Thank you for addressing the actual points here instead of just insisting that the game made a bunch of profit therefore it must be good. I disagree with a lot of what you're saying but I appreciate having an on-topic discussion.
creeping-deth87 wrote:1. Yeah, there were definitely binder fodder cards all over the place but this is hardly unique to Decipher. Every card game like this has a plethora of such cards that never see the light of day.
It isn't unique but the
reason why they were binder fodder is important. Compare with
MTG:
In
MTG there's a lot of stuff that is below the power curve but it at least
functions. A vanilla 2/2 for 2 CMC is not playable in most competitive constructed formats but it still functions if you have to take it for some reason. There are limited formats where you don't have free choice of cards a core strategy element is doing the best you can with stuff that would be below the constructed power curve, as well as the pseudo-limited environment of casual groups where you don't always have the best cards because you aren't willing to spend much money on the game. In those cases the vanilla 2/2 works just fine and is even an essential part of the game. What you
don't see often in
MTG is cards which are completely dysfunctional outside of very specific situations, the kind of stuff that is dead in your hand because you're never going to see the one edge case scenario where it does anything.
In the Star Wars
CCG there was all the usual stuff that was binder fodder because it was too far below the power curve to ever see play in competitive constructed formats but there was also a ton of stuff that was just plain non-functional. All those "movie moment" cards were dead weight in every format other than cooperative roleplaying games. You opened a pack and you immediately threw all of them in the trash because even in limited you'd never be able to play them.
2. 'Going wide' and doing what you described was a great way for the other player to throw a whole bunch of crap at just one of the locations you were doing this and making you lose a whole tonne of Force from one battle, way more than you would have Force drained for. It was actually a really delicate balance to Force drain as much as you could without leaving yourself too exposed at the locations you were doing it.
Depends on the game scenario. If you could meet your opponent head-on and win you probably wanted to do that. But let's say it's my space deck vs. your ground deck. Each of us has little hope of winning by contesting the other's sites, even our best shot is still going to lose the battle. So we both are incentivized to go for the minimal-interaction play and hope going wide and draining uncontested sites is fast enough to win. I admit that it wasn't a
fatal flaw initially and maybe could have been addressed by balance changes early in the game's history but once the routes to victory started to proliferate later on it was just too unlikely that you'd have the ability to go head-on with your opponent's strength and have any hope of success.
For comparison, consider "competitive"
40k and secondary objectives. Objectives like table quarter presence, where you just deep strike a unit into a table quarter and then score points for doing it even if your opponent promptly kills that unit on their own turn, are horrible non-interactive design. Even when they aren't dominating the meta the existence of a non-interactive strategy where you can win by passively existing leads to bad gameplay experiences and
40k would be a much better game if that nonsense was removed.
3. There was literally only ever one win condition: depleting the opponent's life Force. The way you got there varied deck to deck, but there was no other win condition. If you built a deck designed to do one very specific thing without ever interacting with the other player, you made a bad deck. Stopping the opponent from doing what their deck wanted to do was just as important as executing your own strategy.
Only if you define "win condition" very literally. Blowing up the death star or winning a game of holo-chess might not have literally said "you win the game" but the benefits were decisive and resulted in the rest of the game being mopping up the last few force drains and making your victory official.
And always being prepared for interaction may have been viable when the parallel routes to victory were largely limited to space vs. ground. Once those side games started to proliferate there were just too many to reasonably cover them all. With only 60 (
IIRC) cards you couldn't meaningfully interact with a possible opponent's jedi training, holo chess, death star trench run, etc, especially when many of the cards required to interact with each of those parallel routes to victory were of marginal value if your opponent didn't bring that thing and you still had to fit your own victory conditions into those 60 cards. You
had to pick a subset of the game to focus on and accept that it was going to be a race to combo off if your opponent brought one you didn't cover.
4. Sorry, no. The battle mechanics in this game were amazing. It was a lot more than just tallying power against each other. There was a lot of unexpected moments from interrupts and reacts, whether or not you brought your own weapon cards made a substantial difference in which characters would be forfeited on the other side, and attrition was such a good mechanic that could lead to some very Pyrthic victories where you technically did win but lost so much materiel that you're in a much worse position afterward. Whether you chose to lose life Force or forfeit characters at the location to satisfy your battle dmg was an important decision point for the losing side as well. The battles were excellent.
This is subjective, but in my experience most of that stuff was on
40k levels of obvious. Surprises and genuine clever plays were rare, most battles were a formality of each side doing the obvious things and then totaling up the score.
5. If you accidentally drew your whole deck and killed yourself, you're an idiot. No one ever did this. If you knew your life force was low, you tried to do what you could with what you had on the table. This made late game strategy really interesting, because you might have had a lot of stuff in hand to help your situation but at what cost?
An idiot, or a new player. A game can't just be good for hyper-competitive experts, if a newbie can accidentally lose the game by being too successful at what seems like the obvious route to victory then it's a major NPE and a design failure.
As for strategy, it may have been interesting in an abstract mechanics sense but it was completely inappropriate for the theme. This is
Star Wars, a setting of epic heroes and their adventures. Carefully managing your bookkeeping and avoiding becoming a victim of your own success might make sense in, say, a stock market investing game where "oops, the SEC decided that was illegal" is a perfectly thematic outcome. But in a Star Wars game it sucks that you can lose because you built too much of an epic fleet, and you have to ask yourself if it's worth playing Luke/Vader/etc on the table vs. keeping that card in your hit point pool.