Anatomy of Failure: Star Wars CCG

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angelfromanotherpin
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Anatomy of Failure: Star Wars CCG

Post by angelfromanotherpin »

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December 1995

A NEW FAIL

It is a dark time for collectible card games. The pioneer
MAGIC: THE GATHERING is stagnating as both a game
and as a product. Riding its coat-tails, thirty-eight new
CCGs have entered the market this year.

Most of them hilarious crap.

Players and retailers alike are awaiting the arrival of a
titanic IP on the CCG scene. Its name alone will save
guarantee short-term financial success, but will it escape
the pitfalls of rushed production and poorly-understood
design principles that afflict so many of its brethren?

No.

Last edited by angelfromanotherpin on Thu Jul 26, 2018 10:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

In my B5CCG AoF thread, I said I was going to get to this game if no one beat me to it, so here it is. This game had a seriously parabolic arc to it. It started off as an incredible pointless mess, became a really pretty good but byzantine game, and then plummeted into shitastrophe and then demise. Let's start with the first part.


Bullshit #1: The Original Game is a Pile of WTF
There's no getting around it, this game spent literal years as a pile of rando crap. The first six sets (Premiere, A New Hope, Hoth, Dagobah, Cloud City, and Jabba's Palace), taking us into early 1998, have a gameplay flow that could be described as aimless.

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Not that kind of aimless.

Let me talk a bit about some of the core mechanics.
1. One player had a light side deck, and the other had a dark side deck. In a tournament you'd bring one of each and play two rounds against each opponent, which wasn't a bad way to handle it. Light and Dark cards had different backs and didn't mix at all.

2. You won the game by completely depleting your opponent's deck and hand.

3. There were location cards, and those locations had light and dark side icons. Those icons gave their respective player game currency, and allowed that player to deploy forces there, but also made them vulnerable to drain there.

4. Drain was an abstract mechanic representing 'winning,' and when one player drained another, it milled some cards from their deck/hand. You could only drain where you had forces and your opponent had none, so one of the key objectives of the combat mechanic was removing enemy forces to enable your own drains.

4. The other baseline way to mill your opponent's deck was to win fights in a big way. The more you won a fight by, the more damage your opponent took, and if they couldn't (or wouldn't) satisfy all the damage by removing their units, they lost cards to make up the difference.

This created a kind of interesting tension, where you wanted to spread your forces out so you could drain at many locations, but you also wanted to concentrate your forces so you would win fights big and not lose them big.

But here's the thing. Until mid-1998, that was basically the entire game. People would try to draw the good characters, and put them places, and win fights, and there was no rhyme or reason to it. The incentives and mechanisms for doing Star Wars things in Star Wars places were almost non-existent, and in some cases anti-existent. Some examples:
You can't capture the princess with a stun blast because stun blasts force people to escape.
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This card has a use, but it ain't capturing.

You can only steal the Death Star plans from the Death Star, and they don't help you blow it up.
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Oh, god, I forgot about the Utinni subtype.

Stormtroopers were so wretched that the dark side player was often better off using random cantina background aliens.
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You weren't fighting over strategic or thematic goals, you were fighting over whichever locations players happened to have put in their decks because they had slightly advantageous rules text.

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Hey look, the incentive is to not blow it up.

Bullshit #2: Spam, Spam, Spam
This era of the game was also characterized by spamming certain cards. The game had no limit on how many copies of a card you could put in a deck, and some cards got very irritating when they dropped over and over and over again.
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Bullshit #3: Elaborate Inconsequential Subsystems
Early on, this game had no discipline at all when it came to creating new subsystems, which usually involved a seemingly innocuous piece of text that actually pointed to a bloated chunk of text in the latest version of the rulebook. What was worse was that most of these subsystems were almost completely pointless.
e.g. Undercover
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Undercover Spy Rules
Certain cards can make your character into an "undercover spy", such as the Effect card Undercover or the Immediate Effect A Gift. When your spy goes undercover, place it on your opponent's side of the site (even if spy was on an enclosed vehicle).

Special Rules
Your undercover spy is considered inactive. However, the following exceptions apply:
— Their game text remains active.
— You may still deploy Effects, weapons, and devices on them (they are not inactive).
— Except during battle, they may still be targeted by Interrupts, as well as cards that target spies (or ISB Agents), and anything that would cause them to be dueled, hit, or lost.
— Undercover spies may still be attacked by creatures, and any creature attached to an undercover spy will remain active. Note that these exceptions apply only towards the spy's state as an undercover spy, anything else (such as going missing or 'all cards' situations) overrides these exceptions. Also, when an undercover spy goes missing, the character remains undercover, but missing rules will override the undercover spy rules until they are found (thus while missing, they cannot use their game text, cannot have Effects, weapons, or devices deployed on them, they no longer prevent force drains
from being initiated at their location, etc.).

