://www.sjgames.com//inwo/news/germany1996.html Followed by the Bjorne Moonbase deck https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ralph/inwo/DotW/bjornekill.html And lastly with the Six Dead Conservatives deck https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ralph/inwo/DotW/6-dead-conservatives.html One of my favorite bits of INWO trivia comes from a weird little rule they have: any deal, trade, or sale you agree to must be obeyed. So, if you promise not to attack next turn if so-and-so doesn't counter your plot, you are bound to that action even if circumstances change and not-attacking would be to your detriment. To get around this rule there was a card called "I Lied"  When played, the opponent must keep their word, but you don't have to anymore. So, in the semi-finals of a major tournament, when down to two players left, the one offered the other a decent amount of cash to concede the game. Seemingly illegal, but, you know, money in have versus possible prizes in the future. The other player agreed to the deal. The player offering the money then played "I Lied", and grinned. A judge was brought in because, well, this seemed wrong, but it was ruled not only perfectly legal, but very much in keeping with the spirit of the game. The player had to concede, and the other player advanced to the next round. Lots more INWO info can be found on this website that I'm shocked is still around, despite not having been updated in 25 or so years: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ralph/inwo/inwo.html
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2022 14:51
|
|
|
We had huge Doomtown and L5R scenes here for a while. Doomtown lasted until the end of the big first story arc and people sort of wandered off, but I absolutely love some of the mechanics. L5R stuck around a lot longer but nobody seemed to care much about the relaunch after a few attempts to get it off the ground here. One of the devs for Jyhad lives in town and so we'd get to see Vampire tourneys which were really cool to see as they all use groups of four or five for obvious reasons. Shadowfist was the pocket picks. I loved the cards that could absolutely turn the entire game around like Golden Comeback or Neutron Bomb. Every faction had one and they all felt equally powerful despite doing different things like GC bringing back a character into play or Neutron Bomb wiping out all characters. Really fit in with the faction's themes.
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2022 16:27
|
|
|
So, after a game that had no relation to anything and a pretty cool design, how about the exact opposite? Mythos, or, cynical narrativism: the card game I mean, seriously, a Cthulhu based card game should have been a slam dunk. Pretty much anyone involved in gaming knows it, the RPG in the top 10 RPGs everywhere and is #1 is some regions, the title uses the same “instantly recognizable word” strategy as Magic.. all good. The only problem is, what do you really make the card game about? Symmetric conflict isn’t really a common thing in Cthulhu. Maybe two rival cults, but then you’re playing the “baddies” and are doomed either way. So they went the logical, but extremely awkward, path. You’re actually playing out an investigation in the same way as you would be in the RPG - only there’s no answer. Here’s an Investigator. The Unfortunate Nephew, above, is an Investigator too.  Investigators, as you can see, are double sized cards. You pick one for your whole deck and it starts in play. They were also included in the starter decks by being folded in half, so Investigator cards that don’t have a ruddy great crease down the middle were especially unusual and valuable. As you can see, the Investigator has a starting and maximum Sanity score. Sanity is HP - there’s no separate health track. Education is a semi-random value used for breaking ties at various points. Each Investigator also specifies how many cards you can and/or must keep between rounds (the hand size of 13 is the same for pretty much everyone), and what languages they know, which is important for Tomes. There is no ability at all related to music on the card. And that’s the case for most of the Investigators - they have interesting backgrounds that don’t do anything. So, we pop down our Investigator, draw our 13 cards, and play a Location card to start in:  The opponent does the same. Then, we pass back and forth between us and the opponent, playing a single card or taking a single action each turn until either we both pass, or one of us passes twice in a row. Also, that green hexagon in the bottom left of the card tells us that Aylesbury is a pretty mellow place, so we gain +1 Sanity for being there. On our next turn, while we’re in Miskatonic Valley, we meet up with Nahum Gardner:  He doesn’t cost anything to play as long as we’re in a region where we might meet him, which we are. He's also a chill guy, which gives us 1 more point of Sanity. Both being fairly relaxed about this whole paranormal thing at the moment, and being as we are dumb investigators in a Cthulhu story, we decide it would be a great idea to head into town and visit the creepiest bookshop we can find.  