Response to Lucas Licensing's Response

I thought that MTG decks could be as large or as small as one desired.

I am super-excited about the new Star Wars TCG and jetted over here to read about what people were saying.

It seems like a sort of a tempest in a teapot is going on here.

For my part, I am so very very excited that Richard Garfield is going to design a new Star Wars game. I have played a few games by this guy and he is a GREAT game designer in my opinion.

I thank my lucky stars that Richard Garfield is designing a new Star Wars game. Hey, WOTC did GREAT things with the Star Ward RPG. I am already saving my money and will buy at least three booster boxes and box of starter decks in April.

And I have a friend who will do that too! We are going to have a ton of fun!!!

Hello,

Sorry for the long rant, but if your really interested in this subject of the WOC vs. Decipher debate, you may find this interesting.

I was a retailer when the SW:CCG premiered. It was highly anticipated and I had sold at least 14 cases during those early days. Out of approximately two dozen SW:CCG buyers, there were only two left by Dagobah.

The gamers ditched it because the rules were clunky and the rule additions seemed to either counter cheesy rule abuse (or power cards) or were completely unrelated to the existing game. Not only that, it seemed that the power cards were the rarest ones and the casual players would always get hosed.

The collectors dropped it because it was ridiculously hard to collect, with 5 or 6 levels of rarity ranging from dirt common to ultra rare. A collector would buy box after box trying to get a set, still have to pay an insane amount of money for that Darth or whatever and be stuck with crap loads of ultra commons. That was funny considering how Decipher hyped that the main characters would be commons.

The only people left buying it were my nephew and myself. Mainly because we got it at cost and we are both DIE-HARD StarWars fans. You would be hard pressed to meet a bigger SW fan than me within 200 miles of my home! J

Then there was the fact that Decipher SCREWED the retailers from day one by shipping the product late. We all missed Christmas sales to get a January release. This was CHRISTMAS, folks, they committed an unholy act by this. Not to mention how they took direct preorders for the product and then cancelled them leaving those of us that trusted them to sell direct hanging out in the cold. We had to fight tooth and nail with all kinds of unsavory distributors to get the product. Ever since that moment, my middle finger has been facing the Decipher company's foul direction.

I continued to buy the cards like a fool, no,? like a heroin addict. I have full sets up to Special Edition, the latest sets?. Well I have most of them, but gave up on having them all. I just made copies of those last few and stuck them in the once blank places in my binders.

You might wonder why I still bought them. I will be honest, the pictures were remarkable? the cards were beautifully designed, very high quality. They looked better than the trading cards that Topps made and I really appreciated that. They were a game cards to boot! Unfortunately, I thought the game sucked eggs. I REALLY tried to like it, but I just couldn't. I mean, too many cards affected other cards by name, often rare cards that a player wouldn't have. That is not good game design, it's cheesy marketing ploys. It is true that they didn't ban cards from tourney play? but why is that so good??? Cmon, all they had to do is make up a card that targeted the offensive card directly and hose it, then sell it to YOU the gamers. More Cheese. I can respect that there are people out there that like this game? but I really don't think that it is a good game for casual players.

I have played just about every CCG ever made. IMHO Legend of the 5 Rings is by far the best?. followed by Magic and then there are others that are fun too. And for those of you that are still trying to pretend that Pokemon isn't a real game? WAKE-UP!!! It has been enjoyed by far more people than the SW:CCG and that, I believe, indicates that it may also be a good game (I don't know I haven't tried yet).

Yes, the Decipher SW:CCG is also enjoyed by many people. But I would bet that the SW:CCG has a higher collector to gamer ratio than any of other CCGs out there. Star Wars has always been a big collector's market and I am sure that a great deal of those beautiful cards were bought by collectors and stuffed into binders, never to be played.

