Nostalgia Strikes Back: Star Wars CCG

I imagine every game player goes through this. At some point you think back to games gone past and wistfully wish you could experience or play them again. There are a lot of games from my early days of game playing that I think back fondly on. Some of them were just plain terrible but I enjoyed them just the same. I remember playing a lot of The Dragonriders of Pern Boardgame, Dungeon!, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (first and second editions), Talisman (I had all the expansions except the Dragons one), and Battletech.

The topic for today harkens back to my college days and it is none other than Decipher's Star Wars Collectible Card Game. This came on the scene when I was heavily into Magic The Gathering and as a result I never played a lot of Star Wars as my slim hobby budget went to Warhammer 40K and collecting the MtG power nine and every multiland I could get my hands on.

A friend of mine really got into Star Wars CCG and as a result I played a decent amount using his cards and I really enjoyed the game. A big part of that enjoyment comes from the mix of design and theme. I really like the hand management and using cards as currency aspect. Add in a theme that works well with that mechanic and you've got a pretty well designed game.

Late last year I made a decision to resurrect this game within my local gaming group. This was purely going to be my pursuit as my gaming buddies were busy chasing other gaming goodies like Android Netrunner and Warmachine / Hordes. I did get commitments that they would play the game if I put together some balanced decks so I set off to plan on putting the Star Wars CCG into my collection.

So how does one set about the task of re-introducing a game of this magnitude into his group? Very carefully. The first thing I decided on was how much of the game I wanted to tackle. The game boasts somewhere around 2500 unique cards. Fortunately I only wanted to play the game I remember from its early days in 1997. I settled on limiting the game to its initial releases Premiere, A New Hope, and Hoth. As a stretch goal I am considering adding Jabba's Palace and Special Edition for the extra aliens and "tutor" cards. I think the dark side should get to play with the Executor from Dagobah as well but I don't want the set as Dagobah wasn't good for the game IMO.

I was happy to discover that the game is not dead. There is a small community supporting the game and they still run tournaments and produce virtual cards. The articles there are pretty good like this little gem on getting back into the game. So armed with determination I set out on my mission. There were two hurdles I had to overcome, the first was getting cards and the second was building balanced decks my group could play.

I thought about buying a bunch of sealed boxes and assembling sets but quickly threw that idea away when i calculated how random (and expensive) that could be. Instead I focused on buying completed sets, that way I could control my costs and card count. Sets of unlimited Premiere sell on eBay for around $65 so getting enough to build the kinds of decks I wanted to play was going to take time and money.

I ended up buying 4 complete sets of Premiere to ensure I got the rares needed to build thematic decks. Nobody wants to play without the main characters so I needed at least three to four copies of certain core characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Vader. I supplemented this with two additional sets of Premiere Commons & Uncommons. Sets of common and uncommons are very cheap and I'm thinking about adding more. This provided me with a solid base of Alters, Senses, Corvettes and other basics.

I am still working on assembling sets of A New Hope and Hoth. A New Hope looks to sell below $50 but Hoth is pricey landing in the $60 to $70 range. I believe I only need two sets of A New Hope and three of Hoth. This trip into nostalgia isn't for the feint of heart.

Building balanced decks based on cards from Premiere, A New Hope, and Hoth is the bigger challenge. I have little game experience and don't have buckets of time to experiment. Even if I did there isn't a large, accessible community where I live that can help me hone my decks. There are decks posted at Star Wars CCG Player Committee and Deck Tech, however is very difficult to find designs using cards only from Premiere, A New Hope, and Hoth. I found a few on Deck Tech and I'll give them a whirl but I'm not sure they are balanced against each other. To ensure balance my plan is to research decks that were at the top of the tournament scene in 1996 - 1998. In theory the top players from that period should have produced the most balanced, competitive things around.

Finding information on those early decks wasn't as easy as I thought. Google searches only yielded decklists for the winner of each Worlds tournament. I could not find any information online about the runners up who must have had some decent decks. Even Decipher's old site is gone and would be gone if it hadn't been for one fellow who reproduced it here and even he wouldn't have been able to do that had he not found another who saved the content on his hard drive. In the days of the internet nothing is forever. If you see anything you like on the old Decipher site you should copy it because who knows how long the mirror is going to exist.

To help me in my quest for competitive decks from 1996 - 1998 I researched the dates of some issues of Scrye magazine and bought them from Troll and Toad. Chronologically issues #14 - 20 represent the timeframe I am interested in. I am not sure if they will yield anything helpful. A couple of the covers claim to have winning deck lists. If I find anything useful I'll post it; perhaps some enterprising soul may find my backwater blog and use the info.

As for the decks I want to build. I figure two from each side is a good goal. When Hoth came out the game divided into ground and space decks. I like that and want to put together a ground and space deck for each side.