Moving between locations takes 2 turns unless they’re both in the same city. The green background on the area box tells us they’re in the same “region”. If they weren’t, we’d have to use a special card to get between them at all. The “tome” indicator in the top row of the card tells us that we’re allowed to play Tomes there, and so naturally, we pick up a creepy book.  Fortunately, it’s in English, since that’s all that the Investigator and Nahum can read. Reading it doesn’t require an action if we have a suitable Spell card in our hand, so it turns out we learn:  How to drive people we don’t like barking insane, while damaging our own sanity in the process. The sanity cost for a spell - in the yellow hexagon - is only paid when it’s cast, as a matter of “holy crap, that actually worked?” Having overheard a few rumors in the creepy bookstore, we head to a certain very specific house:  We felt a vague dread even as we stepped into the house (-1 sanity penalty on the card), but it’s followed by a horrible feeling that something is stirring, somewhere we can’t see.  Monsters can be played in any location with a Gate - that’s the green swirly icon on top of the Location card. They’re played to a face-down pile called the Mythos Threat. At the end of a round, each player decides which (face-down) cards from their Mythos Threat they’re going to send against each other player. That player decides which allies they’re going to commit to defending against each other player. Then all the monsters are revealed. The monsters fight each other, so only the player who had the highest total strength of monsters inflicts damage to the opponent’s actual board. Defending allies absorb up their card value worth of Sanity, but die in the process. Any damage left after that blows through to the Investigator’s Sanity. Then, all the attacking monsters on all sides get discarded, cards are drawn and discarded, and we start again. There’s a bunch of card-based exceptions to this, of course, but that’s the overview. So, you can probably see how this works. It plays fast and is heavily based on building flowing narratives through card play. But there’s one thing we haven’t mentioned yet. One terrible thing. The victory condition.  That’s an adventure card. To play it, all of the named cards or card types need to be either in play on in your discard pile. If you’re playing the basic game, when you play one, you win. If you’re playing the advanced game, you score the points in the top right, then shuffle your discards back into your main deck. You win when you get 20 points. The kicker is that you only have to have played the cards in the adventure. What’s actually happened in the game need have no bearing on it whatsoever. For example, the tome we found in the bookshop? We have now satisfied the tome requirement for this adventure. The fact that we didn’t encounter a cultist and take it from him is no matter (and there wouldn’t be any way to do that in the game) And while there are card progressions in the game that can lead to dramatic outcomes (you can summon Cthulhu if you can get the card combination right, although doing so just makes things worse for everyone rather than wrecking your opponent), they aren’t usually ways to directly win. Let’s note two things I didn’t mention above. First of all, there aren’t many card costs other than Sanity. So the game is far more based on being a race than on being resource management - the main cost of a card is the time taken to play that card. Second, I didn’t mention the opponent’s actions. That’s because a lot of the time they don’t matter, and that’s doubly so with the Adventure system. If we’d gotten - say, the Wife into play and then the opponent had killed her with Pipes of Madness or their Mythos Threat, it wouldn’t matter, because she would still be in the discard pile. But hell. Just imagine trying to play this thing competitively. You’d have to memorise every possible Adventure card in the game to identify what patterns might tell you which one the opponent might be going for. Then you have to just hope you can somehow disrupt it, or you get luckier on the draw than them. Ugh. I have a private theory about this game. There was a promotional poster for this game, showing the card layout in play and several example cards, for months before the game actually dropped. I wonder if they spent those months trying to sort out the victory condition - that the cards were basically printed, and it was just that one bit of the rulebook that was the sticking point, and eventually they just made the best of a bad job. After all, the main part of the game works really well, but the ending completely ruins it as anything but a casual storytelling game. There’s nothing wrong with casual storytelling games, of course, but they’re not the right kind of metric to sustain a CCG long-term and Mythos only lasted for 3 sets (the first of which was released in 3 waves) before disappearing beneath the waves.
|
|
#
?
