By Blaze99960

So you're interested in designing a deck for Star Wars Epic Duels (or at least one that uses the same game mechanics)? Good. Well this is the place to be then. We're going to walk through some of the most basic deck design ideas and then send you to learn the best way possible: from experience. Let's begin.

If you haven't already, download and install Corey Andalora's program Epic Duels Deck Designer, which can be found here. You should scroll down to the section titled Downloads: and click on the latest version (as of December 2012 it is v0.8.9). Save the file and install the program. (Note: this program is Windows only, as of December 2012 there has been no Mac-compatible version developed)

The Deck Designer program is the best way to quickly and easily create decks to test. If you have lower (but IMO acceptable) standards for the art quality of your decks this will also be how you print the final versions to play with (more on that later). If you prefer higher-quality art you will need to use some advanced image editing software in addition to scans of the original decks; we will not be learning this method in this guide.

When you open the Deck Designer program the first thing you see at the top is the Menu bar, leave this for now. Below that, in the middle, is the list of the cards currently created in your deck. Along the left edge are tools to create new cards and change the art on the back of the cards. Along the right are additional commands. (We'll come back to them). Below that is the number of each type and total cards. Finally, at the bottom is the characters and their HP. We'll explain how to use these functions once we've gone over the structure of an Epic Duels deck.

An Epic Duels deck is composed of 31 cards. In a standard layout, there are 10 basic combat cards for the major character, 9 for the minor character, and 12 Talent cards (Specials and Power Combat). The 12 Talent cards are typically divided up into 6 different cards, with quantities of 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1 (although some decks, notably Palpatine, use 4, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1).

Each Epic Duels character has one major character and either one or two minor characters. If there's one, the minor is called a personality minor; if there's two, they are called generic minors. They also each have health. If the minor characters are generic, they won't have more than five HP; if they're personality, they can have anywhere between 7 and 15 health, averaging around 10. Major characters have anywhere between 13 and 20 HP, averaging between 16-17. If you want a more detailed analysis of the patterns of HP levels (and other components of a deck), read Character Trait Trends.

The basic combat cards of major and minor character come in prearranged sets (although you're technically allowed to make your own, if you want). Obi-Wan John's excellent article Basic Deck Design by OWJ walks you through it in more detail, but I'll provide a summary of the basics.

There are three basic decks for melee major characters: Red, Blue, and Green. Red is for characters who are aggressive or dominating in combat (ex. Darth Maul). Blue is for balanced characters (ex. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Count Dooku). Green is for conservative or defensive characters (ex. Yoda).

There are also three accepted decks for ranged major characters: Yellow, Yellow+ and Orange. Yellow is the basic shooter deck (utilized by both the Fetts), Yellow+ is slightly better (used by Han Solo), and Orange is for characters who are borderline melee characters (Orange is a fan-created basic deck). In general, Yellow is rarely used in custom decks because of its weakness.

There are four basic decks for minor characters: Weak, Strong, Strong+ and Strong++ (creative names, I know). They are all for ranged minors (although the Strong++ deck, it could be argued, is for melee characters, see Card Wordings) The weak deck is reserved for generic minors who are grunts (AKA cannon-fodder, meat-shields, etc; ex. Clone Troopers, Battle Droids, Stromtroopers). The Strong deck is one step up, it is for average minor characters (ex. Padme, Greedo, Zam, Leia). The Strong+ deck is for powerful minor characters (ex. Super Battle Droids, Chewbacca). The Strong++ deck is only used in the Royal Guard/Crimson Guards and is for the strongest of the minor characters (almost nobody). It should also be noted that there are many custom basic decks that are commonly accepted (all of which can be found on Basic Deck Design by OWJ).

Now that you know the basic organization of a deck, you need to do some research on your character. Learn his (or her) personality, how he fights, what he lives like, etc. For Star Wars characters some good sites to use are Wookiepedia (I especially like the Personality & Traits and/or Skills & Abilities sections, at the bottom of any character entry) and the Star Wars Encyclopedia

So now that you know about your character, we need to translate what you've found into a theme/strategy, which is then translated into his/her Talent and basic combat cards. The theme or strategy of a character is, in essence, how they win a duel (read more about it in this forum post). Pick a basic combat deck that matches your character's theme as best you can. Then, start coming up with ideas for cards that will match your character's theme. For example, if he fights hit-and-run, do an attack card with movement; if he is very defensive, do a few powerful defense cards and limit his attacks; if he disables opponents, focus on discarding; if he's better in a crowd, make cards that damage all adjacent enemies; if he's multi-faceted, give him a variety of Talent cards. This is where the skill of making a deck comes in, and is inherently the most difficult part to learn. I would take a look at other well-designed custom decks (anything in the 10YA set is high-quality, and so are the EU decks) and look at how they translated the character's style into the deck's theme, and the deck's theme into specific cards.

