Vector Prime Notes

The Genesis.  The main catalyst to my efforts to create a Star Wars Trading Card Game (SWTCG) expansion came from poking around on the internet one day trying to see what kinds of decks other people were building.  That led me to several places including Rebelbasers.com.  It also yielded another website: Star Wars TCG Independent Development Committee (IDC). 

After looking over the IDC’s expansions they had out at the time, I thought there is only so much the IDC could do in terms of expansions.  There are only six movies.  There are the cartoons and video.  Essentially there were a finite number of sources for imagery for the cards, which therefore limits the number of expansions.  I thought to venture into the infinite…well…quasi-infinite at any rate.  My thought was there was a tremendous amount of material to inspire cards contained in the multitude of books. Ah, but there is one big problem relative to making SWTCG cards with that idea…no images to put on the card.

Well, I intended to not let that bother me.  So, onward I marched into the world of SWTCG card creation.  The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was the finding of the Star Wars Artists Guild website with a treasure trove of artwork there to use as images for the cards.  Not to mention there’s a good deal of Star Wars images out there on the ‘net to begin with.

Card Creation Methodology.  My initial plan was to simply gather a notebook, Vector Prime, and a pencil and start taking notes on potential cards.  If I may get truly Star Wars geeky, I intended let the “force” guide me in regards to card ideas.  Meaning, I did not set forth with some grand plan in mind to develop new game mechanics or create new abilities that were thematic throughout the set.  I simply wanted to read a passage and translate what I read into existing SWTCG game mechanics if it seemed worthy of doing so.

            Initially, I failed on both of those intentions.  When I started, I neglected to remember a certain fact about the Yuuzhan Vong (YV): they are outside the Force for all intents and purposes.  Hmmm…how do I treat them then?  They certainly aren’t from the Light or Dark Side of the Force.  So neutral right?  That gave me pause to think as well.  Neutral still implied (to me) that you are part of the Force, where as the YV are not.  My first potential departure from my original intent was to possibly add something (the YV) outside the existing SWTCG rules, abilities, etc. to the game.  In the end, I decided against adding a fourth faction to the Light Side, Dark Side, and Neutral factions.  Instead I thought it better to treat the YV as Neutral.  However, later I’ll put out a possible tweak/addition to the rules for the SWTCG community’s consideration on the use of Force in regards to playing YV card/decks.  The big thing is that YV cards won’t be able to use Force for any activated abilities, etc.  I’m fine tuning my idea on how to handle that loss of a resource that the Light and Dark Sides can use so as to keep game play on even footing.  I also may use a different symbol instead of the Neutral icon on the card to designate it as a YV card when the name doesn’t make it blatantly obvious it’s a YV card.

            My second almost failure in regards to following my intentions was I created a new ability, but I decided against it because I remembered I didn’t want to create any new abilities and it was a bit of a hybrid of two existing abilities.  I may save it for later expansions.  (Yes, later expansions…whether people use this or not, I had fun doing it.)

     Back on track…so that’s what I did.  I sat down with Vector Prime and took notes on potential cards.  I then created another sheet within my copy of the IDC’s Skywlkr Deckbuilder and translated my notes into actual text to be used on the physical cards.  After I did that, I then took up the task of creating the visual cards.  That was, as I said in my first post, about four years ago.  I thought I had lost some of the work I had done on the actual cards from file migration from one computer to another, but found the initial cards I created just this morning.  Looking at them, however, I’ll need to recreate them.  Mainly because I found the proper fonts (I didn’t have them before.) or, at least, fonts that are closer to the real thing than what I had used before.  And, for whatever reason I cannot recall, I saved them in a format where I can’t simply go in and change the font.  Go figure.

The Result.  What I ended up with is a 255ish card rough draft of an expansion of the SWTCG called Vector Prime…so far.  In the intervening time, the IDC introduced Resource cards.  So, I’m going back through to see if there is a way to use those in this set.  What the expansion is not: balanced.  I did not go in with any goals for creating a certain number of cards, card types, etc.  As I mentioned before, I just re-read the book and let the book make the cards, so to speak.  If it was in the book, it could potentially be a card.  That left me with a rather unbalanced expansion especially in terms of Ground units.  Most of the action of the book took place in space, so that left the Yuuzhan Vong short when it came to ground units.  There also was not a whole lot of variety to draw upon when it came to Yuuzhan Vong Space units.  So, a Yuuzhan Vong deck would have to be heavily supplemented with Neutral cards.