Jul 17, 2022 18:40
|
|
|
Battletech In 1995, collectible card games were exploding, with every gaming company on the planet coming out with a CCG of their flagship product. In a display of business acumen that foretold things to come, Wizards of the Coast bought up the CCG rights to a number of IPs, including Battletech, intending to simply let them die. Fresh off the (moderate) success of his latest CCG, Netrunner, Magic creator Richard Garfield heard about this and asked to be the designer of the Battletech CCG. Because they couldn't say no to the guy who was responsible for their executive suites and gold-plated D20s, they put him in charge of the Battletech team. The Battletech CCG came out in '96 to almost no fanfare. The mechanics are based somewhat on Magic's mana system. Players draw a hand of cards, play command cards onto the table, which can be tapped for resources, which are used to play other cards. There are five flavors of resources, but the system is a bit more forgiving than Magic. If you don't have the correct type of resource, you can still play cards that need it, they just cost more.   For example, "Support: Logistics" is a Command card that can be tapped for one unit of resource, and also supplies you with Logistics. Meanwhile, the Atlas is a mech that costs "7 1L", which means it costs seven resources, plus an additional one resourse if you don't have access to Logistics. The game leans toward battlecruiser play, with the biggest mech (Daishi Dire Wolf) costing 17 even with all reductions. To facilitate this, you could pay part of a Mech's cost one turn and put it onto the table face down 'under construction', then pay the rest later. But if you do, you opponent can try to attack it! Mechs attack one at a time, and can attack almost anything: your opponent's mechs, resources, cards under construction, or their 'stockpile'. Damage to the latter causes them to mill than many cards from their deck, ending the game when the deck is empty. As for how the game plays, I really couldn't tell you. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only one in my area who even looked at it. Based on a few mock games, I'm guessing the gameplay was a lot like low level Magic. If you enjoy "I attack, I block, I play a combat trick", you would probably enjoy Battletech. Personally, I thought the game was OK, but not thrilling. Despite being a Battletech fan, I never really felt engaged, and more to the point, never got the urge to jazz up my deck with a dozen or two boosters. IMHO, one hefty problem was that the game relied a lot on D6 rolls. For example, this card:  It does nothing 2/3 of the time, and 1/3 of the time has a huge effect. In other words, it's very possible for an entire game to come down to a die roll. People generally don't like this, especially in tournaments. The game limped along for a few years, with several expansions, until the fourth expansion, Arsenal. That introduced a new card type, the vehicle, which was a massive rules clusterfuck which required a stack of errata the size of a phone book, effectively killing the game.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2022 00:33
|
|
|
Gynovore posted:Personally, I thought the game was OK, but not thrilling. Despite being a Battletech fan, I never really felt engaged, and more to the point, never got the urge to jazz up my deck with a dozen or two boosters. IMHO, one hefty problem was that the game relied a lot on D6 rolls. For example, this card: Oof. No joy anywhere on this card. It either does nothing and wastes time on a die roll, does nothing and wastes time and recurs to do this all again next turn, or shits up the game with randomness. I'm not a heavy Eurogamer guy who is against randomization in games, but this is a bit much.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2022 01:22
|
|
|
There was all kinds of busted stuff in that game. It came up in the F&F thread a while back, and I looked to see if I'd saved any of my decks or articles from back then but it's all entombed on a hard drive from college.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2022 01:46
|
|
|