For instructions & hints on using the Deck Designer program, scroll to the bottom.

Once you've finished (and don't worry, it takes practice and many revisions to get it right) play with it. An easy way to do this digitally is to download and install Vassal. (For Vassal Instructions scroll to the bottom) You can export it to Vassal and play with a friend or against yourself there, or print it off (on plain-old paper) and play with (low-ink option: File>Draft Print Preview>[Print Icon]; otherwise, File>Export>Deck to pdf). This is called play-testing (playing with a deck in progress). I usually play against benchmark characters like Dooku, Obi-wan and Han; some people play their characters against every original character. When you're playing, observe how the theme works out, and if it matches the theme you wanted. It probably won't, so go back and change the deck, or change your theme. Keep changing until the deck and theme match up. Additionally, when you make changes, you can adjust the strength of the deck by raising or lowering values of cards. If it's too weak, raise attack or defense values, movement values, discards on opponents, draws, etc; if it's too strong, do the opposite. Don't be afraid to change card effects, change quantities, card names, HP, etc— anything is fair game.

Once you have your deck to the point where it plays like you want it to and is as strong as you want it, print it off. You can create a pdf file of your deck by going to File>Export>Deck to pdf in the Deck Designer. Most people use 110lb cardstock (possibly high gloss). You can get characters, if it's in the Star Wars universe, from the game Star Wars Miniatures (just search your character's name and "Star Wars Minis").

That's all for this introduction. The best way to move up to the next level is to start be reading all of the other Component Design Articles, I especially recommend Basic Deck Design by OWJ, Character Trait Trends, Design This!, Fully Operational: Scene, Theme, and Character Decks, Fully Operational: Collectible Card Game Design in Epic Duels Design, and Fully Operational: Aggressive vs. Conservative. Meanwhile start reading forum posts, especially in the New Custom Decks section. Finally, and most importantly, keep practicing your design skills. Most people post their decks to the forum when they've got them to a workable level so that others in the community can critique the deck (when posting your deck for critique, it will be helpful to copy-paste a text version, which can be generated by going to File>Export>Deck to text).

Glossary of words or acronyms you may encounter:

Balance(d): whether a character is at a fair strength compared to other characters

Direct Damage (DD): damage done by Special cards (cannot be blocked)

ED: Epic Duels

EU: Expanded Universe

IMO: In My Opinion

NPE: Negative Play Experience, explained here

PTV: Path to Victory, roughly how a character wins

Deck Designer Instructions/Hints:

Using the deck designer is fairly self-explanatory, but here's some directions anyways. When you want to add a basic combat set for a character don't do it card-by-card, go to Combat in the menu bar and find the one you want. For adding Talent cards, use the New Card button on the left. Within the card editing dialog: the quantity of the card in the deck is at the bottom as Count; the title of the card is under Mechanics>Name while the name of the character is Character>Character; you can adjust the size of the corresponding text so that it can all fit, and you can change the color of the card. HINT: Once you have the art set for one type of card (any major talent card, any major combat card, any minor combat card, etc.) you can copy those art setting to all other similar cards by selecting that card and clicking Apply To..., then selecting all the same type cards. There are similar controls for Health (at the bottom), for generic minors select Duo under Card Type>Subtype. Remember that if your character is a shooter you need to set that under Mechanics>Ability. One last note, on the right side there are commands for Deck Location. This is the location of the deck within the EXT window on Vassal. When releasing the Vassal version of your deck on the wiki you need to make sure it's not in the same position as any other deck by referencing/registering on the Extensions Registry.

Vassal Instructions:

After downloading and installing Vassal, download and install the Epic Duels module here. Save the file SWED3-2.vmod and then open Vassal. Go File>Import Module and find and select SWED3-2.vmod. You now have ED installed in Vassal. To export your deck from the Deck Designer to Vassal go to File>Export>Deck to Vassal (SWED 3.2) and save the file. Then, in Vassal, right click on the ED module in the main screen and select Add Extension. Find and select your file, then double click on the Epic Duels module to open it. If you're playtesting alone, select offline; if you're doing it with another computer select look for a game online. Your deck can be found under the EXT

tab at the top.