A Look Back and The View Ahead:
Playtesting for Scum and Villainy
by Nathanael Tripp

Wow, we finally got to a point where everyone can breathe a sigh of relief, the release of S&V, and now we're in the middle of playtesting for the next set, Battle of Endor. Scum and Villainy was one of the most complicated sets ever created from a Playtesting aspect. There was just so much stuff in this set that could cause a problem. We had all kinds of subtypes flying around including Rebel, Imperial, Jawa, Tusken, Bounty Hunter, Jedi, Smuggler, Diplomat, Creature, Spy, Droid, Stormtrooper, Clone, and we even had a Merchant join the mix. So with almost every subtype in the game in this set there was a lot of testing that had to be done. I personally built and tested about 45 decks on Lackey and spent about 100+ hours trying to tone everything down to perfection. In my opinion we did pretty well with this set, introducing some new concepts for both play style and deck building.

The single hardest aspect of testing for this set though has to be the new ability that was introduced, Stealth. This ability gave everyone on the IDC headaches for weeks on end. And it was also a major point of friction for many members. But why could such a simple ability cause so may problems? Well it all started with one card that fortunately was cut before production, Disguise. This card was awesome and I tried everything I could think of to keep it balanced so that it could stay in production. However, it just wasn't meant to be, there were just too many problems with this card. You are probably asking yourself "What could this card possibly have done to make it that abusive?" Well here is the original text for the card:

Disguise (Neutral, Equipment - Character)
1 build
Pay 2 build points -> Equip
Equipped Agent, Assassin, Bounty Hunter, Smuggler, Spy, or Thief gets Stealth. (This unit cannot be attacked unless it is tapped.)

The problem with this card is that it is too open ended. It allows you to give too many units the Stealth ability. We tried adding in a Speed restriction of only equipping it to a unit with 30 Speed or more, but that didn't solve the problem either. The unit that abused this card the most was Zam Wessel (D). Since she could choose between two sets of stats at the beginning of the turn you could choose her faster version to equip Disguise to, then next turn choose the slower stats and have a tank that could never be attacked. Also by keeping this card around it limited any future creation of any subtypes referred to in this card. So rather reluctantly we decided to cut this card. It was probably the smartest thing we could have done.

Lastly I would just like to give HUGE thanks to all my Playtesters; we couldn't do these sets without you. And a special thanks to Mengo, you're the voice of reason my friend and it is a true honor to be able to work on these wonderful sets with you. So thank you everyone for taking the time to read this and have fun with the new set.