And yet Magic introduced dice rolls in some recent non-comedy sets, including some cards that had very low but nonzero effects for low rolls, and for some reason the sycophants just loved it.  Battletech is one I was always curious about, since I was a big fan of the video games. It's odd that there is this idea of "under construction" since it's my understanding that there are fairly few places where you can actually make new mechs, at least in the Inner Sphere. It's about salvaging ones you can find or destroy, or some state or company's existing navy.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2022 09:05
|
|
|
Magnetic North posted:And yet Magic introduced dice rolls in some recent non-comedy sets, including some cards that had very low but nonzero effects for low rolls, and for some reason the sycophants just loved it. Die rolling and coin flipping in MTG can  . I submit Krark EDH decks as evidence. Specifically, their 20 minute turns.Generally I don't like die rolling in these games. I like chance to be a bit more controlled, a lot more meaningful, and preferably to come from other players rather than blind luck. Hidden info in an opponent's hand is a good example of all three. That said, I don't mind die rolling as much in Anachronism because it is such a quick game, and both players are rolling so it doesn't ever feel like solitaire. It is the weakest part of the game's mechanics, but it is tolerable there.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2022 13:35
|
|
|
By the way, as someone who got into MTG in 1995 and bought every copy of Scrye and InQuest I could get my hands on up until the early 2000s, I'm loving this thread. Back then all these other CCGs always seemed so adult to me, not necessarily because the subject matter was mature (though I do remember seeing XXXenophile ads and being a bit perplexed that people wanted an erotic card game), but because they seemed very complex and were often for intellectual properties that I wasn't yet familiar with as a child (LotR, Dune, Battletech, etc.). It's funny coming back to them now and realizing that most were basically disposable games developed to milk a little profit out of an IP and/or gimmick games looking to cash in on the CCG craze.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2022 09:40
|
|
|
XXXenophile was more or less a parody of CCGs anyway. By RAW, your entire deck was ante and you would come away from every game with a completely different deck than you went in with, because there were no rules for tracking ownership. I don't think there was any rarity in the sets and most of the winning strategies were bizarre combos of cards with meta-effects on each other.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2022 11:18
|
|
|
i ripped the xxxenophile advertisements out of my copies of scrye and threw them out because i was scared of my parents seeing them
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2022 15:49
|
|
|
hyphz posted:XXXenophile was more or less a parody of CCGs anyway. By RAW, your entire deck was ante and you would come away from every game with a completely different deck than you went in with, because there were no rules for tracking ownership. I don't think there was any rarity in the sets and most of the winning strategies were bizarre combos of cards with meta-effects on each other. I bought one deck of XXXenophile and had exactly one game (with a 'no clothing removal' houserule because it was at a gaming store and therefore everyone was a 400lb guy). It was fun and the cards were hilarious, but it was clearly shoehorned into being a CCG when there was no reason for it. TTBOMK there was no deckbuilding strategy at all, you just threw your cards into a pile and went nuts.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2022 18:47
|
|
|
hyphz posted:XXXenophile was more or less a parody of CCGs anyway. By RAW, your entire deck was ante and you would come away from every game with a completely different deck than you went in with, because there were no rules for tracking ownership. I don't think there was any rarity in the sets and most of the winning strategies were bizarre combos of cards with meta-effects on each other. Ironically (or intentionally?), the only way to ensure you got your own cards back was to sleeve them up for protection
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2022 20:29
|
|
|
Toph Bei Fong posted:Ironically (or intentionally?), the only way to ensure you got your own cards back was to sleeve them up for protection lol "I didn't use protection so I caught a case of the ol' Jeweled Bird."
