Good morning! If you’re anything like me, your mind is completely unstable until you start sipping on coffee. It turns out the more kids you have, the less sleep you get! There’s something sweet about the morning you’re up a little early and can just sit and let the mind wander a bit.

Thus leads us into our first Morning Musings article. As the mind wanders on some random Star Wars Unlimited thoughts, we’ll find out if I’m living in fantasy land or crazy land with these ideas..

Is Ramp fundamentally overpowered in Star Wars Unlimited?

Today’s thought is the headline above, is ramp fundamentally overpowed in Star Wars Unlimited. If you’re unfamiliar, ramp in a Trading Card Game is using your resources to increase your available resources in future rounds as Tyler outlined in our TCG slang dictionary. In Star Wars Unlimited thus far, we have DJ Deathstar, Resupply, and Command that function as ramp cards. Ramp (along with card draw) is a concept that is fundamentally always seen as strong in card games.

In the case of resupply, you are spending 3 resources (potentially in Round 2) in order to have 5 resources in Round 3 while your opponent only has 4. This isn’t always an amazing move, as not playing a card(s) for 3 resources in the round you play your ramp card may put you behind your opponent and unable to catch up. Normally there is more risk involved by ramping.

In Star Wars Unlimited, there is more at play though. We have free units that enter the battlefield ready that can’t be deployed until we have a certain number of resources in play. These leaders are balanced around this, as at 5 resources we can get a 3/6 Leia Organa who has Raid 1, at 6 resources Luke Skywalker who is 4/7 with an On attack ability, and at 7 resources we get the big bad Darth Vader at 5/8 with a damaging On Attack ability. What happens when we ramp and Darth Vader comes out the same round as Luke Skywalker? Suddenly that Luke deployed doesn’t feel as safe and ready to take over the game. Even worse, if we ramp twice in the first few rounds to then deploy Darth Vader Round 4 when we would normally have 5 resources, he can come out before Luke Skywalker does by a whole round!

What might stop the might of ramp?

This value gained may not be quite double that of other TCG’s, but its clear that ramp has extra value in Star Wars Unlimited. Clearly the devs had to be aware of this in development.. right? Well we have gotten a quick glance behind the curtain in that aspect, as Tyler tweeted out that the Grand Inquisitor had been a 5 resource leader through most of development, before they ended up pushing him back to 6 due to how strong he was with the Ramp card DJ Deathstar. It’s clear the devs are aware of the value there, so its likely we’ll see some kind of way to combat ramp with the full set of cards. What might that look like?

• I like the idea of a card like Waylay that would either bounce an opponent’s resource to hand, or defeat it.
• Cards that exhaust opponent’s resources
• Cards that interact based on the number of opponent’s resources. Deal damage to a unit equal to the number of resources they control.

Personally I’m very interested to see what FFG gives us to work with in the space. In our limited gameplay, we have yet to see a deck that has ramped twice in a game lose. As is, I have a hard time believing Villain Green won’t be one of the best set 1 decks with its virtually exclusive access to the ramp cards thus far.

What do you think about ramp thus far? Are you worried it may be too strong in Star Wars Unlimited?