Part 1: Cards and Card Types
In my last entry, I spoke a little bit about what a CCG is, the formats of Star Wars: Unlimited and that I’ll be focused on Limited for the next few weeks, but I only barely touched on what the game IS and how you play it. Let’s fix that by starting with the card types and what they do.
A Base, A Leader, and A Deck
First, two disclaimers. When I talk below about deck construction, I’m talking about the constructed format of Premier. I’ll make a note at the end of how other formats differ. Secondly, every thing I mention is spelled out in the rules of the game, but if a card ever contradicts the rules, the card is correct. Card game designers love nothing more than designing cards that directly contradict core rules.
SWU decks are made up of one base card which represents your health, one leader card which determines what kind of other cards you can or should play in a few ways, and a minimum of 50 other cards in your deck. In Magic The Gathering terms, this what they call your library. And I will occasionally refer to Magic due to its prominence in the CCG space. Let’s talk first about Bases and Leaders.
Bases all have a number assigned to the that represent their health. The standard value is 30; some bases offer more maximum health in exchange for some kind of disadvantage; other bases will give you less maximum health in exchange for some kind of benefit. Bases also have one “aspect.” Put a pun in that term while we talk about Leaders for a second.
Leaders are the second mandatory component of a deck along with bases. Leaders are double sided cards, with a Leader side and a Leader Unit side. You have one leader, and it starts the game in the leader area, on its Leader side. Leaders usually have an ability they can use while on their leader side, usually but not always once per round, and sometimes with another cost or associated condition. They also have an Epic Action that can be used once per game. This is when your leader flips to its Leader Unit side and hits the battlefield as a powerful unit. These units usually still have some kind of additional ability or effect that is similar to their Leader ability. Bed with me, I’ll explain actions in a bit. When a Leader Unit is defeated, it flips back to its Leader side and goes back to the leader area. Its action can be used again on subsequent turns, but its Epic Action to deploy it as a Leader Unit cannot. Leaders have two aspects, and the combination of leader and base aspects have a major influence on your deck building and strategy.
Let’s Talk Aspects
If you’re familiar with Magic, SWU aspects are similar to Magic’s colors. If you’re not familiar, aspects group similar cards together thematically, and have a gameplay effect of how much you pay to play them in game. SWU has 6 aspects, all with an associated color: Vigilance (blue), Command (green), Aggression (red), Cunning (Yellow), Heroic (White), and Villainy (Black). There are also cards that have no aspect, and are called neutral. If a card is not neutral (and most are not), it will have at least one aspect assigned to it. Cards can have two aspects. If a card has one of Vigilance, Command, Aggression, or Cunning, it can also have EITHER Heroic or Villainy. Currently, there are no cards that have a mix of Heroic and Villainy* and no cards mix blue, green, red, or yellow.
*Okay, there’s ONE Leader card that flips between Villainy and Heroism, but that’s the ONE exception and he’s still only either Villainy or Heroic at any given time.
See how I switched from using Vigilance, Command, Aggression, and Cunning to using blue, green, red, and yellow? That’s because it’s faster and also how decks are generally referenced. Remember when I said bases had one aspect and leaders had two? That’s still true - bases will be one of blue, green, red, or yellow**.
Leaders will be one of those four colors PLUS either Heroic or Villainy. Those three aspects set the tone for your deck; you can have cards in your deck that don’t match the aspect(s) of your leader and base, but they cost more to play. We’ll come back to that.
Your leader and base combo are so foundational to deck building that decks are frequently referred to as “Leader name Base Color” if using a generic 30 health base. If using a base with a special ability, it’s “Leader name Base name.” Since some leaders appear in multiple sets, you’ll often see a number after the leader name. For example, Han Solo has Leader cards in sets 1, 2, and 4. His sets 1 and 4 leaders are both Yellow Heroic aspect cards, while his set 2 card is Red Heroic. Players quickly know which specific one you’re talking about if you say you’re playing “Han1 Yellow,” “Han2 blue” or “Mono Han4,” with “mono” always denoting the leader and base share a color. If you were using the popular 25 health base “Energy Conversion Lab” with Han from set 2, you’d probably call it “Han2 ECL” using shorthand for the base name. A final wrinkle to this example: since “Han2” has art based on Alden Ehrenreich in Solo while
Han1 and Han4 have art based on Harrison Ford, you might hear “Young Han Blue” instead of “Han2 Blue.” Every game, every subculture has its own jargon.
**Fine, there’s ONE truly neutral base, but again, we’re ignoring outliers.
The 50 cards in your deck will be a mix of Units that will all have a sub-type of either Ground Unit or Space Unit, Upgrades that are cards that attach to and modify a Unit, or Events, which are cards that cause something to happen when played.
Units are the bulk of most decks currently, with Events and Upgrades supporting them. Ground Units can be vehicles like walkers, speeder bikes, various tanks, or the snow speeders from Hoth; they can be generic groups or individuals like “Enterprising Lackeys” or “Battlefield Marine” or specific, named characters like “Luke Skywalker.” Same goes for space units, although those specific, named units are named ships like Red Five or the Millennium Falcon, not people. Units have an attack value and a health or XP value. To use Magic terminology again, these would’ve called power and toughness. When a unit attacks, it deals damage equal to its attack value or power, and when it has suffered damage equal to or greater than its health, it’s defeated and goes to its owner’s discard pile. Unlike Magic, damage is persistent. If my 7 health Luke Skywalker takes 4 damage, that damage stays until I play a card to heal it or he takes 3 more damage and is defeated. Also different from Magic is that when you declare an attack with a unit, you specify if that unit is attacking your opponent’s base or one of their units. Players being attacked do not have the option to “block” attacks against their base by redirecting the attack to a unit in play.
Upgrades are attached to units and the best example I can probably give are the 6 lightsabers currently available. These are all upgrades you can attach to a non vehicle unit, and they grant the unit additional attack and health. If you meet other conditions explained on the card, you gain other benefits. For example: attaching “Mace Windu’s Lightsaber” to any non-vehicle unit grants it 2 additional attack and health. If the unit also happens to be Mace Windu, you can also draw 2 cards. That’s the most straightforward type of upgrade; there are upgrades you can play on your opponent’s units to make them weaker or unable to do certain things, or even take control of them outright.
Events are even more varied. These are cards you play for a one time, immediate effect. This can be anything but some common, simple examples are to heal a specific amount of damage from your base or a unit, defeat an enemy unit, give a unit extra power for this phase or return a unit to its owner’s hand. Again, these are general and generic examples; the effects can get wild.
This has been a fairly long explanation of the card types used in SWU. In Part 2 of this blog, going up very soon, I finally talk about how you actually use these cards to play the game. This is where folks with an understanding of Magic may find some surprises like I did that open up a strategic depth in this game that I truly love.
Format specific notes since my lair above is about the Premier format:
In Twin Suns, each player chooses two leaders and one base. Those two leaders can be from any mix of red, blue, green, and yellow aspects, but must share their Heroic or Villainy aspect. Luke and Han? Fine. Luke and Vader? No good.
Also for Twin Suns, with the release of the Jump to Lightspeed set, the minimum deck size is now 80 cards, not 50.
The other Twin Suns restriction is that while you can have up to three of any one card in your deck in Premier, Twin Suns is a “singleton” format, meaning only one copy of each card per deck. For Sealed play, you can have more than 3 copies of a card if you happen to open them in your draft or sealed pool.