Star Wars ccg design intent, notes and other musings.

Before I begin, a few words on 7.3.

The last few weeks have been a gut wrenching for me and I’m sure many of the others who helped with the set. There are plenty who could say “I told you so” but many are showing their character by just getting behind the Competitive Balance Team’s erratas and I applaud them and CBT for their quick action. Their changes, I think, will over time be seen as good solid fixes and I hope over time the cards that 7.3 added to the pool will be seen as very positive for the game. I’m very proud of the work that everyone did on this set, from playtesting to proofing.

That being said, I’m very excited about the Design contest. I’ve publicly stated that I’m going to give this design thing 3 sets to see if I’m cutting it. I think this Design contest will help bring out some talents that our community has and will give the Advocates a nice pipeline of potential designers to consider for when any of us move along, whatever the reason. I do think that with the right team in place (and despite what just happened, I emphatically feel we do have a GREAT team) that almost anyone can design for this game.

We will learn. We will improve. We will all have fun playing Star Wars for years to come.

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So when I sat down and decided to bring Spice mining to life, I was faced with a few challenges. Somewhere out there Eric Olsen had supposedly jotted down the bones of the theme, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. So I literally I only had the various Kessel sites to start with.

I’ve read the Kevin J. Anderson books where Han has some adventures with giant spiders and the like on Kessel, but I didn’t want to go that way. I decided that the best thing to do would be to study the extant site’s game text and try to make something that worked with all of them.

I searched for cards with Kessel in lore, title, and game text, and then only one of note was Spice Mines of Kessel v – which seemed to be a really nice counter to Watch Your Step (WYS) but one that was never played since there wasn’t a platform to run it on. I could change that.

The Extraction Facility was the key site to building a theme around. Based on the Dark Side’s game text, spice cards had to come from both players. In other words it was not just a simple retrieval mechanism. Based on the Light Side’s game text, Dark Side would have to get a benefit from the spice cards greater than pseudo retrieval for it to be “worth” using the place-out-of-play (OOP) text.

Armed with that, I decided that some sort of destiny matching would determine mining “success”. There are a few other games I’ve played that inspired the mining mechanic… stuff like revealing cards and maybe drawing one if a condition is met, that sort of thing. The destiny drawing would thematically represent “digging” for spice. Since I wanted to somehow get a Light Side card in the mix, and messing with tracking is fun, I decided that you could force your opponent to draw destiny. From there, the dual success conditions arose.

I decided to make spice mining a mission instead of an objective since I felt it paralleled farming better and also that as a theme it wasn’t objective-worthy. But how would the deck start? Kessel system plus one of the 2/1 sites is a pretty bad non-objective ratio. So I created the new site. At first, it had the Admin pull on it but over the course of time that migrated to the device. At all times I felt that it should protect Kessel from being converted since that would be another dig at WYS. I’ll admit that I forgot that Kessel’s game text was canceled by the objective since it never comes into play with modern WYS builds… that would be something cool to fix with a future “Kessel” card. The office also provides a costly out in case a key card of yours gets spiced.

So I have a good start, I just need to build the platform… and that was accomplished with the “Kessel” card pull. Now you could start 2/0 or 4/1 and set up your locations with the mission itself as you start mining. This was also an out in case the deck ended up weaker than it seemed. Any future player/designer could make a card with Kessel in title and you have a pullable helper for the deck.

Let’s talk about what you can do with spice cards. You can “retrieve” them with the site. They passively add to drains (with Spice Mine Administrator out). If you are at the Extraction Facility, you get out of phase drawing. You can reduce damage by 1 essentially. And you can take yours into hand with the Administrator. The opponent can shut some of these down by killing the Administrator, putting cards out of play at the Facility, or using the Office’s game text (but you get something in return). I really was happy with how these various options turned out. You always have something you’d like to do w/ a spice card, but often times you don’t have enough of them to do it. I think that’s a fun tension to have.
One of the more controversial bits of game text was “autospicing”. Here I refer to paying 2 to stack any card from Lost Pile on the mission. Once we started making lots of things for spice cards to do, against some aggressive LS decks they would get rid of all your cards and you would be a sad clown. I felt autospicing was well costed and gave some intriguing options and flavor to the deck. The deck doesn’t activate a ton so pulling off the autospice into hand combo @ 5 Force is pretty burly but you can have some fun with it. In a build I was messing with, I ran the Empire’s Back v and Limited Resources. I would autospice one of them. My opponent would have the opportunity to use the Office’s game text, and if he did, I would “retrieve” the autospice and then take the other interrupt into hand and play it still for some direct damage. I contend that this is a fair mechanic since Light Side can fight you at the Extraction Facility, save Force, and OOP your cards or just kill the Administrator.

The device didn’t exist at first but came in the second round of testing (as well as the Program Trap restriction… good job testers!). Since spice wants to run something close to Hoth Combat Readiness V’s character and vehicle build, the testers rightly pointed out that it needed something more to distinguish it from that deck or else people would just play what already has been proven. I decided that some damage mitigation would be ideal, and I could make it so that it’s a mild counter to Profit direct damage as well.

The Administrator is inspired by Moruth Doole, and the premium members did a great job selecting the base card. At first, he added to your mining destinies draws (X was +1) but testing showed that text wasn’t needed. That was good since the mission was too long and I had to switch some text around.

I hope you enjoyed this look a spice mining and a short look at my design process for it.