The Decipher Head Cheese seems to complain a lot about the licensers that they use. First Paramount, then Lucasfilm. Why don't they make an original game instead of relying on licenses? Probably because it wouldn't sell. They have a history of creating weak game mechanics so they rely on big

scotbot, you do bring out some good points. As a swccg player and a 15 year old it is extremely hard to obtain rare cards on a weekley alowence budget. The game should have been designed where these "powerful" (mainly main character cards such as Darth Vader, Luke, Obi Wan, ect) cards could be more easily obtainable on a much much smaller budget, instead of droping hundreds of dollars on boxes to increase you chances of getting the card. Yet still provide for the needs of the collectors of the game, perhaps throw in foil versions of these powerful cards that are worth high value so that there will be one version of the card that is easily obtainable and have the same card this one foil worth lots of money.

your point on the Pokemon card game being a better game than the Star Wars game, you must keep in mind that a majority of the players are below the age of 10, they dont know weather or not it is a good game, all they know is that its POKEMON and thats whats cool at their age.

You know, I never bought the argument that powerful main characters were difficult to get. With the exception of Grand Moff Tarkin, I easily got three or more copies of the main characters. And the one thing Decipher did with the game that I liked was the de-emphasis of mains and toys strategies in later expansions. And if you want powerful main characters, there's Enhanced Premiere characters with a built-in weapon...

Besides, how hard is it to get Luke when there's 8 of them floating around?

Regardless if you like or dislike the change of the License I would tend to agree the real change over was a money driven one. It bites, but its reality.

I do think that when they say 'we are doing what is best for the fans in the long run' or something to that effect is a bunch of BS.
And he also says something about talking with SW:CCG players...uh who? how many?
I guarentee if they put a poll up on Decktech.net asking: Do you like the license going to WotC to create a 'better game'?

At least 98% of the players who vote would vote NO. And decktech represents a great deal of players from around the world who devote alot of time to the game.

I think the majority of players of Decipher's CCG aren't going to buy the Wotc CCG. That probably won't effect sales that much seeing that WotC wants to create a game for a new wider audience.

Well just have to see how well it does.

Agreed that Decipher did do some pretty blockhead things in the CCG's infancy. But it is my experience that as Decipher matured as a gaming company, their relationship with retailers improved vastly. The Gaming Company/Retailer relationship will ALWAYS be a bit strained, but I think that those retailers that stuck with Decipher to the end are glad that they did. Also keep in mind that Decipher fully intends to help Retailers sell the remainder of their SW product. So since everyone is preaching "Let's wait and see", then I propose the same philosophy in terms of D's handling and support of the SWCCG post-"license lost".

I don't know what to think about that. Most of my friends already sold or are in the process of selling ALL of their SW to play LOTR since Decipher no longer has the license. I heard a shop near where I live is selling Theed boxes at 2 for 1. Are they loosing that much money?

I think what the Decipher designers lacked was complete foresight. .....the designers used the expansions to counter abused mistakes they made in previous expansions and made the expansions mostly only playable against the same expansion.

I'm going to have to say, the last five years of SW:CCG experience for me has been totally different. All the sets flowed well together, except E1 tournament play, but that's different.

The only problem I think popped up with the Decipher game play came out around the time of Dagobah. The cards released in that set turned the game from SW into Magic, and that made a lot of people mad, including me. I almost gave up, and did for a while, but started dabbling again and discovered the problems had been corrected and the game was still fun, so I pressed forth.

Yes, the Decipher game is more complicated than other CCG, but not overly complicated. That's what made it cool. I have no interest in YET another magic style game where games last only six or seven turns. I like the in depth stragetic style of SW/ST.

There is also a lot of hypocracy (spelling?) going with Magic fans, too, in regards to this Decipher announcment. I hear a lot of talk from Magic fans saying how they're glad WOTC has the license, because Decipher bans and eratas cards too easily. HAH!! I don't want ANY Magic fan telling me that! I gave up Magic for SW in 1996 because 80% of my collection of Magic cards was either banned from tournament play, or erata. I hear people tell me WOTC has learned the errors of their ways, yet I hear that the RPG gets erata-ed on a regular basis. What the good of a rule book if the rules aren't right? No, this new SWCCG won't last as long as Decipher's did.

