Some of you may have noticed that I went a long time in between blog posts, prior to posting about my Instant Replay deck. I was working a lot on custom cards during that time, creating plenty of new ones both for fun and so I could build some decks that I couldn't build before, like Aaron Mead's awesome Ultimates Burn deck. Highly recommended, by the way. But the other thing I was doing during that time was creating a pair of custom Vs. decks, all based on Star Wars characters and themes.
As you'd expect, one deck is good guys and one is bad guys. The bad guys all have the Dark Side affiliation, and some also have the Bounty Hunters or Sith Lords affiliations. Dark Side characters and effects are mostly modeled after Weapon X cards, since the Hunter concept fits well with both the bounty hunters and the Sith. My cards are heavy on the original trilogy, and light on the second, although I do bring in some cool characters/concepts from the later one, like Darth Maul.
The Dark Side-only characters are all army characters, and that's what both 2 drops are. Sand Trooper is based on Sarge Steel. Scout Trooper is a Weapon X Satellite on a stick, but he can also pull hidden characters back into the visible area. That effect was needed to balance out the Rebel 2 drops, one of which is really good.
The 3 drop Boba Fett has an effect akin to a Black Panther 3 drop from MMK, but he is also a Hunter. With his effect, he can fetch a Blaster Rifle, making himself a 7/4 when attacking. It can be used with Boba or the army characters for free.
One notch up the curve is Darth Vader. He prevents hunted defenders that he stuns from recovering. He's nasty when he has a Scattergun-like Light Saber.
The 5 drop, Darth Maul, is based on Stepford Cuckoos. He can stun easily on either init, and then your opponent will want to freeze you in carbonite.
Lots of army characters on the Dark Side, including the alternate 3 drop. My favorite is probably the 6 drop Clone Trooper, who is terrific when an Order 66 is issued. He's based somewhat on Lobo.
Both decks have curves that go to 8, even though matches usually don't last that long. The 7 drop is another Vader. This one is based on a Punisher 7 drop. The 8 drop Darth Sidious is a watered down Thanos.
Lots of good tutors, pumps and effects for the bad guys. These are equivalent to Weapon X Satellite and Savage Beatdown.
There's a standard curve/build for their deck, but I also created some other cards to experiment with, including some for a heavy army build. Haven't tried that one yet. I had to fiddle with the wording of the 6 drop Clone Trooper to prevent problems with the 1 drop, even though they are both army.
There are also some extra plot twists that I don't always include. Revenge of the Sith is a Nasty Surprise with a nastier twist, while It's a Trap is a Power Siphon. Its effect isn't team-stamped, so I guess it could be used by the rebels as well.
Then there are the good guys. They play for the Rebel Alliance, although some also have the Jedi Knights affiliation. There is no real theme for these guys as there is for the forces of evil. Just lots of cool effects based mostly on good cards that already exist in Vs.
Both 2 drops are Princess Leia's. The main one has a Barbara Gordon-like effect, while the other is more like Franklin Richards. You'll notice that Scout Trooper can pull them back into the visible area, as well as making them hunted. If your opponent can't do that so he can get at her, the Leia who looks like Angelina Jolie is going to get you an extra card every turn, in which case the good guys win percentage goes up due to card advantage. (There's alternate art for her, in case her tats creep you out.)
The main 3 drop is Han. As you'd expect, he works best when equipped with a Millenium Falcon, although he has a very powerful effect on his own. He's better than Boba when equipped, but he can't get his own equipment.
The main 4 drop is Luke. He has a watered down effect like that of the 4 drop John Walker used in my Instant Replay deck. His Light Saber prevents him from being hunted. It's a Cloak of Nabu and a Power Gem, rolled into one.
The 5 drop is Obi-Wan, who wants to be just like Wonder Woman. Between him and A New Hope (think Children of the Atom), its sometimes hard for the Sith to do their thing.
Chewie is the 6 drop. He is intended to counter the Lobo-like Clone Trooper. He wants the force to be with him on his first attack so he can swing again into the second Trooper. Yep, It's Clobberin' Time!
The 7 drop is another version of Luke. Think Grodd, Psionic Simian. Yoda renders that nasty Sith 8 drop Only Human.
