Back in May 2020, we announced a new structure and schedule for each Season, which included a 3 month playtesting period that would include 2 scheduled card adjustment updates for that season’s cards. It’s now September 28th, and time for the final round of adjustments for Season 4. A huge thank you to Javier A. J. for producing all of these card images for us in such a short timespan, as well as ThereIsNoTry and Trevize for updating the Vassal and TTS modules respectively so you all can enjoy these changes right away. These adjustments have been made based on the play data we’ve collected well over 130+ games over the last 2 months, as well as player comments on Slack and Discord and in the public surveys on this site. 4 cards have received functional changes for the v4.2 update, while 1 card has received a templating correction. Here are the changes.
The Darksaber
- Removed text that changed ranged attacks to melee and changed Hunter to Brawler
- Moved ability converting Blast to Cleave to the special action attack
While the goal of the Darksaber’s design was primarily to provide a net increase in power for Maul and secondarily to provide a different and flavorful alternative playstyle for Sabine, the card had taken on a lot of additional text to serve the latter secondary function. In analyzing Sabine’s strengths and weaknesses as a relatively fragile figure who prefers to play a hit-and-run game and stay out of the center of combat, as well as looking at other 1 point upgrades available to Sabine such as Targeting Computer and Scavenged Weaponry, as well as the opportunity cost of giving up a valuable 1 point upgrade from a list like Extra Armor, Doubt or Black Market, we decided that giving Sabine a 1-die melee attack in addition to a once-per-round reroll for 1 point without any additional drawbacks was probably not going break the game or turn Sabine into a meta monster.
We have seen the concerns that on paper the Darksaber gives Maul a potential damage output that is very high for a 7 point figure, however his relatively slow speed for a melee figure and his low durability with no built-in defense bonuses seem to temper his high damage output. Our playtesting data seems to bear this out, with Maul currently at a 54.5% win rate in 22 games played, and with the vast majority of our playtesters who have played with or against Maul reporting he feels strong and fun to play but balanced for 7 points as he needs command cards to help him close the gap and tends to die very quickly once he moves to make his first strike. We are happy with how Maul is faring with the Darskaber and that he is finally a figure that is able to perform well at the highest tiers of competitive play.
Rebel Pathfinders
- Reduced cost from 8/4 down to 6/3
- Reduced Health from 7 to 6
- Reduced Light it Up reroll from 2 dice to 1
While we heard from a lot of folks that enjoyed the interesting strategies that pathfinders brought to the table, there was also strong feedback from the community that all the little tricks they were able to do, in combination with their attack profile, didn’t quite add up to being worth 8 points. At 8 points, a group is expected to be a primary damage dealer in a list with maybe some added bonus utility, but Pathfinders were shaping up to be the opposite, figures with high utility that could deal a little bit of damage in a pinch. To reflect this, and with many players also asking for more 6 point Deployment card options in rebels, we’ve decided to lower the cost of Pathfinders to 6 points for the group, and lower their figure cost to 3. We have also toned down some of their stats to reflect the sharp decrease in their cost. While this does mean that Pathfinders can no longer use Call the Vanguard, they now have access to Reinforcements instead, and we found that the interaction between Call the Vanguard and Distracting Fire often resolved non-intuitively depending on which player had initiative and created a lot of confusion that will now no longer be an issue.
Lando Calrissian
- Reduced Health from 9 to 8
- Clarified timing of when Shrewd Scoundrel checks dice results for doubling
Many of our playtesters have told us that Lando’s dice manipulations abilities are a lot of fun to play with, but that he may be a bit on the strong side. His ability to use Shrewd Scoundrel on defense, as well as having access to both On the Lam and Cheat to Win, adds a fair bit to his durability. We were pretty happy with how Lando has played and performed so far and believe that just a small adjustment is required to make sure that he is as strong as he should be but does not ever feel oppressive to play against, and we’ve decided to return his Health to its original 8.
We have also introduced wording to clear up the timing of Shrewd Scoundrel, which has caused some confusion with cards like Tough Luck and Cheat to Win without referencing an external FAQ document. By specifying that Shrewd Scoundrel checks the results after rerolls are done, it should become clear now by reading the card that any abilities that happen during the reroll step, including Cheat to Win and Tough Luck, will happen before Shrewd Scoundrel checks the dice results to see if a result should be doubled.
Verena Talos
- Added +1 Accuracy to Close Quarters attac
While it might seem strange that an ability called Close Quarters would receive an accuracy bonus, the main reason for doing this is because of the odd interaction between Close Quarters and the Arsenal and Epic Arsenal abilities. According to the Return to Hoth rulebook, when Verena uses Close Quarters on a figure with either of those abilities, namely IG-88 or General Weiss, Verena’s opponent gets to choose the dice pool for that attack, which means they can choose to force Verena to make a ranged attack with either 2 red dice, which is guaranteed to miss, or red and yellow dice for Weiss, which has a high chance of missing, as Verena does not receive the innate accuracy bonus abilities from those figures when she uses their attack pool. We’ve found this does not sit well with players upon learning how this interaction works, and have decided to fix this problem as a quality of life improvement for Verena players not having to worry about Close Quarters being useless against these 2 popular figures, while still maintaining the original ruling from FFG for how these abilities interact with each other.
Bossk – Templating Correction
- Indiscriminate Fire text corrected from “other than you” to “other than the defender”
When we updated how Indiscriminate Fire worked to use a single die’s results rather than to count surges, we intended for that to no longer affect the target of the attack because the result had become so much more reliable and could now deal actual damage instead of only dealing strain. However the templating for this card was not quite right, and players were getting confused as to whether Indiscriminate Fire also affected the target or not. It has now been corrected to match other similar abilities in the game, with “each other figure” meaning each other figure besides Bossk, and “other than the defender” clearing up that the ability does not affect the original target of the attack, only the surrounding figures.
So there you go, all of the changes for Season 4.2. The Community vote to approve whether or not these cards are added to the permanent IACP roster will open up on October 19th and close on the night of November 1st. The reason we have these final changes 3 weeks before voting opens up is so that you all can get a chance to see these cards in action before you make a decision in the community vote on whether to permanently approve these cards. After November 1st will be 3 months of uninterrupted IACP Approved play, during which time no further changes to cards will be made, save for the scheduled map rotation coming at the end of November.
I hope you all enjoy the updated cards and continue to have fun testing and playing with Season 4 cards. The playtest league will continue on through November 1st, and you can jump in if you haven’t already by going here. If you’re playing on vassal, keep uploading your game logs to the IACP dropbox folder, even if they’re not official playtest league games, we want all the data we can get. The v4.2 updates are available to play on Vassal in the 12.4.3 module available here, and on Tabletop Simulator here.