This forums is for questions, answers, and discussion about First Edition rules, formats, and expansions.
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First Edition Creative Manager
By KazonPADD (Paddy Tye)
 - First Edition Creative Manager
 -  
1E European Continental Runner-Up 2023
1E The Neutral Zone Regional Champion 2023
#570674
Hello all, and welcome to a very theoretical Friday Question!

Let’s assume Decipher never decided to switch to producing 2E. It’s 2002, The Motion Pictures is about to release, there is no All Good Things or Enterprise Collection. What’s the next Expansion going to be? Clearly Nemesis and Enterprise are the newest properties on the block, but they’ve just done a Movie set and Enterprise needs some time to develop first, so let’s discount those options: where do they take STCCG* next?

Maybe they flesh out that Maquis icon? Maybe they focus on the later seasons of DS9 or Voyager? Maybe they copy the CC and go back to breathe new life into TNG? Maybe they explore the Animated Series?

Where do you go next?

(* I can’t call it 1E, there only is one edition!)
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By stressedoutatumc (stressedoutatumc)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
#570682
I think it would have been a good time for Decipher to evaluate the game and refine/re-define/cleanup mechanics/timing issues/etc.

Then, I would think they would be able to identify what "new" mechanic they are bringing with the next set or block. To use MTG as an example, every new block typically brings a new ability that adds to the complexity of the existing mechanics and also provides a reason to build a new block of cards.

I think Decipher was kinda doing that and so far the CC has been doing that as well. For example, in SSTTR, it may have been some tweaking, but the idea of rewarding and not outright punishing for staying "in-era" with [CF] offers a freshness.

So, I think the real questions for the CC is what are the most problematic areas of the game right now that can be fixed, what new mechanics can be introduced and NOT break the game, and what era/episode/movie etc best accomplishes those goals.
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By Iron Prime (Dan Van Kampen)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Moderator
#570686
I think they would have headed to a Reflections II.
I would have loved for them do a clean-up and rerelease; sorta like the Magic core sets. But I really doubt they would have done that
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#570701
Honestly, I think they do a whole set based on Nemesis. They pushed NEM hard in 2E's premiere set, and I think the same happens if they stick to 1E. Since one movie probably can't carry an entire expansion (unless the movie is FC), I suspect they'd do a "villains" theme, like they did for the Adversaries Collection a few years later.

Otherwise, the Maquis.
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First Edition Art Manager
By jjh (Johnny Holeva)
 - First Edition Art Manager
 -  
#570712
Fun question. Great answers.

Decipher pulled off a soft reset/re-launch of Star Wars CCG with the Special Edition expansion. Cleaned up rules and brought a lot of playability into it with Objectives.

I think this could have happened with Star Trek: a "Special Edition"-ish super-sized expansion with Mains from across the Trek Properties and SW-style Objectives to soft re-launch the game.

A Trekkie can dream…
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By GooeyChewie (Nathan Miracle)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Architect
#570726
I don't think the fact that the previous expansion was The Motion Pictures would have stopped them from making the next expansion Nemesis. And I agree with BCSWowbagger that they would have leaned into the "Nemesis" name and focused on villains, or more broadly on [NemR] [NemL] icons.

Call to Arms introduced Borg and Dominion to 2E. More germane to this discussion, it added Terok Nor. In our hypothetical world, I could see Decipher's next big step involving pseudo-treaties. They would take the form of seedable Incidents that nullified your actual treaties but allowed some specific segments of cards to work together (possibly at the cost of not being allowed to use personnel and ships not specifically allowed by the Incident). In this fashion they would expand the Maquis, the Cardassian-Dominion alliance, the Tal Shiar-Obsidian Order alliance, DS9 itself (including Quark by name), and the Duras family/Sela team-up (just for a bit of variety, because a lot of team-ups happen in DS9).

Eventually they would push the limits of these Incidents to include one that allows you to play [Bor] and [Fed] [1E-DQ] together in the same deck, which involves a whole new section of rules to make it work.
 
By Dunnagh (Andreas Micheel)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Contender
#570891
Highly advisable would be something that allows new players to play modern decks without buying tons of displays or single rares from all the sets.

So: New Base set with characters from 3 affiliations, but overall modernized. Better dilemmas especially, Ways to access people from the deck, more modern seed cards that allow for faster gameplay. Downloading people, more card plays / card draws.
Basically what happened in the virtual Set "The next Generation"
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By Smiley (Cristoffer Wiker)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#570892
I would think that they would have had to reevaluate the situation more level headed and introduced rotation to the game as there had been uncontrolled power creep since TwT and forward, with the biggest offender being Voy.

This to make the game more accessible to new players, make the experience less of a 2-player solitaire where you watch your opponent do card juggling for 15 mins straight before you are allowed to do anything yourself.

