This game is at its best when it has some whimsy, which is where the musicians come in! The design where they trigger every turn because they're just there in the background was fun, and we really wanted Max Rebo to be the one who felt like he was breaking a core game rule #FFGStaff
Not in this set, since there was minimal room for Aldhani stuff with everything else we had going on (and Secrets of Power had already put a lot of focus on Andor) #FFGStaff
Once John put The Axe Forgets and the Tree Remembers into the card file, I knew these were the art pieces they should have. Lt Gorn serving the arrogant Imperials was a shot that stuck with me immediately after the episode, and the story of justice against Beehaz fit the concepts perfectly #FFGStaff
Usually we balance powerful abilities with a cost, so you have to give something to get something. But occasionally we balance them by giving power to the opponent, to make it easier for them to counteract the advantage you just gained. The puzzle, then, becomes how to break the symmetry #FFGStaff
It's important that every deck have counterplay to maintain a healthy metagame. Healing can undo an aggro deck's start, and board wipes obliterate midrange. To make sure there was something to beat control decks, we designed a unit that is protected from most removal and made her cost 8 #FFGStaff
After the excitement and success of Grand Admiral Thrawn (JTL), we immediately started looking for an opportunity to make a similar design. Unfortunately, On Attack abilities are often much stronger than Defeat abilities, so we had to put a cost on the front (though we pushed Enfys's unit) #FFGStaff
With Academy Training in SOR being a 2 cost +2/+2 upgrade, I was convinced that Mastery was supposed to be a 3 cost +3/+3 upgrade. However, Mastery was powerful enough in our Premier testing that the developers started looking for a downside to put on it to preserve future design space #FFGStaff
While upgrades represent a high risk, being vulnerable to unit removal, there are a number of exciting, high-power (and thus high-cost) upgrade designs that we've come up with that we enjoy sprinkling into our sets here and there, to keep games uncertain and tense #FFGStaff
With Jyn Erso and Saw Gerrera both being Rebel leaders whose abilities care about defeating your units, we leaned into the idea that our Partisan units would have When Defeated abilities or abilities that were conditional on having lost a unit this phase, to synergize with both. #FFGStaff
Once we decided that we were going to put a neutral RG leader in LAW, it was immediately obvious to us that it should be Saw Gerrera. But there was a complication: Saw was already in SEC! In order to avoid duplicating the leaders, we moved Saw to LAW and the SEC leader became Cassian #FFGStaff
Of course we were going to have the Aldhani payroll heist in our heist set! This card was designed top-down to capture that event, with each unit taking their turn stealing a credit from the bank. We knew it'd be hard to make competitive as it has no upper limit, but the dream is there! #FFGStaff
He goes back to his owner's hand. #FFGStaff
One of the first questions to ask when making podracers is "what does podracing look like?" I thought it was cool when SW Destiny used "resources on your podracers" as making progress in the race, and John came up with "attack first" as a way to make players feel like they won the race #FFGStaff
Yes! We didn't want to include piloting in the set (for complexity reasons, to let the new mechanics have more space and spotlight) which meant he'd just be a ground unit.
That said, we did talk about it and the door is very open to making a pilot version in the future. #FFGStaff
For much of design there was a meaningful self-discard theme, as John wanted to capture the feeling of "overclocking" yourself, spending your deck as a resource. It was a tension because we don't want to turn the discard pile into a second hand, but it opened up some very fun design space #FFGStaff
When we put Doctor Aphra in SHD, her evil droids had been written out of her story, and were more associated with Darth Vader in my mind. When they returned (in between design & release of SHD), fan demand for them was overwhelming, so we went out of our way to find a home for them in LAW #FFGStaff
A cool thing about aspects being your set's theme is that there's lots of backwards compatibility when you make synergy cards. These cards caring about how many aspects a card has means they're going to be playable with cards in any set, but optimized when playing with LAW cards #FFGStaff
With multicolor being such a prominent theme, we wanted some commons that would be sufficiently exciting. To make them even cooler, John proposed making them all performing different roles in a heist team, and I worked with the art team to get the aspect colors into the art piece of each #FFGStaff
Not this set, he wouldn't make sense in the concept for the most part. But perhaps more importantly, the show didn't come out until months after we locked the prestige list! #FFGStaff
You can evade Sentinels when you attack with a condemn'ed Saboteur unit, and it will still get +2 power from Commence the Festivities. You will not defeat the defender's shields (from Saboteur) or use any other abilities. #FFGStaff
When John put The Client on the character list for LAW, I was dubious initially at whether he would fit in this set. But he does hire a famous bounty hunter, and the mission to recover Grogu is kinda like a heist, so once I saw it all together I was convinced #FFGStaff
With lots of credits in Lawless Time, we wanted to make sure there were also tools to beat credit-heavy decks if the strategy became dominant. Putting those abilities on characters famous for stealing a bunch of money from the Empire felt especially appropriate #FFGStaff
Correct! (It's very exciting/terrifying) #FFGStaff
It's easy to talk about the design process as a road map of changes: "how did we get there from here?" But what about the people that make those changes? What's their experience like?
What does it feel like when you have to kill your darlings? #FFGStaff starwarsunlimited.com/articles/beh...
Obviously Han was designed to work with Credits, but we wanted to give him reasons to play with cards from other sets as well—and yellow cards also make Shield tokens fairly often. The interaction with the Force token was an unintended side effect we found too funny to remove #FFGStaff
We don't design Action [exhaust] abilities that often, as exhausting units for an ability means they're not attacking and advancing towards the end of the game. But for a support unit whose job is to create a Credit token every round, it let us make Lady Proxima very cheap to play #FFGStaff
Early drafts of LAW featured mechanics that were related to players' resources, but they didn't end up fitting this set. A handful of abilities remain that interact with a player's resources, including this very exciting way to punish your opponent for resourcing their bombs! #FFGStaff
We've slowly been expanding our scope of what kind of instant wins we're comfortable supporting. Personally, I like them when they're telegraphed and the opponent can strategically play around them, which the unit side of a leader does well. Vader with Aggressive Negotiations is scary! #FFGStaff
The idea of "throwing a rock" at someone for 1 point of damage (by discarding it) was extremely funny, while also providing synergy with multiple leaders in the set. There was much debate as to whether the ability needed an aspect check like Rey (LOF), but this felt conditional enough #FFGStaff
We identified a handful of "teams" that we wanted to give matching color sets, then when that wasn't enough we picked about ~10 units (mostly Underworld) that we thought were cool and included them with a white/colorless treatment. #FFGStaff