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2022 21:23
|
|
|
I do remember one of the silliest rules disputes I saw on USENET at the time. For context. Here's a Xxxenophile card:  You will notice that it is in no way XXX rated. In fact, I don't think any of the cards were. There was a ton of innuendo, a ton of bare boobs, and the odd bottomless woman with no detail. The worst card I remember was one of a guy sticking himself in a centrifuge, and even then the actual bits weren't visible. (Also, just thinking about it gives me a serious pain in the trouser.) Also, the lead artist was Phil Foglio and the rulebook was a Phil and Dixie comic. See those symbols around the outside? That's the game. You lay out the cards in a square weave pattern (alternating horizontal and vertical). On your turn, you have to rotate a card 180 degrees to create a match between the symbols on the edges of opposite cards. The card with more symbols "pops", and you "score" it, follow its instructions, then replace it with one from your hand. When you score a certain number of cards, you win. If there is no match available on the board, you redeal. The rules dispute came from the fact that the rulebook technically said: "if you refuse to follow the instructions on a card, you lose." This was intended for the few dumb cards which had the instruction "Remove an article of clothing." I have no idea if anyone ever used that rule, since they presumably had the common sense to be in private when they did. Here's the problem card:  You will see that it has no symbols on it, so it can only ever be collected by using a special ability that pops another card, of which there are several. The rules argument? "If you pop Nik, do you immediately lose, because you are required to 'splee three frooKs...' and have to refuse?" Btw, the actual game rules were re-released as a single deck non-collectable clean game called Girl Genius: The Works. Edit: looking around, it turns out that the xxxenophile card game was intrinsically a joke after issue 10 of the comic had the following cover:  Apparently fans asked them to take the statement "Why not?" literally. hyphz fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Jul 21, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2022 22:28
|
|
|
This card looks like the grandfather of RoboRosewater, and I dig it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2022 01:02
|
|
|
hyphz posted:You will notice that it is in no way XXX rated. In fact, I don't think any of the cards were. There was a ton of innuendo, a ton of bare boobs, and the odd bottomless woman with no detail. The worst card I remember was one of a guy sticking himself in a centrifuge, and even then the actual bits weren't visible. (Also, just thinking about it gives me a serious pain in the trouser.) Also, the lead artist was Phil Foglio and the rulebook was a Phil and Dixie comic. It was mildly naughty at best. Lots of boobs, buttocks and female pubic hair, but no actual genitalia and no sex acts. (at least none were shown, they were implied all over the place.)
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2022 03:56
|
|
|
So, anyone going to write up Shadowfist? I know it a bit, but I only ever played the Daedalus version. By the time the Z-man version came out most FLGSes we’re stocking only Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 15:25
|
|
|
hyphz posted:So, anyone going to write up Shadowfist? I know it a bit, but I only ever played the Daedalus version. By the time the Z-man version came out most FLGSes we’re stocking only Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh. I would love to see a write-up. I played one game of it in HS with two people who knew the rules and refused to teach me enough to actually play, despite conscripting me into a game. The experience sucked but in a way that had nothing to do with Shadowfist, specifically. Between getting ground into powder, I got the vague sense that there was something to this game (that I was not going to see at that time).
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:23
|
|
|
I'm in the midst of a write up on Rage, but first I have to dig in my basement and find the box that the two strategy guides White Wolf put out are in, because boy, I have opinions on some of the tone in there...
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 16:42
|
|
|
Toph Bei Fong posted:I'm in the midst of a write up on Rage, but first I have to dig in my basement and find the box that the two strategy guides White Wolf put out are in, because boy, I have opinions on some of the tone in there... I eagerly await what you have to say about the initiative order.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 17:04
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:I eagerly await what you have to say about the initiative order. And Past Lives.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 17:25
|
|
|
hyphz posted:So, anyone going to write up Shadowfist? I know it a bit, but I only ever played the Daedalus version. By the time the Z-man version came out most FLGSes we’re stocking only Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh. I would like to eventually but life is kinda busy right now. Also, well, the spoilers coming out of the game's current owners appear to be vindicating the fears of the naysayers, so that might be relevant to include.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 20:35
|
|
|
Magnetic North posted:I would like to eventually but life is kinda busy right now. Also, well, the spoilers coming out of the game's current owners appear to be vindicating the fears of the naysayers, so that might be relevant to include. Well that sounds depressing, even if I haven't followed the game in ages.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 21:25
|
|
|
My VTES cards said JYHAD. They renamed the game because the original was in poor taste. I remember playing Spellfire, the D&D card game, Wyvern, the dragon based card game, and a few others in the mid 90s. I think I still have all of my cards.
|
|
#
?