Wherever you have an undercover spy:
— Your opponent cannot Force drain.
— You may deploy without presence or Force icons.

Undercover Spy Rules - Deploy as Undercover Spy
Some characters may (or must) deploy as an undercover spy. In such cases, the character can only deploy to a site location, never aboard a vehicle or starship card. The character deploys to the opponent side of that location. Canceling the game text of such characters will not stop them from being undercover. Deploying a card as an undercover spy still counts as deploying a character, a card with ability (if applicable), a card of that card type, a copy of that persona, etc. before going undercover.

Undercover Spy Rules - Movement
Undercover spies may still move. This movement occurs during the opponent's move phase. They may use any movement a character can normally make (they are still your character, thus they use the docking bay text on your side of a location and cannot "tag along" when opponent plays Elis Helrot or Nabrun Leids, which relocates only "your" cards). However, they cannot move onto a vehicle or starship card (they may still move to vehicle sites or starship sites).

Undercover Spy Rules - Breaking Cover
Certain cards will cause an undercover spy to "break cover" (cease being undercover). You may also have your undercover spy voluntarily break cover during your deploy phase. If your undercover spy ceases to be a spy (for example, loses the Plastoid Armor) they will also immediately break cover. If your spy's cover is broken, (either voluntarily, or by opponent's card) it loses all undercover-related cards and returns to your side of the table.

Undercover Spy Rules - Dueling
When your undercover spy is dueled, they are active for the duration of the duel, and return to being inactive once it's complete (if still on table).
It's a lot of text for a mechanic I never saw used or contemplated using, and there were a lot of effects in the same vein. You could fly the Falcon into an asteroid field to try to outrun capital ships, but the circumstances under which you would want to were so narrow as to be completely negligible.

Special Mention: 'Humor'
The writers of the game were clearly having some fun with it. Sometimes this was actually amusing.
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More often it was infuriating.
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Unwritten text: slow gameplay to a crawl.


The Star Wars CCG was born at the end of 1995 and died at the end of 2001. For ~1/3 of its lifetime, it languished as a thing that could be played, but was only a confused parasite on its IP, theme and mechanics badly dissociated. That would change with the transformative seventh set, the Special Edition.
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Post by JonSetanta »

I still have my Empire deck. Tons of star destroyers and space ships, some blank-ability named characters, etc.
The guns all attach to the mooks making this the first printing of the game.

The cards are worth jack shit on the market.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

The Design Strikes Back

I don't know who at Decipher was responsible for turning this game around, but they did a heroic job. Did the game still have problems? Absolutely. But a lot of the biggest issues got addressed, and the play experience improved dramatically.

Anti-Bullshit #1: Objectives
When the game first came out, each player only got to start with one location card in play. The Special Edition rulebook let you start with an Objective instead. And you did, because they were great! Objectives might be my favorite CCG thing ever. Let's look at an example.

An Objective is a double-sided card. It starts with its 'zero' side face-up.
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The zero side puts a number of cards into play, has some sort of effects, and includes a condition that will flip the card to its reverse side.

This particular card puts into play a prison location, a Leia imprisoned there, the location you have to get Leia to, and associated docking bays that make getting from the Death Star to Yavin 4 pretty easy. Its effects are to prevent you from putting certain cards on the Death Star, to make cards that release prisoners uncounterable, to prevent you from playing a Nabrun Leids, a teleport-effect card that would trivialize the rescue operation, and to remove itself from play if Leia is removed as a battle casualty.

To flip the card you have to move Leia to her destination, but as a prisoner she can't leave by herself, and trying would most likely result in her being removed as a casualty and scrapping the objective. So you have to put together a team, send them in to get her, and then fight their way out again. In short, exactly the kind of thematic Star Wars gameplay that was missing previously. Also, the Dark Side player has a strong incentive to make the rescue as difficult as possible, because the reward on the other side is crazy go nuts.

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I'm not going to go into the details; it's a series of combat buffs that will make the Dark Side player's life very difficult.

Here's a very popular Dark Side objective that also addresses some of the spam plays.
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Thematically, this punishes your opponent for not having Obi-Wan or Luke (or a version of Leia) where you can easily send Vader to get them, and rewards you for getting them with Vader. It's pretty awesome. But it also hoses Sense and Alter, and self-destructs if you play Scanning Crew (a spam card that would also be pretty unfair in this situation).

