Name: Ryan French

Age: 30

Location: Port Angeles, Washington

Favorite LS Deck: After five years or more of hating WYS, I finally built it a few years back….and now it’s my favorite. The amount of utility that you get from the objective, balanced against the relatively poor selection of characters available, makes for some very interesting gameplay situations. While it’s my favorite deck to play, I wouldn’t dare try to design helpers for it, because we’ve seen over the last two years that it can easily get out of hand with just a few tweaks to its available character pool.

Favorite DS Deck: CCT starting IG-88. I put this deck together right after Virtual Set 5 came out, and it’s rarely been out of my deckbox since then. The amount of choices you are faced with in searching your Force pile every turn makes for very interesting games, and the platform can be stretched to incorporate nearly anything you want to add. I’ve carbon-frozen Obi-Wan, We’re the Bait’d a captive Leia to stop Luke from Jedi Testing, even Epic Duel’d from this platform. IG-88′s searching ability allows you to keep a toolbox ready for any situation, and I love that level of control over my destiny.

History with the PC: When Decipher put up the announcement about the PC, I joined immediately, hoping to make it as a card designer. I sent in my ideas for an “Enhanced Hoth” set as part of my application, but it was not enough. Instead I was brought onboard as one of the first proofreaders, back when we used an email list to communicate, and I remember pitching an email fit over the original wording of K’lor’slug (V) and Molator (V) (if played as originally written, they prevented any character from leaving the table during the damage segment of battle, while also requiring those cards to be forfeited, which is defined as “lost during the damage segment”). My level of input waxed and waned with the years, until the Re-Edit Project began, and under the leadership of people like Silee and Shewski, the proofreading team codified our guidelines and rules, and became a lean mean proofing machine. Since then I’ve been asked to help handle rulings questions in the Rules Forum, and now, finally, 9 years in the making, this SWCCG card designer is now fully armed and operational….

Personal Design Philosophy: I have several goals in designing a card or theme. First, the design must be elegant. I don’t want to design a monstrosity that is impossible to read and impractical to keep track of during play. I want my card or theme to be simple (as much as possible, and we all know that “simple” to a SWCCG player is about 3 times more complex to any other card gamer), both in understanding how it works and in seeing it do its thing on the table. Second, I want my design to be creative. I don’t want to just re-hash things that other cards already do; I don’t want to make the next set of combo cards. I want to mine unexplored design space. One of my current designs started from the question, “What can we do with Out Of Play cards?”, while another came from “Let’s see if we can explore the movement rules a little.” I don’t want to break the game, but I do want to explore it a little more. And I trust our Development Team to keep me in check if I do go off the deep end. Third, the design must be flavorful. By that, I mean that the title, lore, picture, and game text should all meld together to support the idea behind the card. A great example here is the new R2-D2 we just put out in 7.1, which the current Design Team all had a hand in brainstorming. My goal for an R2-D2 card was to show off his ability to coordinate the Rebels when they were moving around on the Death Star or Cloud City, as well as his ability to screw up the security countermeasures of those areas. And when we settled on the destiny manipulation and it was evident that he, as a presence-less and thus hard-to-kill droid, needed a stronger drawback, the element of being captured was, again, a very true-to-life drawback for R2-D2 to have, as he was so intensely pursued by Darth Vader throughout Episode IV. This is the droid the DS is looking for, and having him be captured if the Rebels ever lost track of him was the perfect complement to the design goal of that R2-D2. Another example, albeit a somewhat poor one, is my original V-Lite design, Maul’s Sith Speeder. I wanted that bike to have a mechanic allowing Maul to leap off of it into combat, just like he does in the movie, to gain some advantage. The advantage ended up being a loss of immunity to the Jedi (representing the surprise element of Maul’s sudden appearance) as well as the ability to track that destiny-5 vehicle around for some future destiny draw (representing Maul’s constant vigilance of his surroundings, as seen in one of my favorite Star Wars novels, Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter). While I would rather have the underlying card be Fear Is My Ally (both for the picture and for the fact that I have a copy autographed by Ray Park himself!), I’m satisfied that the Flare-S Racing Swoop does a good enough job of representing Maul’s swoop bike, and thus all the elements tie together to produce a flavorful card.

Your ideal meta: I certainly like it when any deck is good enough to bring to a tournament, but I realize that there’s almost always going to be a few decks that are top notch. The challenge is recognizing when a deck is perhaps too good to be giving help to (such as WYS is right now) while still designing exciting cards for the rest of the game. As with any creative endeavor, it’s difficult to hear that your ideas are off-limits, but luckily I rarely want to design cards for what are already the best decks. While I may enjoy playing WYS, I enjoy designing cards for more downtrodden decks like Rebel Strike Team much more. And I suppose none of that really answers the question….right now, I would have to say my ideal meta is one where my beloved CCT IG-88 deck doesn’t have to resort to “dirty tricks” like the torture card to win games, and can instead crush the opponent using various personas of Darths Maul and Vader instead! I also want to see a little more balance represented in the top decks, by which I mean that a deck like Profit, which focuses on only one arena, is at a marked disadvantage compared to decks that are able to play in both arenas. I want to see more games decided by battling, I suppose, and less by “drain racing.” But, as always, the best meta is one where people are excited to play, and that is firmly my goal: design exciting cards.