Jul 23, 2022 21:31
|
|
|
The posts mentioning the game "On the Edge" jogged my memory about a Star Wars Customizable Card Game deck that partially relied on a card by that name. I went looking through the cards I still had and, lo and behold, it seems this deck was the last light side deck I ever had constructed for live play. I had the cards for the deck, all still together, in a long box. I did a quick write up about the deck. I don't currently have the energy for a full effortpost (godspeed to anyone attempting that, btw). Here's the card:  There's a searchable database of the cards from the game at https://swccgdb.com The deck relied on a unique multi-turn setup of cards that coincided with major movie events, and often led to huge comebacks for the light side player. This deck also mostly stayed functional for years, only switching out a few cards when new releases came out. Looking back, this feels like a big contrast to how most other games played out, where whoever drew their expensive cards in the correct order would get ahead and stay ahead. I have to give all credit for this deck to a guy named Mitch who played in the tournaments at the back of a local used book store. He may have gotten the idea from a website or listserv or something, but he had a reputation for showing up with decks that had a strategy besides playing the most expensive cards possible. That was always cool to me as a teenager who couldn't afford the decks on the very high end. What Was The Setup? To introduce the gimmick in the deck, we need to start with a few of the major mechanics of SW:CCG:
 (Q: "Why are all of these card images so low res and busted?" A: "They came from the 90s internet.") The card On The Edge let you pull cards back from your lost pile into the facedown used pile, restoring them to your force. The risk was you had to gamble with how high of a number you picked; guess too high and you lost the rebel character you picked, who was a (probably valuable) card on the board. However, with the benefit of card counting and deck stacking, you could reliably get 4 or 5 cards back using this card in the early days of the game without losing your rebel. How Did the Deck Work? What turned On the Edge into part of a combo deck was an elaborate mechanic called "Jedi Testing". Available only to the light side player, this was introduced in the Dagobah expansion set. To shorten the description of how this worked, the idea was you assembled a collection of resources on the board including Yoda and a special version of Luke (Son of Skywalker) at sites on Dagobah. It was very difficult for the dark side player to interact with Yoda and Luke on Dagobah because characters and ships couldn't normally be played there. This was laid out in the extensive rules that weren't obvious from the cards themselves.   Each turn, the light side player would play out one of the 5 jedi test cards and try to pass it. These tests corresponded to the sequence of events between Luke and Yoda during the movie. Flavorful! They also added various continuous effects that slowed the game down tremendously for the dark side.  Although all of the jedi tests had beneficial effects for the light side player, the place where the deck would reach escape velocity was the fifth jedi test, It Is The Future You See (IITFYS).  Among the wall of text, the important bit is that you could draw a destiny value as this test completed and then use that value for all destiny draws into the future of that game as long as the apprentice (Luke) was still alive. So instead of a pseudo-random number draw that you could cheat sometimes, now drawing destiny would always be in your favor if you stacked you deck once to hit a high number for IITFYS. Enter another card added in Dagobah, WHAAAAAAAAAOOOOW!  This card was never really useful in actual gameplay unless your opponent tried the extremely rare tactic of trying eat Luke with a Dianoga (the trash compactor monster from the first Death Star). Later sets would add more cards with destiny values of 7 that could be more useful, but not necessarily less ridiculous.  For a jedi testing deck, you would put a few cards with destiny value 6+ even if their usefulness was fringe. They were mostly there just to be drawn with that destiny draw in IITFYS. That would give you a 7 on every destiny roll, the highest possible, for the rest of the game thereafter. With a 7 safely locked in with IITFYS, you could then play multiple On the Edges in a row, guessing 6 and naming Luke each time, every turn or every other turn from then on. So, after being non-interactive for most of the game (and probably falling behind), you could pull the balance back into your favor in a few turns through On the Edge, a bulk rare from the core set that was in print continuously for the life of the game. How Did It Win? Although you could prevent losing nearly indefinitely, how did you win with Luke and Yoda stuck on Dagobah? Well, if you are always hitting sevens like you're Grits n Gravy, it happens that battle math anywhere usually looks very good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAyGQObCFpE Because the other tests had slowed the game down considerably, the dark side player probably had to spread their resources out to try to race against your test progression. So, the light side player could just pick the most sparsely defended location on the board, deploy some combination of Han, Leia, Chewy, or the Millennium Falcon, and dare the dark side to fight next turn.    