Friday, March 02, 2007

Forward.... into the past!

To the guys who found this post about SWCCG after almost 14 months:

The NFL rulebook is miniscule in comparison to the SWCCG Glossary. It's got about 24 pages, and most of them are taken up with the size of the numbers on the field. Have you ever seen the NFL rulebook? I read and write rules for a living.

I "shoulda done something" about SWCCG? Did you see the game before it was published? No, you didn't. I helped make it a better game before the first major playtest. I spent the next six years helping to make SWCCG the game you love today.

I don't know why you players are so hostile to the designers of the game you continue to play. Do you think that George Lucas designed it?

Lots of the features and mechanics of that game I don't like. You guys do. That's okay. We disagree. That's alright. Just try to remember that you can disagree with somebody without insulting their livelihood or making personal attacks. Try that, just once for me, for old time's sake. You'll be a better person for that.

7 comments:

Mkae said...

Hey, you got people talking. Regardless of their opinion, that blog entry gave us a chance to dust off some memories. Don't forget that we're all stick rock stars to a lot of people for the work we did on SWCCG.

You're like the Jerry Garcia. I'm probably the Neil Diamond.

But anyway. I had a point. I don't think I do any longer.

Kindralas said...

My response to those people...

Around the time of Hoth, the Light Side deck of the time was EBO, and I, like many other teens of the day, couldn't make one, because I didn't have the money, despite getting the occasional free packs from various sources. Not only did I not have the Premiere mains to make the deck work, I didn't even have the EBO's to attempt to make it.

So, instead, I traded for all the Wampas I could, and made a deck specifically made to beat EBO and no other deck. The tactics of which are explained in the original post.

But, the real reason that this deck was successful was because, at that time, I was perhaps the only person in existence who understood the creature rules and their impact on the game. This lasted well into the Endor playtest, where my Rabin creature hunting deck was retrieving massive Force because I refused to interact with my opponent.

Oh, wait, Rabin doesn't do that anymore? Guess we caught something in playtesting...

Later, after I had acquired the Premiere cards to make a solid main-based deck, I made the Skywalkers deck, basically mains with toys slightly late. I'll never forget the time I outforced some poor kid by a hundred, simply because I drew and saved Force until I could dump and ruin his day.

We used to have a saying in our scene, never deploy first. You're just begging to get destroyed.

A game, this is not.

Many of the design flaws that Star Wars had were as much my fault as well as the rest of the Dev team, as they were Rollie and Tom's. But the simple fact that the only possible way to handle an overpowered card or deck was to magic bullet it was dumb. I would rather have seen cards banned.

I'm exceptionally glad that people out there enjoyed our work on the game, and that people still find it and have fun. There's a tickle of pride when my friends here talk about Star Wars as a good game. But the game had flaws, lots of them. Top tiered decks exploited those flaws. If you have two evenly matched mid-tier decks, the game would be fun, but those situations never happened in tournament play.

In tournaments, you either never interacted (force drain for 10 total, draw, done), or there was one solitary interaction, my 30 Power against your 2 Power.

TheGirard said...

i liked the game, people still play it more than probably half of Scrye's top 10 games and it was a strong license.

I just wish it was still as strong a license

Steve Horton said...

One thing your post did spark is some very funny e-mail discussion between old friends about our favorite SWCCG moments. Those years from around 1997 to 2001 were wonderful. LOTR TCG was good, but we all still consider SWCCG (pre-Episode I) to be the best CCG of all time.

Brad said...

Rules are like romance - you just need it ... but it's a bitch at times too...

Jason said...

I loved the comments from people who wondered if we ever played the game.

Anonymous said...

In all fairness the rule books were mostly filled up with rewritten cards (can pilot anything - type entries). The biggest problem with the rules was two-fold.

1) Entries were listed under card titles instead of "game description". You ask about Card A and they say that rule is under Card B in the glossary - yeah that makes sense.

2) The rules interface for people was the listserv. When that was run by Tuttle it was a disaster. To have an official of Decipher handing out wrong rulings was a big problem.

The Magic rulebook is huge...and a work of art (IMO).