Both decks have eight tutors available to them, so they are equally consistent. Star Wars is kind of a doubly team-stamped version of Mightiest Heroes. The Dark Side has a 2 cost plot twist similar to Signal Flare, while the Rebels have a location based on Brother I Satellite.
As with the Dark Side, there is a standard curve/build that I had in mind and play tested with and against, but there are also some extra cards that I can use to experiment with alternate builds. For example, there's a Lando 3 drop that can fetch Cloud City/Soul World.
Dagobah is a bit like Dr. Fate's Tower, and X-Wing is another equipment card it can search for, for equipment-heavy builds.
Here are the remaining cards, not mentioned above, as well as some alternate art cards.
I had a lot of fun putting these cards and decks together. They will probably strike you as somewhat overpowered, and you'd be right, although neither deck is very fast. Both are built to win on 6/7, and whoever gets evens wins more often than not. Sounds bad when you say that, but isn't that normally the case when you have two decks with the same preferred initiative--the one that gets it usually wins? They are also fairly evenly matched when played against each other, which offsets their power relative to normal Vs. decks, and that is all I ever intended to do with them. Rebels have the bigger bag of tricks, but they need them to counter the brutal effects of the Dark Side.
I used proxies printed with my inkjet printer to develop these decks, then I had them professionally printed on card stock by MakePlayingCards.com (MPC) when I was done. If you want to look at an OCR-like list of all the cards, and my standard deck lists, you can download it from here. The regular card images can be found here. MPC-ready versions are here.
Please don't send me any über-Star Wars-fan-boy comments telling me how so-and-so isn't really a Rebel or a Sith or whatever. If I cared about that stuff, I would have vetted every card with my oldest son, who has read every Star Wars book ever written and collected every figure. (Mild exaggeration only.)
Similarly, I am not really interested in your firmly held belief as a self-avowed Vs. System aficionado that Jedi Light Saber should not give +3 ATK and protect a Jedi from being hunted. I. Don't. Care. This project was done strictly for fun, and for my own (and my son's) personal pleasure. Just enjoy the cool artwork and laugh to yourself at my ignorance/incompetence, OK?
7 comments:
Shouldn't the affiliation be "The Empire" or "Galactic Empire" as opposed to "Dark Side"? Dark Side just seems like another term for Sith considering you're doing Rebel Alliance instead of "Light Side".
I see you skipped the last two paragraphs.
I wouldn't consider myself a big Star Wars fan. I've never read a SW comic or book (I haven't even seen all of the movies), but it just jumped out at me when I was browsing the cards. You crushed it on the art for sure. These are far and away the best I've seen for a Star Wars based fan set.
Uggh. This is EXACTLY the kind of debate I wanted to avoid. There is no Galactic Empire in Episodes 1-3. I needed a team affiliation that would encompass the various troopers and bounty hunters, Darth Vader, Darth Maul, and every other bad guy in all 6 films. I originally used Galactic Empire, but I realized that was wrong. "Dark Side" seemed like the most apt catch-all affiliation for everyone who was opposing the good guys, so I went with that.
Hello, I have a little question about "Frozen in Carbonite", why you must discard a card to play this Plot twist??
The Original card MEV-271 Erased (http://www.coolstuffinc.com/p/VS+System/Erased) Name: Erased
Casting Cost: 2
Card Type: Plot Twist
Card Number: mev-271
Card Text:
KO target stunned hunted character.
The casting cost is cost 2 and not 3 like Frozen in Carbonite, and to play, you dont discard any card.
Thank you so much.
Two things: First, Erased is too strong in the context of MEV. It is too easy to hunt two characters per turn and KO both of them, without paying any cost to do so. All other KO-stunned-character cards (Finishing Move, Removed From Continuity, etc.) require some kind of payment. MEV was poorly tested by UDE, and no card in that set should be raised as an example of proper balancing of powers. Second, I DID playtest the Star Wars decks extensively against each other. I started out in this case with a card worded the same as Erased, and adjusted its wording as the result of playtesting in order to achieve balance. For example, by turn 3, the Rebel deck has access to A New Hope, giving it an opportunity to play that in response to Carbonite going on the chain, and recover the stunned character before it can be KO'ed. Both cards require a discard to play, so there is no advantage on either side in terms of cost.
Thank you. I love all of your decks.
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