It would have been a sobering but hard thing to do.
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By Ensign Q
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#570894
Iron Prime wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 11:32 am I think they would have headed to a Reflections II.
I would have loved for them do a clean-up and rerelease; sorta like the Magic core sets. But I really doubt they would have done that
but reflections kinda is that? rerelease and errata of existing cards with some foils to drive the sales.
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By Iron Prime (Dan Van Kampen)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Moderator
#570901
Reflections is more a re-packaging of product with little other effort.

Technically errata makes it in there - but only because it was already done and in the latest print file...
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Executive Officer
By jadziadax8 (Maggie Geppert)
 - Executive Officer
 -  
2E North American Continental Semi-Finalist 2023
ibbles  Trek Masters Tribbles Champion 2023
2E Deep Space 9 Regional Champion 2023
#570930
Smiley wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 4:15 am I would think that they would have had to reevaluate the situation more level headed and introduced rotation to the game as there had been uncontrolled power creep since TwT and forward, with the biggest offender being Voy.

This to make the game more accessible to new players, make the experience less of a 2-player solitaire where you watch your opponent do card juggling for 15 mins straight before you are allowed to do anything yourself.

It would have been a sobering but hard thing to do.
I highly doubt that Decipher would have introduced set rotation even if they'd stuck with 1E. They had the opportunity to build 2E with a block mindset from the beginning of the game and chose not to do so.
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By Cartagia
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
#570944
BCSWowbagger wrote: Fri Jan 28, 2022 1:17 pm Honestly, I think they do a whole set based on Nemesis. They pushed NEM hard in 2E's premiere set, and I think the same happens if they stick to 1E. Since one movie probably can't carry an entire expansion (unless the movie is FC), I suspect they'd do a "villains" theme, like they did for the Adversaries Collection a few years later.

Otherwise, the Maquis.
I think the only reason it wouldn't have been NEM is that the movie didn't come out until the very end of the year. I'm thinking it would have probably been Reflections II, like a lot of folks have said. Maybe with premium cards, like they started doing with Star Wars.

Then it would have been NEM.
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By Smiley (Cristoffer Wiker)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#571285
No one really spells it out when introducing a new game. And not doing it have killed most, if not all games since the introduction of CCG's that did not meet a low player base death before. And waiting too long just prolonged it. Even LCG's came to the same conclusion.
jadziadax8 wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 3:41 pm
Smiley wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 4:15 am I would think that they would have had to reevaluate the situation more level headed and introduced rotation to the game as there had been uncontrolled power creep since TwT and forward, with the biggest offender being Voy.

This to make the game more accessible to new players, make the experience less of a 2-player solitaire where you watch your opponent do card juggling for 15 mins straight before you are allowed to do anything yourself.

It would have been a sobering but hard thing to do.
I highly doubt that Decipher would have introduced set rotation even if they'd stuck with 1E. They had the opportunity to build 2E with a block mindset from the beginning of the game and chose not to do so.
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#571305
Smiley wrote: Fri Feb 04, 2022 11:00 pmAnd not doing it [set rotation] have killed most, if not all games since the introduction of CCG's that did not meet a low player base death before. And waiting too long just prolonged it. Even LCG's came to the same conclusion.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just putting some context around this.

***

Magic: the Gathering has some non-rotating formats.

One of them is Modern. It currently has 16,117 cards in it.

However, after Modern reached 13,894 cards, Wizards decided that that was too large a card pool to be manageable to normal players.

So they introduced Pioneer. Pioneer had 6,773 cards in it at launch. (It now has 8,996 cards.) Wizards considered this a manageable card pool -- assuming it was helped along by a ban list, of course.

Magic Standard Format does rotate. It currently has about 1,800 cards in it, which is about average.

Magic Standard routinely peaks at just over 2,000 cards before rotation. The largest Standard cardpool ever was in July 2021, when Standard hit 2,150 cards.

***

The Star Trek CCG (First Edition) Constructed Complete OTF card pool contains a grand total of 3,928 cards. That's it. Twenty-seven years of this card game have amounted to a little under 4,000 total cards.

***

It may be the case that 1E will someday develop a card pool so large and so unlearnable that we will have to implement set rotation in order to maintain a viable game.

But our current card pool is barely half the size of Magic's "training wheels" non-rotating format, a quarter of the size of Magic's actual non-rotating format maintained via ban list, and less than double the size of Magic's actual rotating format (which must be relearned by all players every couple of years anyway).

So the day when we must introduce set rotation may be coming, but it is probably still a long way off.

If we did introduce set rotation to First Edition, and tried to follow Magic's approximate card pool sizes, then our sets would rotate approximately every twelve years.

For now, the ban list + aggressive errata + universal printability (a huge advantage Magic doesn't have!) seems adequate. If we're failing to recruit players under these circumstances, it seems to me that it's probably due to other factors, like overly complicated rules, insufficient novice-friendly materials, inadequate marketing, or just fundamentally unpopular gameplay.
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