Objectives reshaped the entire game. Previously, a deck had been about exploiting particular card interactions; now they were about playing variations on cool moments from the source material. You'd show up with a Jedi Training deck and a Death Star deck, and your opponent would show up with a Hidden Base deck and a Carbonite Freezing deck, and you'd get some really interesting interactions. Sometimes you'd get a directly opposed match, like a Death Star/Blow up the Death Star clash, and things would be fraught.

They even started to print more support for stormtroopers.
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So all was well, right? Well, mostly.


Anti-Bullshit #2 + Bullshit #4: Ban No Ban & the Arcane References
The Magic bans of '94 must have been really unpopular. I remember the old L5R ad that boasted 'Zero Banned, Zero Restricted.' Anyway, Decipher had a firm commitment to never explicitly banning any SWCCG cards, no matter how stupid or bad for the game they were. Instead, they implicitly banned those cards with effects on other cards.

In the Death Star II set, they introduced Starting Interrupts. Now you could start the game with either a Location or Objective, and a Starting Interrupt in addition. The original Starting Interrupts just searched your deck for some Effects and put them in play.
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And at the same time, cards like this showed up.
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Oh look, it's a card with a small but meaningful effect that also happens to hard counter two of the most notorious spam cards in the game. If you showed up with a traditional package of 10-15 of either of those, they became blank and you lost super hard. The opportunity cost to playing Your Insight Serves You Well was so low that anyone who hated the cards it blanked (spoiler: almost everyone) could drop it in and create an environment where Scanning Crew and 3720 To 1 weren't banned, but might as well have been.

What the fuck, right? It's like the worst of both worlds. The people who'd have been mad about an outright ban weren't fooled by the 'stealth' ban, they got mad anyway. Also, it clogged the design space for some of the otherwise best sets with cards whose only real purpose was fixing previous bad cards, allowing those bad cards to project their badness forward in time.

Finally, it was very off-putting to new players. If you got into the game after Death Star II dropped, you might never know that Insert Odds decks, or Scaninator decks, or other similar nonsense, ever existed. And you'd be better off for not knowing. But you'd also be mystified by the prolific references to old weird cards that nobody seemed to play. SWCCG was never the most accessible game, and the not-ban cards made it worse.

I mean, the most important thing was that the stupidest cards stopped being played and the less-stupid but still abusable cards were much reduced in their abuse. It was a worthy goal that was accomplished in a dumb way.

In a similar vein, they also refused to explicitly errata cards. When it turned out that the Rescue the Princess objective was overly vulnerable to losing Leia and self-destructing, they printed this:
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About half that text is errata for another card.


Before the Dark Times, Before the Prequels
The year 2000 was the height of the game. The environment was diverse and robust; and play was thoughtful, thematic, and exciting. It wasn't perfect, but it was a good time. The Death Star II set had swept away the last remnants of the old stupidity, and the Reflections II set did a very creditable job of introducing popular Extended Universe elements without getting stupid over everything.
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Strong, but not fanboy overpowered.

Then the Phantom Menace ruined everything. Predictable, really.
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Post by Zaranthan »

I imagine there were at least a few incidents of some poor newbie buying a couple Scanning Crews because they look good and "this guy was selling them super cheap!" only to later realize what Your Insight actually does.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Return of the Fail
(Warning: Contains content which may cause readers to remember the prequels.)

Bullshit #5: Prequel Spillage
One of the big problems of the prequel expansions was that Decipher never drew a hard enough line between the two time periods. And it started with the first prequel expansion: Tatooine.

Do you remember how little actually happens on Tatooine in Phantom Menace? It's absurd. Somehow they decided to hamstring themselves by making that the intro set, and also they simulated the lack of activity by printing no Objectives. You got a bunch of the prequel characters, but there were only two side-plot things to actually do: Maul trying to capture Amidala, and pod-ra–. Pod-ra–.

<deep breath>

Fucking pod-racing.
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I want you to imagine the most inane part of an inane movie being able to be profitably dropped into most any deck. I don't have to imagine, I lived through it.

Without any prequel-era Objectives, there was not and could not be a prequel-era-only environment. The only thing to do with the prequel cards was drop them into existing decks, getting anachronism and Jar Jar on everything you loved. For my money, the worst part was ~70% of decks getting their pod-race on. When I'm holding off walkers at Echo Base, I don't want to be distracted by gambling on sports.

Also, like 1/3 of the set was non-prequel material. Just explicitly support for Masassi Base or Hunt Down decks. Space that could have been used to better divide the eras was instead used to blur the line between them by explicitly mixing eras in a single set.


