Season 9 Final Updates – v9.2, Feb 27th

We’re already 2 months in, and it’s already time for our final update to Season 9! That’s right, on our new schedule, after 6 playtest league rounds and 56 playtest league games (and 56 vassal logs processed!), it’s already time for the 2nd of 2 planned updates to the season, meaning this will be the final round of updates. The game logs and feedback we’ve received from players testing out the new cards on Vassal has been fantastically helpful in guiding us to the necessary corrections in this update. The feedback and comments provided by players in our IACP Discord has been especially helpful and has guided much of our internal discussion in the Steering Committee about which cards needed changes and how to change them.

As this is the final update before the community vote to approve the cards for competitive play in mid-March, we’re not going to be leaving anything on the table this time. Everything that we felt needed an improvement got hauled up to the hot seat for interrogation, and we’ve gone and improved 12 (out of 17!) cards for this final update.

Beatdown

Beatdown was intended to boost Brawlers that split their damage output between 2 attacks, but ended up creating a scaling problem, not just with 3-figure groups (Riot Troopers + Flametrooper Squad Upgrade), but also with any combination of effects that could combine to result in 3 or more attacks in an activation, including Parting Blow, Pummel, Meditation, etc. To keep the effect of the card within the intended scale of a 0 point cost, we’ve implemented a 2 damage cap while maintaining the ability for multi-figure groups to benefit from the effect.

A New Hope

We’re very happy with the effects that increasing the cost to -1 had on encouraging more players to try out the Obi-Wan version of the list to gain access to Skirmish Upgrades over the Obi-less version. However many players still reported that even with the added restriction of preventing Leia from shuffling a unique command card back into the deck after it was used by A New Hope’s effect, the New Hope crew’s suite of unique command cards was just inherently strong enough that giving any figure in the list access to a powerful effect like Son of Skywalker, Debts Repaid, or even I Make My Own Luck every single turn was still too difficult to deal with. Many players suggested the cost should be changed from exhaust to deplete to make the effect a once-per-mission thing, and we’ve chosen to go with this change. Hopefully, this card should serve a valuable purpose of primarily enabling the dream team of Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, R2 and 3PO in the same list, while adding just a little bit of spice to those games with a one-time effect and keeping list-building options open with Obi-Wan as an option.

Ewok Warrior

Ewoks were in a much better place after their 9.1 overhaul. However, we realized that with each Ewok now being able to use their own mini version of Sling Barrage to supplement their range, similar to Tusken Raiders, they no longer needed Reach to enable their attacks each round, so that is being removed.

Jyn Erso

Jyn Erso was a triumphant return to form in Season 9, however there was concern that with the addition of Beatdown as a very efficient way to give her +2 damage during her activation, we may have ended up overcompensating with a full point reduction. The temporary point reduction did achieve a personal goal of mine though, which was for more players to give her another chance and see just how much damage she can deal when fully tokened up and against the right target, she often felt very close to Maul’s damage output for that first activation but with way more speed to close the distance as well as power token support. The attention Jyn received during this season’s playtesting has put some respect on her name, but we feel that with Beatdown as well as the possibility of some additional toys coming Jyn’s way in Season 10, a much smaller +1 Health will give her what she needs to succeed and be a popular Rebel option for seasons to come.

Bodhi Rook

Bodhi Rook has quietly proven himself to be a workhorse for the Rebel faction whose abilities players seem to agree have felt balanced and fun for our first 2 point figure in IACP. However we felt after testing with Bodhi more and hearing some more feedback that Bodhi’s attack seemed a bit over-tuned for a 2 point figure who is providing as much value as he is through his support abilities, especially the surge ability that often resulted in an additional 2 damage when he attacked. This often made him a surprise endgame threat to moderately damaged figures that did not match players’ perceptions of what he should be capable of. While we often like to balance our support units to be moderately competent attackers when they need to be, in this case there was a clear delineation at what a 2 point support figure’s attack should feel like, compared to 3 and 4 point support figures.

Meditation

We toned down Meditation in 9.1 to replace the free Move action with a Focus instead, but we still shared some players concerns that because of Channel the Force guaranteeing this card on round 1, it would be difficult to balance it without basically reducing it to only being worth 2 points. One of our goals for this card was to have a viable command card option for Rebel Force Users at 3 points. We’ve decided to make this card no longer searchable by Channel the Force, as that seemed to be causing the most difficulties around balancing it to be worth 3 points. Instead, it can be used by any Rebel figure to gain a Focus for an action, but gives its strongest abilities to Rebel figures that wield the Force. While spending an action just to become Focused isn’t something most lists would want to pay 1 point to do, let alone 3 points, this also helps solve one of the concerns we had about removing Channel searchability, which is that it would end up feeling useless if you drew it too late in the game. Now at least if you don’t draw it in the first couple of turns when it will be the most impactful, you can still get some value out of it by potentially focusing any figure in your list before they attack.

