Cease to Hope posted:

Orvin posted:

I was at a pre-release event yesterday afternoon and had a good amount of fun. Got a pretty good amount of games in, 3 rounds of 3 games each. But there really wasn’t quite enough time to finish the 3rd game. And my last round I won the first 2. So 6 full games, and two partial games.

The back and forth nature was good, in that it didn’t feel like there was a lot of downtime while waiting for your opponent to take their full turn. The card interactions did make for some interesting choices. Do I attack with this guy to do damage before my opponent can get it off the board, or do I do the other thing that is cheaper, more efficient, whatever because it is on the board. And some times I just had to put things on the board and hope my opponent didn’t just outright kill it so I could bring in something else with a synergy bonus.

I played with Jyn leader (gives -1/-0 to opponent defenders) and kinda liked the survavibility she gave to my units. Made it nice to either ignore weak chip damage units, or keep some of my units alive with one health when they otherwise would have died. It meant I could be way more aggressive in keeping my opponents board clear of stuff.

First Prerelease posted:

18 person turnout at my LGS (Gongaii in Oregon). Staff were very friendly, crowd was enthused. Gongaii wanted to go best-of-1 which led to a relaxed atmosphere for learning.

My first two packs had Vader Unit, foil Superlaser Technician, and Overwhelming Barrage, so I was in on Vader Green. It was kind of decided for me by the pack gods. Spoiler alert: Vader Green Ramp/Good Stuff is what is colloquially known as a "good deck".

Guy at my table got the Hera showcase. Not sure if he knew how much it was worth.

First game I won by almost purely by luck. Played against Red Tarkin. I mulliganed a wonderful limited hand because I was on premier autopilot and forgot that the hand would be worse in limited. Second hand had all 5 of my events, so I was in rough shape out of the gate.

If Tarkin had realized he was the beatdown sooner, he would have won. He should have won, but he did not. He durdled and gave me time to come online, and Vader leader is a beast.

Second game was vs Blue Vader. Differing color matchups seem really fun in this game; not quite a mirror match but you both know your avenues of play. All of my red cards came out early and he didn't stand a chance. That game got locked down early and went fast.

I sat down against my 3rd opponent who was running with Red Leia. I audibly groaned; that beatdown was going to run right under me. I resourced Corellian Freighter and Gladiator Star Destroyer and he got out some good space units and I was on the ropes.

Then Round 6 I double Vadered which felt DISGUSTING. I will answer for that sin. He got me to 29, but I'd been sitting on an Overwhelming Barrage which Vader used to clear out the space arena. I never let him re-establish a board presence and he scooped a round before I won. That's a match-up I probably would lose in a Best-of-3, but in a Best-of-1 I lucked out.

The pack gods may not have been particularly kind financially, but they were very kind mechanically.

Prize support was underwhelming (compared to other stores), but I think I was the only person there who wasn't signed up for additional prereleases this weekend. The store's running "Prerelease on Release" events next week, so I get one more shot at sealed before settling into constructed and limited.

Cease to Hope posted:

uncle blog posted:

It's weird how much better the art looks in real life. The game has a great table presence. Really pops

Orvin posted:

I played with Jyn leader (gives -1/-0 to opponent defenders) and kinda liked the survavibility she gave to my units.

canyoneer posted:

The Star Wars Deckbuilding Game (terrible name!) is a fun little 2 player dueler. Theme is very well applied there too.

Elblanco posted:

Sounds like a core set to me

Cease to Hope posted:

Contrast this with the other four Star Wars CCGs, where being a Jedi or a droid was something with an inherent game effect, or where (even after the first set!) your deck would be something like "battle droids" or "characters you'd expect to find on Tatooine" or "Luke, Han, and X-Wings." This seemed to have very little of that; at best I saw a few cards that wanted to be with other rebels or imperials, and a penalty for playing good guys with bad guys. (Even then, it felt weird that Han and the bounty hunters were as good/evil-locked as, say, Darth Vader or Leia.)

This seemed very lacking thematically by comparison. The rules seemed to fit soldiers and war materiel well - bounty hunters fighting mercenaries, fighters attacking ships - but having R2D2 or Tarkin be a character you play, get an effect, then trade immediately for chip damage in a fight in the ground, that felt weird and lousy.