The smart play for the dark side was to run away from battle. However, they would usually fight just to see what would happen since the smart play usually just meant a slower death (and swiss rounds were timed for two games). What would happen is the light side would use multiple (or duplicate) interrupts and abilities to add multiple additional battle destinies (which, again, are all guaranteed to be 7s) to power and attrition.  The resulting blowout would cause the dark side player to lose life force directly due to overflow damage. One battle like that would usually be enough to put the light side player so far ahead that the dark side player could never rebuild. I once saw a light side player running this kind of deck get miles ahead in a game and then start setting up for an Attack Run on the Death Star with Wedge Antilles for style points.   It was a fun deck to play, and you got to use a lot of the cards as the game designers intended. In contrast, the much more well known mechanic from the Dagobah set, which was crushingly dominant until it was errata'd out of viability, was playing a bunch of asteroid locations. I don't remember exactly how that deck worked, but I remember that it sucked. That describes a lot of SW:CCG in hindsight.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 00:47
|
|
|
Oh, wow, the Decipher Star Wars game. I’d forgotten that existed. I only really remember the drama over the rarity of the iconic movie characters in the first set, and a game breaking common (Electrobinoculars) in the core. Also the manager of our then-FLGS thinking that Decipher would beat Wizards because Wizards wasn’t that big a company at the time while Decipher was established in the traditional board game market… hyphz fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jul 24, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 04:54
|
|
|
I'm in favor of these historical decks. I have one or two from the memory bank that might interest people.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 07:04
|
|
|
Decipher had some of the best deck boxes (at the time) for the Star Wars and Star Trek CCGs and I still use a bunch of them to this day for Commander.  They hold 100 sleeved cards plus room to spare. The long boxes they came out with were pretty good too, I still have one of the gold Star Wars ones and an LotR box hanging around.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 10:52
|
|
|
This is a good enough write up of some of the game's mechanics by way of that janky deck that I'll add it to the OP for SWCCG. I do love a good combo deck in any CCG. VTES didn't have a ton of them because the multiplayer dynamic made comboing off like this enough to get 1 VP but usually not a lot else. Usually. Ben Peal, the game's current steward, built an infamous deck that he called the Pochtli Twister. He brought it to the North American NE Regional Qualifier with it one year and won the tournament. Around the same time, in the sanctioned tournament season prior to that qualifier, he came up to my small Maine city from Boston and played the Pochtli Twister, so I have played against this...thing. The deck was predicated on two things: Burn Option cards, and a specific vampire named Pochtli. Burn Option cards started in an expansion called Bloodlines. This set introduced a bunch of rare and strange fringes of the World of Darkness lore, like Gargoyles and Fae vampires and all-but-extinct clans like the Salubri. Because these clans were meant to be splashed in with existing, more numerous clans, the cards specific to them often had the Burn Option.  That little burning card symbol on the left side indicates a Burn Option. All this meant was that the card could be discarded during any player's discard phase (the last phase of a turn) if you didn't control any minions of that bloodline. This could only be done once per turn, but it let you vent chaff from your hand in case things just didn't shake out for you to have that bloodline in play during this game. Remember: discarding in VTES is good! Whenever you discard a card, you draw to replace it immediately. This is why cards like The Barrens were staples in a lot of decks which had a hard time cycling cards more organically:  Anyway, so Burn Option cards can be discarded during anyone's turn, once per turn. So let's look at the deck's star:  