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The Battle
of Endor is easily the expansion which has impacted the game
the most. Breaking from the traditional Wizards' approach to balance
and design, the set has shaken the game to the core. Both good and
bad, this Revolution is here to stay, and it is the purpose of these
articles to analyze the Revolution.
Today's Revolution: Speed.
In the past, the Star Wars Trading Card
Game has been dominated by faster units in almost every aspect.
Speed allows first attacks, greater opportunity and can prevent
your opponent from gaining as many attacks against you. Speed inflation
has set in over the years, and an average speed unit seen during
Attack of the Clones (50) is comparatively slow to the speeds
seen in many meta-game decks of Scum
and Villainy (60 for single units, 80+ for stacked ones).
As speed has risen further and further, it has gradually pushed
lower speed units out of play, and created virtually useless capital
ships.
Battle of Endor has quickly obliterated
this concept. The concept began quietly, in Scum and Villainy,
with the introduction of Stealth. Many Play Testers for the
IDC feared Stealth; that it would become too powerful. For that
reason, you will rarely see a self-speed lowering card. Nor will
you see a Stealth unit with lower than 30 speed (and even those
are rare, as 40 is the preferred minimum). With good reason too;
disallowing attacks brings invulnerability, and invulnerability
is a very, very scary concept from a balance perspective. However,
Stealth is ultimately a gift to the TCG, shattering the need to
play extremely high-speed units at all costs.
Stealth, however, needed a counter, and that
counter is found in now-useful, low-speed units. The lower-speed
units break through the Stealth units' invulnerability when the
Stealth unit is forced to attack, tapping it, and making it vulnerable.
The Battle of Endor set brought many slower, but useful, units in.
Some even go as far as to have anti-Stealth all together, such as
Scouting Party, which gains Accuracy 1 against a Stealth unit. All
together, these provide a strong counter to Stealth units.
While the SWTCG has always had three "classes"
of speed in its units, those being high speed,
middle speed, and low speed, Battle of Endor gave mid and
low speed units (in general) a purpose, creating a clear, triangle-counter
system:
Like all counter-systems, no one kind of unit
will be able to win it for you any more. A fleet of high-speed units
will have a lot of trouble with just one Stealth unit. Likewise,
a mid-speed Stealth unit is going to have difficulty destroying
a slow but strong low-speed unit. And finally, that low-speed unit
just can't compete with faster units. From here on out, it will
generally take two kinds of units to win the arena, not just one
as has been seen during other sets. Whether it was the IDC's intention
to create a system such as this is not known, but it is definitely
a positive addition to the game.
Counter systems, which are a favorite concept
of game balance designers, allow for the critical "conceptual
balance." Conceptual balance, meaning balance within the concepts
which govern how the game is balanced, is crucial for any game.
Without conceptual balance, balance cannot be achieved, because
there is no guiding "rules" for balance. Many players
in all games also make the mistake of confusing the term "balance"
with "inter-faction balance." Balance between different
factions, in the SWTCG the Light and Dark sides, is inter-faction
balance, meaning balance relating to which side is capable of winning
more. Intra-faction balance, the other half of the term "balance"
means how a faction is balanced from the inside. Many times this
boils down to: does everything have a purpose?
Looking at it from a pre-BoE perspective, the
SWTCG had horrible intra-faction balance in relation to speed. High
speed cards became nearly all that was seen, with just a few exceptions.
Anyone who questions this cannot disagree with this statement: capital
ships were almost never seen in meta-games. One large reason for
this was, simply, they didn't have the speed to be useful against
faster units, who would shred it to pieces. There are, of course,
other reasons to this, but that's another story for another article.
Post BoE, all speed-classes have a use -high,
middle, and low. To say that this is a bad thing would be to say
that a balanced game is wrong. Battle of Endor's Revolution on Speed
is highly beneficial. Like it or not, the higher speed units now
form only one aspect of speed-balance triangle.
Thoughts
or comments? Visit the message board thread for this article here.
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