I did not love how even in the premiere set we had per-card damage tracking and two kinds of per-card tokens already. This is a lot of crap to stack on a card, especially when two of the token types have an effect that offsets but does not eliminate the effect of wounds.

Upgrades were a mess. I played Devotion on a Star Destroyer multiple times, and Entrenched a TIE fighter. Even more than the characters, the upgrades didn't feel like they meant anything. They were just lumps of numberwang. I'm not sure there were any space-specific upgrades even; I didn't see any.

Rares and Legendaries were often draft-ruining bombs. I drafted Tarkintown and Dooku and they were consistently a free card's worth of tempo for too little. If you drafted a couple good rares/legendaries and could consistently play them, they frequently would come down and just blow out the entire board. There were rares that just sent every unit killed this turn back to your hand, stole units with no restrictions, or just had a solid body and killed something when they entered/left play. The worst I saw was Avenger, which killed a unit when it entered play and every time it attacked.

For a game with two lanes, space seemed very undercooked. I drafted that TIE, a raider, a Z-95, and a rebel capital ship and generic star destroyer, both of which I just ate the cost penalty on. Frequently I just beat my opponent to death in the space lane with those! It felt very easy to race face in space due to a general shortage of spaceships in the set, plus everyone's leader was a ground unit. I saw Leader Tarkin and Han, and it felt strange that neither of them helped with space combat very much. (On the other hand, Thrawn was very impactful and just rocked my poo poo overall.)

Events all seemed to be removal except for Search Your Feelings. I saw a ton of minor variations on "destroy unit," "deal n damage to unit", "unit attacks (out of sequence)", "unit deals damage to unit," etc. Occasionally there were MTG-style +n/+n combat tricks or "draw card" too but they seemed to be consistent tempo losses. I also saw some "choose two (of four)" cards, always played to kill a unit and do something else.

There didn't seem to be any sense of place or condition to the game. People had base cards (and I drafted a rare one with less life but a one-time effect, which was neat) but it didn't feel like you were attacking Cloud City or anything. The characters just seemed to be in the same nowhere arena as MTG or Hearthstone, with no cards that represented advantageous or detrimental conditions except as attachments to one character or else one-time effects. Leaders did provide this effect, but there were a lot of officer-commander-type characters with static effects that did not survive long enough to feel like they were having a significant effect overall.

I did actually like the stripped-down Hearthstone feeling as a game. It still works as a struggle to build enough tempo to convert some of that tempo to face damage. That's still fun!

On the other hand, I didn't love how often I was just going face. I drafted Iden/Tarkintown and while I didn't love Iden - basically every blue commander I saw looked better except Chirrut, who was a joke - but by drafting with an eye for Restore and removal effects, I was able to win games just playing face hunter more often than not. That's not fun. (In fairness, this may be a pre-release teething issue. People drafted cards that looked cool, while I drafted thinking I wanted to curve out. A lot of people showed me neat-looking expensive cards but few people played them against me.)

I did like, for drafting, how many of the cards are just Star Wars stuff and not locked to good/bad. I had a Cloud City guy with a 70s porno stache and he felt like someone who could just get mixed up with anything. Sadly, he did not have an ice cream maker. I had a couple cross-side cards and having the option to play them felt good, although I only really played one.

I like just going ahead and doing the MTG commander thing. It's nice that the game starts with a limited announcement of your overall plan, and it felt neat that, usually, you had your leader meddling every turn.

Playing your leader, however, generally felt bad. The ones I saw were not very interesting units, even by the already low standards of the game overall: generally just the same effect as their passive ability. Plus, my opponents tended to prioritize punching them out again. It was neat that they're a free Ambush unit (and this is most of the value I got from Iden), but it felt bad to see people play Luke, Grand Inquisitor, or IG-88. They'd get one attack before immediately getting their leader's teeth kicked in.

Speaking of, the most impactful characters felt like the worst of modern MTG creature design: characters with middling-high stats who generated value immediately or when they left play. Ambush and When Deployed/Defeated were just too much better than characters with actions, On Attack, or static abilities, because they were so difficult to protect and it took so long for them to get any value. This makes a lot of characters feel even more like generic game pieces. The Emperor is a removal card on a stick. An AT-AT is a burst of healing(?). This actually feels thematic for the Rogue One characters (K2 was a literal suicide bomber as I recall) but it isn't like the R1 characters are any more likely to be designed this way.