Pochtli has superior Necromancy (skull), superior Obfuscate (black box), and superior Potence (fist). He has inferior Dominate (chain) and inferior celerity (lightning bolt). Necro and Obfuscate are used for stealth, to do things without getting blocked. Dominate is used to increase bleed, i.e. damage done to other players. Celerity and Potence are primarily used in combat. The deck would pair him with a bunch of little goobers who had Obfuscate, Dominate, and Auspex (a discipline he doesn't have but that they can use). The deck ran on those disciplines, plus Necromancy. His text ability is unique and crucial to the deck. He can grab two cards from the discard pile (Ash Heap, in the game's terminology) and shuffle them into the deck. Pochtli is a Giovanni, a normal clan and not one of those obscure bloodlines. And no one else in the deck was a bloodline, either. So the deck would spend every turn pitching unplayable Burn Option cards into the discard pile. VTES cards are 90 cards, and I think the Pochtli Twister ran about 80+ Burn Option cards. This meant that, functionally, the deck was less than 10 cards, which it would winnow the deck down to in short order. This would leave it with its real deck: 1 reaction that redirected a bleed to another player 1 reaction that reduced a bleed 2 action modifiers that increased stealth 1 action modifier that cancelled a block 1 action that increased bleed 1 action modifier that increased bleed 1 master card that could pull all the blood off a vampire to add it to your pool 2 master cards for getting blood back onto vampires (the deck's only "permanents," besides the vampires) Once these ten cards were either in hand, in play, or in the discard pile, Pochtli would keep taking his action to get two of them back per turn, and the little goobers would use those cards to take fairly powerful stealth/bleed actions. If the deck's predator was too aggressive, it would start leaving one of the little guys untapped to reduce bleeds or redirect them. Normally you could run an opponent out of these cards with some persistence, but Pochtli is a different animal. Also, bear in mind that a player wasn't eliminated when their deck ran out of cards. In VTES, if you deck yourself out, you just...hang in there. Usually you play for time but in the unlikely event you got decked it was usually toward the end of time anyway so you could either lunge for one more VP with what you had in hand, or turtle-up and play out the clock. Pochtli, though, did this as a matter of course, and used his unique ability to keep resupplying itself with some of the game's most obnoxious cards. It wasn't a dominant deck. I saw it lose. Hell, I saw it explode on the launchpad in one prelim round. But I also saw it steal games in the last twenty minutes by sheer tenacity and resourcefulness. When it did well it did so by making the most of a predator who wasn't aggressive in the early game, and being patient and careful about using its resources. It helps that its player is one of the best players to ever sleeve up a deck. I doubt most players could have gotten very far with this dumpster fire. It isn't indicative of most VTES decks, but it is one of the funnier examples of a deck famous in the game's tournament scene.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 12:16
|
|
|
Hence the V:TES proto-meme of: But-but-but what if I draw multiple copies of the The Barrens. It's unique! Why, you discard them to The Barrens!
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 12:25
|
|
|
Magnetic North posted:Hence the V:TES proto-meme of: 
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 12:27
|
|
|
Also everybody fighting for the control of Powerbase: Montreal.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2022 15:30
|
|
|
Hope someone played enough to do a writeup on the Highlander card game. It always seemed kinda rad back then I just never got around to trying it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2022 22:36
|
|
|
TheKingslayer posted:Hope someone played enough to do a writeup on the Highlander card game. It always seemed kinda rad back then I just never got around to trying it. You're in luck! I'll write that one up next. It'll be a few days before I'll be able to get to it, but it should be this week.
|
|
#
?
Jul 27, 2022 01:40
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:Also everybody fighting for the control of Powerbase: Montreal. AKA Exactly what my Tzimince Wall deck desires most.
|
|
#
?
Jul 27, 2022 20:30
|
|
|
TesseractMinotaur posted:AKA Exactly what my Tzimince Wall deck desires most.  I play a lot of combat decks, so Malkavians and Setites going after Montreal was always funny to me. Like, what are you going to do, block me when I come for it? lol
|
|
#
?
Jul 27, 2022 23:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 07:21 |
|
|
I have so many decks, and some might even be alright.
|
|
#
?
Jul 28, 2022 00:41
|
|