Bullshit #6: We're Supposed to Care About What?
The second prequel expansion, Coruscant, actually seemed like it had a lot of the missing material from Tatooine in it. Nemoidians, battle droids, even some explicitly Tatooine-related Objectives. The problem was that those Tatooine-related Objectives were cold boiled ass.
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This one actually restricts your character pool to roughly the prequel-era cast, but in exchange gives you a really weaksauce payoff. Also, it's based on kicking Watto's ass out of his yard in exactly the way the Jedi didn't.

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This one doesn't restrict your character pool, has a significant but annoying payoff, and also requires you to accept Watto as the lynchpin villain of your deck. It leads to having Maul and Vader defending Watto's Junkyard from scrap thieves.

Also, both of them require you to be excited about the whole 'getting a replacement part from a swindler' thing. It's just too low-stakes and low-action to be a deck's focus.

It's really weird, because there are so many decent action sequences in the early part of Phantom Menace that the game completely ignores. Escape from the Trade Federation to the surface could have been a thing. Traveling through the planet core was kind of stupid, but it at least had the potential for some unique gameplay. Evacuating the princess and her entourage past the TF blockade, even. None of them are great material, but they're all better than goddamn Watto.

There were also a couple of Objectives for actual Coruscant material, based on senatorial debate. I'm not kidding.
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To be honest, the political mechanics were remarkably well-implemented. It was just a really weird thing to expect people to want to play out, because it's such a slow part of the movie.

At this point there was enough content for a minimal Prequel-only environment, but it was so limited compared to the original trilogy material that it was basically a joke. There were two decks per side, and because you took a deck per side to tournament, there were four permutations of junkyard-wrangling and senate-speeching, and everybody was pod-racing. It was a pitiful environment, and it only entrenched the attitude of era-mixing.

Anti-Bullshit #3: Defensive Shields
After Coruscant came the Reflections III set. I could probably make a whole extra bullshit entry for RefIII, it had a lot of questionable stuff in it, including a series of cards based on progressively larger fish eating each other for tiny and off-flavor benefits. Even the new and badly-needed prequel Objectives in the set, the highly-anticipated ones based off the Qui-gon+Obi-wan vs Maul combat were... not great. I'm not even going to go into the new version of Leia being slutshamed by her own flavor text.

In this set they added a new card: the Starting Effect. Like the Starting Interrupt and the Objective, this was a third card you could put in play at the start of the game. Technically a third kind of card, but there was only one (per side) ever printed, and they had the exact same text, letting you put a pile of Defensive Shield cards under them, and popping 3 such shields out per game.
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The shields themselves were mostly new versions of older cards that hosed annoying cards.
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This was an overall positive. Because the hose cards didn't have to come out of your deck, you could spend more of your very limited deck slots on having your deck do its own thing rather than defending yourself from other people's degeneracy. Ten shields (out of the 16/side printed) was enough that knowing the metagame was relevant, but not essential. And figuring out what your opponent was doing, in order to choose the right three shields to drop, and when, rewarded attentive and strategic play. That said, the original round of hose cards had worked pretty well, and the shields probably only came in because the widening variety of annoyances in the prequel sets made it necessary. I was at least glad to have a cheap way to discourage pod-racing.

The last set ever published, Theed Palace, wasn't too bad, but it was tiny and all about the actual battle for Naboo. I think it even pushed the prequel-era environment into a viable state, but too late.

Conclusion
It's hard to tell how much poor design choices contributed to the (official) demise of the game. On the one hand, Decipher's license had always been going to expire in 2001. On the other hand, the game had been the second-best-selling CCG in the market for some years, competing very well with Magic, and if it had kept that title, the license might have been renewed. On the gripping hand, it lost the title less because assy prequel material slowed sales and more because the juggernaut that was Pokemon had hit the market and dethroned it (and also Magic, for a while).

Whatever the cause, Decipher lost the license, which was given to WOTC, who was publishing both Magic and (U.S.) Pokemon and looked like the big CCG winner of all time; not gonna lie, I probably would have gone with them as well. Alas, WOTC's Star Wars TCG died in only three years; its last set coming out two months before Revenge of the Sith.

Postscript
The Star Wars CCG is still around, in revenant form, thanks to the internet providing a way for a critical mass of fans to keep it breathing. They continue to release 'virtual sets' and hold events to this day, and they've even started getting into the Disney-era material. I think a similar group is acting as an iron lung for the TCG, though I don't care as much.
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Post by Ancient History »

It's important to remember that the whole "Location-centric" aspect of Star Wars CCG was relatively common - you saw it in Star Trek TCG, Mythos CCG, the Lord of the Rings CCG, etc. People liked the idea of somehow the CCG replicating some aspect of the story, which generally involved a mission or journey, as opposed to being solely resources as in Magic: the Gathering or Legend of the Five Rings. In gameplay that rarely worked out.

Great Anatomy thread, btw!
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