Project Excelsior Launches!

by Matt Kirk, Project Excelsior Lead

18th December 2017

It's been over eighteen months since the results of Project Awaken suggested that a new tournament format should be developed to address several challenges facing the 2E community. Those challenges were:

• Raise the playability and competitiveness of newly designed cards
• Make the cardpool and rules more manageable
• Reduce the length of tournament games
• Enable new player recruitment
• Streamline communication and feedback within the community and the CC

Today, we're excited to present the new 2E tournament format that has been designed to meet these challenges. Excelsior is an exciting new way to play 2E that showcases more recently released cards. These newer cards often have a hard time competing with older powerhouse staples, so in order to give them a chance to shine, Excelsior limits the cardpool to encourage innovation in deck building. This also gives newer players a more level playing field; the smaller cardpool presents less of a learning curve and lowers the barrier to entry.

Links to the new cardpool and rules sheet are listed on the trekcc.org home page, under 2E Resources. 

We're also unveiling support for the new format with perhaps the most requested feature during our Excelsior playtests last year... a Deckbuilder filter! Since Excelsior is a sanctioned format now, the Card Search Engine has been updated with the cards from the v1.0 cardpool, and you can run a check to make sure your new deck is legal to play in Campaign Events.

Not sure where to start in building a deck? We've got your back with three starter decks, one for each headquarters:

Romulan

Klingon

Earth TNG

And also, a pre-constructed deck with a few different twists:

Common Ground

Excelsior games are designed to be a bit shorter than the average 2E tournament game, and based on playtest data, the time limit for Excelsior games has been set at 50 minutes. As with all other aspects of this new format, this could change based feedback from Act I. There is also a deck building limit of 100 cards total among missions, dilemmas, and draw deck. While the minimums have not changed (5, 20, and 35 respectively), the upper limit serves as a way to rein in potentially bloated decks that could use more than their fair share of time in a tournament game.

In Act I, you may notice that all missions are in the Alpha Quadrant. This simplifies gameplay by not having to explain the quadrant rules to new players, while also keeping everyone relatively close together for interactive decks. But depending on how the cardpool changes for Act II, other quadrants could be explored if the storyline takes us in that direction. You may also notice a fair bit of Non-Aligned Android personnel, but not quite enough to build a stand-alone deck; they will have to rely on one of the three HQs for ship availability and personnel to staff them. Whether or not they stick around depends on the storyline as well, in addition to community feedback.

We've got plenty of other features coming for Excelsior in the coming weeks, and we hope you'll join us on the Season 1 Campaign! Ever upward!

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