Resource Management In ED Deck Design

or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Straightforward Designs

by Rich Pizor

I believe in the KISS principle when designing ED decks. The following extended discussion on the design evolution of the Jawa Clan deck (available on the Jawas page) provides an example of why this is.

The origin of the Jawa Clan deck is as humble as it is obvious - they are my girlfriend's all-time favorite critter from the Star Wars universe, and she wanted a deck that featured them. So, being a semi-pro Photoshopper, an inveterate Star Wars geek, and a hopelessly addicted ED junkie, I decided to give it a shot.

After doing some research on the Jawas, I determined the following characteristics that I felt were key to representing them:

- Contrary to what you might expect from the movie, they are not nomadic; they live in tight-knit tribes, with only "raiding parties" going out in sandcrawlers to scavenge for things to fix and sell

- They are not cowards, but they prefer to fight from the shadows, using cunning and sabotage rather than all out brawl

- Different members of the tribe serve different, specialized functions, but all Jawas are expected to be able to defend the homestead - even children

Armed with this data, I put together a deck that would be different from every other deck out there. Instead of one big and one or two lesser characters, it would feature a swarm of 5 small characters, all with access to the same pool of cards, and always able to move all members of the clan regardless of your roll. In an attempt to counter balance this, they would have to get close to do damage - their attack value fell one point per space between target and attacker unless it was a droid. I also carefully built a unique basic deck of 19 cards, specifically designed to be weaker than any conceivable major/minor combination.

It was an overpowered disaster. The weak little Jawa Clan was consistently taking all comers - even Obi Wan. The only deck that ever managed to defeat the 1.0 incarnation was Darth Vader, and then only by Choking most of them. However, it was an instructive failure, because it taught me some of the basics of ED resource management - and, by extension, which rules you can and cannot break.

Why would a deck designed from the ground up to be weak turn out so indominable? A number of reasons:

- EACH CHARACTER HAD ACCESS TO 24 COMBAT CARDS

At the end of the day, if you have 5 characters that can all attack equally well, it doesn't matter if their cards are underpowered - you'll *always* be able to get one of them into attack position, and you'll *always* be able to defend against the retaliatory follow-up attack. In this case it was a rather high number - 19 basic cards and 5 power attacks. It was virtually assured that any character that was in position to attack could do so, and that any character who was attacked could defend for *something*. Every time.

- EACH CHARACTER HAD EQUAL ACCESS TO 7 SPECIAL CARDS

In more than half of the Hasbro decks, only the major character has access to special cards, and when the minor character *does* have access to them, they are less varied and generally less useful. However, I'd created a few different varities of special cards to better reflect the diverse nature of the tribe's special skills, and given all the Jawas equal access to them (except 1, which could only be played if the Jawa "shamen" was still alive)

- KILLING 6+5+4 IS NOT THE SAME AS KILLING 15

The deck consists of 5 Jawas, valued at 6, 5, 4, 3, and 3 hitpoints. The "major" character is considered dead when the three high-point Jawas are eliminated. In theory that sounds about balanced, but in practice it's more difficult to eliminate the 3 smaller figures, even if they have lower HP, and especially if they have access to a metric ton of defense cards. This is because they can scatter around the board - attacking from range if they wish, or simply taking the hit, under the belief that they can still get one shot of next turn and you've got 2 others that need killing before you lose.

So the 1.1 version came into being. This one toned things down a little, tieing each Special and most Power cards to specific "major" Jawas, and dropping a couple combat cards in defernce to more (and not especially powerful) Special cards. This helped, but the basic problem of the swarm mentality remained; as long as all Jawas had equal access to a large pool of basic combat cards, it was uncharacteristically difficult to kill them. This makes sense when you think about it; there isn't a single deck where any one character has access to more than 13 defense cards, but the Jawas all shared a common pool of 17 defense cards. Very few decks have more than 17 attacks, so short of the Jawa player having zero cards in hand, it was almost mathematically impossible to ever attack a Jawa in such a way that it couldn't defend.

So for 1.2, I did what I had been trying to avoid all along; I dropped the unique structure of the deck. 10 "major" combat cards between the three important Jawas, 9 "minor" cards between the other two, and all remaining cards assigned to one Jawa in particular. This allowed me to formulate my Basic Laws of Card Distribution:

1) No one character should have access to more than 10 basic combat cards.

2) Basic combat cards must be split between major and minor characters.

3) Power combat cards must be tied to individual characters.

In this version, the Jawa Chieftan had lots of the power and special cards - partly because it seemed to make sense, he being the Cheiftan and all, partly as a way to mimic the standard major/minor splits of power and special cards. That's when I discovered the deck's newest major design flaw:

- EXPENDABLE CHARACTERS MUST HAVE LESS THAN HALF THE TOTAL CARDS IN THE DECK

Even in a deck where the major and minor split the 12 power/special cards directly down the middle, it still leaves the minor with 15 cards to the major's 16. This is important, because of the two, the major is the only character guaranteed to be on the board until the end of the game (assuming a one on one duel, of course). So if the only character who is guaranteed to be there has access to less than 50% of the cards, the deck is at a major disadvantage; as it was, the Cheiftan had 16 of the cards, but the other two major Jawas only had 13 each. This law quickly became Law #4.

To account for this, I changed up the distribution of powers and specials - 3 to each of the named Jawas, and 3 that any jawa, major or minor, could use. The deck is still at a slight disadvantage since it's relatively easy for a named minor to die before he's used his 3 dedicated cards, but that's the price you pay for uniqueness.

The new version of the deck played very much more like I would expet the Jawas to play - in fact, a little TOO much like that, as it was now almost impossible for the Jawas to win. This might be realistic, but it wasn't very fun to play. The main problem was that, now that the major Jawas had radically less defense than before, they would die almost instantly when getting next to a target to inflict maximum damage - sure, they could snipe Battle Droid and SBD minors at range, but there's only 4 droid characters out of 31 in the base set, and none of them majors. So in the interest of game balance, I eliminated the ranged combat rule. The only unique rule that left in play was their ability to move everyone on a green die roll, and in practice the way I implemented it was more of a headache than it was worth to figure out, so I just eliminated that rule altogether.

In the end, the Jawas still have one unique element remaining: multiple major characters, a trait which I don't think any other deck replicates. Even in its now more balanced (and more weakened) state, the deck gives you unique options and strategies based on that fact, but it's no longer the overpowered Super Jawas of yore. Still, it was a useful exercise for what it taught me (and by extension, anyone who read my design notes) about how tight the design constraints on ED decks really are, and as my last game with the deck proves, they're strong enough to be fun.

Of course the girlfriend still keeps the 1.0 version around for when she just wants to win.