Anyhow I didn't much like it and ditched my cards to another player for the cost of my buy-in. It's not a game I would stick with or recommend to anyone. If what you want is a Hearthstone clone, that's actually the most fun thing about it, with two lanes and the same struggle back and forth to curve better than the opponent and get tempo. But as a Star Wars game or something you'd play long-term? Super generic and indulges in some of the worst design failings of Heathstone and MTG both.

CitizenKeen posted:

One note: Iden is generally considered to be one of the top two leaders right now after a number of tournaments.

Cease to Hope posted:

Oh I can definitely see how. She's consistent value for something you are going to do every single turn, sometimes even without taking a specific action to do so, and she's a very impactful character just as 4... whatever-they-call-power with Shielded and pseudo-Ambush. It felt like even the low-power, high-toughness leaders could only survive two hits from on-curve units at best anyway.

She felt weaker for draft, though. Krennic would have been even more obnoxious going face. Chewbacca slowed the game down a lot, which would make high-cost bombs a lot more useful. I saw an Andor that drew for going face and had IG-88, but it would've meant using a generic blue base instead of Tarkintown. Maybe it's just thinking the grass is greener, though.

Which was the other top-tier leader in constructed?

CitizenKeen posted:

Sabine > Cassian Andor, etc.

That Old Tree posted:

As someone who acquired an almost complete set for a song but haven't had the opportunity to play or even read the rules, what was it about L5R that sucked? I got the impression, years after the fact mind, it was generally looked on pretty favorably other than the way releases were scheduled.

That Old Tree posted:

As someone who acquired an almost complete set for a song but haven't had the opportunity to play or even read the rules, what was it about L5R that sucked? I got the impression, years after the fact mind, it was generally looked on pretty favorably other than the way releases were scheduled.

Cease to Hope posted:

Oh I can definitely see how. She's consistent value for something you are going to do every single turn, sometimes even without taking a specific action to do so, and she's a very impactful character just as 4... whatever-they-call-power with Shielded and pseudo-Ambush. It felt like even the low-power, high-toughness leaders could only survive two hits from on-curve units at best anyway.

She felt weaker for draft, though. Krennic would have been even more obnoxious going face. Chewbacca slowed the game down a lot, which would make high-cost bombs a lot more useful. I saw an Andor that drew for going face and had IG-88, but it would've meant using a generic blue base instead of Tarkintown. Maybe it's just thinking the grass is greener, though.

Which was the other top-tier leader in constructed?

Elblanco posted:

Boba Fett, he's pretty good IMO, but I think people are overhyping him by a ton.

Cease to Hope posted:

the original CCG? super duper powercreep combined with too many factions to support all of them in one set. you'd build a deck for one faction, then play that deck until it fell out of favor (or a key piece got the legs cut out from under it). now you have a bunch of cards that are all locked to this one playstyle or faction that probably won't ever be useful or tradable before the whole mess gets rotated or plowed under by powercreep. and if you were attached to just one faction or character or storyline, lmao

HidaO-Win posted:

CCG or LCG?

I can give you the pros and cons

Cease to Hope posted:

The better-looking Yoda with the grey-ish border is an organized play promo. The ugly Yoda is the actual card in packs. And it's a good example of how so many of the cards are just shockingly bad rotoscope.

banned from Starbucks posted:

Yeah destinys been dead for a while. Can't even give that stuff away.

The Black Stones posted:

Well one thing I didn’t realize is that Leader Showcase cards were a thing.

I was playing in a draft tonight and a bunch of guys were buying boxes (one dude there is nuts. He was literally just giving away any card that wasn’t a foil or alt art as he was looking to get a full set of all cards in the game) so I broke down and bought a second box.

I got Boba Fett showcase. Turned it around on the spot to the owner for 400$ in store credit. I looked at my other box and my other Showcase is Sabine Wren who also is apparently worth a ton of money.

If I got out right now, I would be on top. Haha. I don’t think I’ll buy another box, but I’ll save the credit for when the next boxes come and probably use it to buy 2 sets there.

ShowTime posted:

They've apparently spent more on marketing for this game than any other FFG game, including X-Wing. That tells you how commited they are to this game and how long it could potentially be around.

Arquinsiel posted:

Well now I get why Cease to Hope was comparing it to BattleTech.