I agree with you, Dagobah nearly killed the game. And yeah, more than half of Magic's card are banned less than a month after the expansion comes out.

Anyway, right now, LOTR has all the market where I live. Stores are panicking because they are not selling any magic... AT ALL. It's all LOTR.

Banned and Restricted cards...

Ok folks...

I think that there is a lot of assumptions going on here. Banning cards is based on what format you are playing. If you are playing in the "standard" environment which is the last two blocks (6 expansions) of Magic, there are currently ZERO banned cards.

The only time you start to see banned cards is when you start playing in variation formats that use different combinations of card sets. Then you start to see Banned cards because certain cards make that format less viable.

I had a hard time finding any banned cards in blocked sets... in fact since the beginning of Magic blocks, I dont' there there's been more than 20 cards banned TOTAL (out of how many thousand?)

I think you might see a bunch of cards banned in 1.5 Extended, but that is because people like to play with a special mix of expansions and Wizards has banned cards from those tournaments because it wants them to be competitive for that format.

But if you take the nuts and bolts tournaments - the Type II current Standard environment that the majority of all Magic players play in... ZERO banned cards.

I think that at some point many expansions ago, there was an unusual amount of restrictions and bannings, but for the last three years, I'm hard pressed to find any that effect the kind of tournaments you play in on a daily basis.

Now, if you took any other Card Game and tried to make variation formats... where you only used certain expansions with each other... HA! try and have fun without restricting or banning certain cards in those formats... the cards just aren't designed that way.

That's my take on banning and restricting anyways...

- HG

Well to me I think this is the best time for a new CCG player like me to play, mainly because prices are low and in the 2 tournaments I've been to there were 16 people. Decipher came out with so much expansions that now that they can't produce anymore, player like me can try to catch up with what most of the cards do, I go to deciphers site all the time just to check out the card lists. What I'm trying to say is that we shouldn't worry to much as long as you do your research to see what nearby towns have tournaments. Like I said before they have so much new stuff that it would be like the company was still going on for a few months. I can get the cards I want at the prices I like and play with all the new friends I got, so as far as I'm concerned we should just stop worrying and let the good times roll.

I think that there is a lot of assumptions going on here. Banning cards is based on what format you are playing. If you are playing in the "standard" environment which is the last two blocks (6 expansions) of Magic

There are no banned cards -- for a certain point of view, but from another point of view there are hundreds of banned cards. See, your talking "standard" enviroment. Within the context of "standard" envirment (or type 2 as I still call it), there are no banned cards, but there are hundred of cards not legal to use within type 2 tournaments. This is highly iritating, or is used to be in the late nineties, at least. When they started giving out rules for standard enviroment tournaments, that's all people wanted to play in. Why? Because the older sets were so broken, too many cards either restricted, reworded, or banned. As such, I could no longer use most of my cards for tournament play. But then no one wanted to play against non-type 2 decks outside of tournaments, because they wanted to practice for tournament play with (and against) type 2 decks. As a result, most of my cards were worthless. I had to spend an extreme ammount of money to keep up with type two tournaments, because my decks were constantly becoming tournament illegal. Never had that problem with Decipher. There was never any need to have a "current print" only tournament, except E1 closed enviroment, but even that is very different than the Magic type two tournaments.

Guardsmen his it right on the head. The first thing I thought when I found out that D wasn't having their license renewed was "Hey, this is great for all those players that dropped out because things came to fast and for the new players."

So yes, there is a silver lining. And since there are so many people who want(ed) to learn how to play D's CCG, they may now just give it a try (instead of waiting till April). This is one part of this issue that I find very interesting. I can't wait to see how this could potentially impact wotc's game. Will players want the quick-and-easy fix with wotc's game, or something much more satisfying in the longterm with D's game? Hmmmm....