It will be interesting to observe if players see the searchability and bonus movement of the original Meditation card as being worth experimenting with over the IACP version after Season 9 has brought more attention to the card.

Fennec Shand

Fennec was proving to be a bit too boom or bust as we continued to watch her get playtested in v9.1. Either she didn’t die and was providing way too much value for her player at 5 points, or she died suddenly and wasn’t feeling worth the 8 VPs she gave to the opponent. Her accuracy at extreme range was also proving to be a bit too reliable thanks to her Professional reroll, which made it feel a little too safe to just keep her as far away from the opponent’s figures as possible while still dealing meaningful damage. All at ranges where it felt extremely difficult for the opponent to reasonably be able to deal with her and get those Bounty points. To help with this, we’re bringing down the overall power of her stats by removing her reroll, reducing Pierce 2 to Pierce 1, and reducing her Health back to 8. To compensate, we’ve lowered her Bounty from 3 VPs to 2 VPs, to help reduce the value disparity between games where survives until the end and games where she meets an untimely demise.

Dangerous Prey (Fennec command card)

Fennec’s command card has been reworked to tone down the free movement from 5 to 2 but increasing the chances to deal damage from requiring adjacency to now dealing 1 damage out to range 4, but also dealing 3 damage instead if the attacker is adjacent. Melee figures beware, and maybe start bringing some friends with blasters that roll blue dice.

Krrsantan and Disarm

Krrsantan and Disarm’s changes come as a package deal here in v9.1, meant to work together to create a better experience for players on both sides of the table. The ability to perma-weaken a figure was at the core of Krrsantan’s design from the very beginning, representing the classic Wookiee trait of liberating limbs from torsos. This has proven to be a very effective countermeasure against high-cost figures, often known as queen pieces, who invest points into having good surge abilities and defense pools. But the ability to just dole the effect out to someone up to 9 walking spaces away from Krrsantan, without needing to spend an action or deal damage, made it feel like there was little counterplay available to the queen piece player, other than just keeping their expensive figures out of the fight. It’s good for there to be counters to popular strategies, but there should also be opportunities to counterplay those counters.

We’ve restricted Disarm to now requiring an attack against an adjacent figure to deal the Bleed condition in order to use it. As part of this we’ve also removed the surge cost from Krrsantan’s attacks dealing Bleed, which effectively means that if Krrsantan’s attack deals damage to an adjacent figure, he can play Disarm on that figure. We feel this brings the reward of Disarm more in-line with the difficulty required to use it, and that it also now creates more room for counterplay against it, as positioning far enough away from Krrsantan to not take a point blank attack is a bit more reasonable than always staying a minimum of 10 spaces away from him.

We also found that after dividing up Krrsantan’s innate Pierce 2 between a surge ability and his Full of Rage ability, it felt much more punishing than before to his damage output for the opponent to just not attack him, as odd as that might sound, and just focus on attacking other figures instead. But also as the opponent, it just felt too punishing to attack him and risk turning on his Full of Rage ability if you couldn’t guarantee killing him instantly. So we’ve found a happy medium of moving the Pierce 1 from Full of Rage back to being an innate Pierce 1 ability while keeping the additional surge for +2 Accuracy and Pierce 1.

Scavenged Walker

We’ve heard the community loud and clear, Scavenged Walker felt under-tuned and overly punished with the restrictions placed on it and the lack of support options for players trying to build a list around it. To help out with making this card a little less painful to build around, we’ve added the effect that now allows the Scavenged Walker figure to be able to play Scum-only command cards like Worth Every Credit and Opportunistic, and we’ve provided a free Move action at the start of the mission. We’ve also removed the clause preventing rerolls, which should help AT-ST players a lot. However the AT-DP will still have to do without Assault, which we felt was important for keeping the end of round attack balanced and also for making the AT-DP and AT-ST equally viable options by comparison.

You Will Not Deny Me (Fifth Brother command card)

Finally, the Fifth Brother’s original command card, while quirky and lore-based, seemed to leave players generally uninspired. As we’ve often done in the past, we’ve decided to give it an overhaul to give players more of a reason to include it in their lists. Here we’ve given it the effect of being able to recycle one of the Brawler or Force User cards that you may have searched out with his Sith Acolyte ability (or maybe a 3 point card like Force Lightning or Lure of the Dark Side) back into the deck for another use. This plays quite nicely with that ability, as he can efficiently search out any 0-2 point card he shuffles back in with his ability during his next activation.

Well, those are the final changes for Season 9. Stay tuned to this site for how to participate in the IACP Season 9 Community Vote from March 4th to the 11th to decide which cards are permanently added to the project. Also stay tuned for more information on upcoming online Organized Play events for IACP as well as blogs and articles. Make sure to jump into our IACP Discord where players are playing Imperial Assault skirmish (and campaign) online every day.

I’ll be working on creating the final IACP-style card images for Season 9 cards this week which will then be updated across Vassal and Tabletop Admiral as we approach the Community Vote.