As our 9 month journey from the game’s announcement to the actual release reaches a close, it seemed like a good time to reminisce on what may have been the most unique card game meta I’ve ever played in.

In case you missed it, for the last about 6 months, players have been playing with cards as they became available on Tabletop Simulator and by printing proxies to play in person. While many people following the game called it an absolute waste of time, it might land as one of my fondest TCG memories! I still chuckle every time I think about the people who called for Overwhelming Barrage to be banned with about 70 of the 252 cards revealed at the time!

The Best of Times

I don’t think I’ve ever played a TCG where at some point (though generally it happens more than once) players weren’t complaining about either a “stale” or just flat-out “bad” meta that killed their excitement for playing the game. In some games this is due to a broken combo coming out, or Designers struggle to push balance bans/errata fast enough to clean up a dominant deck. Then you have the most tragic situation of all, which occurred often in Star Wars Destiny, where production delays stuck us playing in a meta for 8 months!

That was the most refreshing thing about playing Star Wars Unlimited the last 6 months- with the steady release of cards (anywhere from 5-15 new cards a week), the meta was constantly evolving! One deck may have been champ for a week before three more rose to take its place the next week! It was so fun to just explore anything and everything deckbuilding wise, and with the cadence of the card reveals, we were literally able to build and play combinations of every leader over the 6-month period.

Given the unique nature of the reveal cadence, I don’t think we’ll ever experience a meta like this. Even if we wanted to re-create the same feelings prior to the next set (we don’t plan on ever playing proxies again before a set release), given the 4 months between sets, we’ll likely see the set spoiled in the last 2 months before its release. This means that we definitely won’t be able to experience it at the same pace.

While it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, it’s been fun to discuss cards as they’ve been revealed in discord and debate how good or bad they are before later card reveals inevitably changed the conversation! I’ll miss the times where we would all sit around waiting for Thorrk’s paragraphs before TD_Tatta entered debate mode with him.

The Worst of Times

It wasn’t all peaches though. We gravitated towards playing in person with proxies, which was a whole process in of itself! Many were able to take advantage of SW-Unlimited-DB‘s export to PDF option, but for whatever reason, the cheapest printer I could find at the store didn’t like the formatting and ended up cutting off parts of the card images. This forced me to manually create Word docs of card images lined up in 2×4 rows, so all the card images would print appropriately without being cut off. While I managed to get fast at this, and do it within a few minutes per deck, it was more time added to the overall process. I’m pretty sure I spent about $200 in printer ink for those 6 months of gaming!

Building tempaltes and printing decks wasn’t the worst part though. After they images were printed, I think had to take the sheets to the cabinet, pull out my trusty paper cutter and cut all the cards out. This was the part that I would often spend anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple hours every week or two printing new decks and updating older ones with new card reveals.

But wait there’s more! After that, I had to pull out a box of sleeves and drop a card game of choice behind these printed card images in each sleeve (I was partial to Keyforge and Warhammer Champions). All the above work together, I often spend an evening each week working on my proxy decks to then spend another evening playing.

Let me be the first to tell you, I am ecstatic we are done with proxies!

Was it all for naught?

As I touched on at the beginning, many people would say we were crazy for “wasting our time playing an unreleased game with a partial card set.” While it is far from the same meta testing knowledge we can gain playing from the full set, it was also far from being a complete waste of time. Here’s a few takeaways from my experience personally:

• We got a whole lot of reps in the action system that has helped us learn and adjust to the importance of sequencing in this game.
• We explored lots of cards we may not have given much thought to had we waited until the full set to start playing.
• We tinkered with every leader in the game.
• We had an adventure working through the card reveals.
• We had a heck of a lot of fun!

I am beyond excited for the release of the game, and I know we will continue to enjoy this game for many years to come. But there will always be something special about the 6 months leading up to release for this game, and I’m not sure it’s an experience we will ever replicate!

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Thanks for joining me for some morning musings! Did you play the game prior to release? Did you enjoy the adventure of card reveals, dicussion, and working through the card pool the last few months?