I would Just like to point out to DarthLud... all of Decipher's Rule Documents were/are posted online for the public, you don't have to buy product to get them.

I can't say that I always had access to the internet.

My only wish throughout this whole debacle was for Decipher's license to last long enough to have a "complete" game with cards and mechanics dealing with all 6 films, but 4 out of 6 isn't bad.

Something I haven't heard anyone else mention.

Back when I freelanced for WEG, one of the things I thought would have sold more of their product would have been some tie-ins with Decipher. In my case, Dave Wolverton and I had this idea for a boxed campaign set based in the Hapan Cluster. Part of what we proposed was for Decipher to give a way a two card deal (I thought an Isolder card and his personal fighter would be good) if you bought the WEG game.

I doubt the idea was ever even offered to Decipher (WEG was suffering big time financially back then) but it was my hope that if the idea got to the Lucas Licensing boys they'd kind of force it on both groups.

Now, you have WotC that owns both the RPG and CCG. I would not be surprised at all if you see this kind of incentive deal for buying both products (like you see if you get both the SW insider and gamer magazines).

Of course, in limited quantites this is a good thing, but it could be carried to extremes. Just a thought.

Hello 2nd Quest,

Well, I guess we are both right in a way about the release date. Take a look at the official Decipher history I found and pasted below.


<<<<The run of limited edition was 199,800,000 cards for the U.S. (half of which
were released by Decipher Inc. on the 22nd of December 1995) and 101,520,000
cards for international distribution (The second half of the U.S.
distribution and all of the international distribution is scheduled for
release in January 1996.)>>>>


If the cards were released to distributers on the 22nd it is possable that many retailers may have gotten them two to five days later. Certainly most didn't receive them until about a week or more later. Either way, from a retailer's point of view, both options missed Christmas.

-scotbot

P.S. For those that are heads over heels for the Decipher SWCCG: If you love playing it... this change shouldn't mean the end to your fun. They haven't made "classic" L5R for ages now (the new stuff is too different for me), but I still enjoy playing the old game with my friends. The same should be true for the Decipher SWCCG if it is all that you say it is.


WOC will have a challenge trying to match the beautiful graphic design of D's cards, but I have high hopes that they will design a better game. If they can do just one of those, then I will buy it.

That is the problem
most players look at the cards made by decipher, look at the cards made by wotc and compare.

The bar has been set rather high in this case.

If more people played SWCCG around here, I would probably be upset like i said before. But noone plays it. Everyone plays MTG around here, The card shop has a bazillion boxes of Magic... But the one game that is always sold out or has low number of packs left is LOTR. It's gotten so bad around here, that I've actually preordered a box of boosters for the next shipment and Raided one of their new boxes for 22 packs. If only decipher's game mechanics for SWCCG were somewhere along the lines of LOTR. I mean the game is complex but not too hard to play. Decipher should've been entitled to keep swccg license. But like i said before, we just can't really say anything until the new game has been out for at least a month to see what it's like and to see if people catch on. If it does, we might all be saying "i'm glad wotc has sw now" or we still may be pissed at the world for it. Time will tell.

Joseph_Orion is the voice of reason. We would be smart to wait until the WOC product is out and played before we make a final verdict,... before we shed tears or drop tons of cash!

Well thank you Scotbot. I just think it's a little unfair for everyone to jump all over WOTC for it. I mean... There were so many expansions in 2000-2001 right? That should be plenty to play with. On the other hand, If SWCCG was MY #1 Game, i'd be pissed off too. We can't honestly say it will suck and we can't say it will be like magic, and we can't even say that it's going to be fantastic. We'll all just play the waiting game. But since it's supposedly coming out around the same time as Mines of Moria expansion for LOTR, my money's probably going to decipher >

No contest. Look for the Balrog