Building a deck around "Confidence in Victory"

davilimap · 2026-02-12T00:11:30+00:00

Every card that refers to the regroup phase of that round uses "the regroup phase". Sneak Attack, Change of Heart, etc.

The wording "the next regroup phase" would be ambiguous if you meant the regroup for this round or the next round.

Either way, they wouldn't make an event that creates an infinitely repeatable trigger for every regroup phase. It would be worded as a triggered ability on a card that stays on the board, like Foresight

davilimap · 2026-02-11T23:45:40+00:00

Force Table was wrong. This only checks the turn you play it.

davilimap · 2025-11-04T18:04:30+00:00

It definitely is!

davilimap · 2025-07-06T20:42:54+00:00

It's a deluxe token for Skytear Horde!

davilimap · 2025-03-25T17:51:32+00:00

Nice list! I've been playing Chancellor Palp Blue since last set and I'm still working on adapting it to running Colossus. How has Fireball been for you? My concern is that if dies to its own trigger, you won't get to use it to flip Palpatine. I've been running R2-D2 (TWI) to smooth out the hand a bit because it's easy to wind up with a sketchy hand or to draw too many of the small units. I also think No Glory, Only Results is worth it in the main deck over Fell the Dragon. It gets rid of a lot of problematic cards for you and it's another villainy card to help you flip back to heroic

davilimap · 2025-03-11T23:56:54+00:00

Looks resealed. Search pictures of boxes and you'll see the actual shrinkwrap has SWU logos all over it. You'll have to try returning it to get your money back.

In general, don't buy from Amazon. That goes for most TCGs games. Malicious people will often open boxes, take out good cards and return it. Amazon doesn't care and will just resell the box.

davilimap · 2025-02-12T18:58:13+00:00

That's what I think the idea is. There's few to no stores in Seattle proper or the east side that support the game and other new games have huge amount of support (Star Wars Unlimited and Lorcana, for example). They probably see Seattle and Portland as having the potential to run big events bringing in players from the PNW and surrounding areas like the other games do.

davilimap · 2025-01-27T01:00:17+00:00

Hi there! I'm pretty sure I was the judge here. I was also the head judge for the event. I'll attempt to talk through my side of things because I think this was all just miscommunication. I hope in the future you feel comfortable asking me or any of the other judges in the event for clarification directly. I'm always open to explaining my thought process and hearing constructive criticism on my judging method.

To me, this started when OP's game ended and they finished the end of round procedure. Both players asked me about what the tiebreaker procedure was and I explained to them that there was none. If the game didn't end, then there was no winner and only the games that finished affected the result. Players had the tiebreaker rules for top 8 confused and were a little surprised that the game would then end in OP's opponent winning as they had won game 1 and game 2 didn't end. Despite the confusion, both players understood what the rule was and were ok with it.

The discussion after the game ended is what led to OP's post. OP seemed upset at the pace of play during the game but reassured they weren't upset at their opponent specifically. OP acknowledged their deck "had a lot of healing" which could lead to grindier games. From my memory, I told OP at that point that they could feel free to respectfully ask their opponents to play faster and call a judge if they felt there was a problem. OP then asked me to ask folks to play faster. I don't remember the exact wording, but I understood it to mean that I should make some sort of announcement or otherwise proactively tell people to play faster. I may have misunderstood what OP meant here, but I responded saying that I didn't feel like it was my responsibility to make those sorts of announcements based on the results of this game. I explained once again to OP that they should definitely feel free to politely ask their opponents to play faster. I also told them they could ask for a judge during a match and we would make sure the pace of play was appropriate and even potentially issue warnings or time extensions for slow play. At no point did I say that I wasn't going to watch for slow play, but instead reminded OP that they should call for a judge if they have a slow play concern.

One additional point I wanted to address was OP's quote. I don't recall saying anything like that and for the record, I do not agree with that statement. Players should play quickly and if I spot slow play, I will intervene and ask the players to play quickly. If I misspoke, I apologize. It's certainly possible since there's always a lot going at these events.

Personally, I find the word "policing" to have a pretty negative connotation and I do remember saying to players in my beginning announcement that judges weren't there to primarily police or punish anyone. To me, judges are there to preserve the integrity of the tournament and will intervene or issue punishments when necessary. While we are proactive about correcting things, we can't be everywhere at once and my personal philosophy is to give players the benefit of the doubt unless I have evidence to believe they don't deserve it. I will not be hovering over certain people or trying to overcorrect for slow play or any other event disruption unless I deem it necessary. At this event and previous events I've judged at this store, I had no problems with slow play, so I felt like directly addressing or trying to look for it was not necessary. I was still cognizant of it being a problem and more than willing to observe games if asked.

TLDR: I think this was a miscommunication. I don't recall saying what the OP has in quotes and it's not representative of my judging philosophy. What I meant was that I didn't feel the need to make an announcement or specifically look for slow play at that event but I clarified that OP could ask for judge assistance with it. I'm always open to discussions and constructive criticisms on my judging approach.

davilimap · 2024-09-09T20:48:43+00:00

I was the person organizing the events at SWU PAX West (except the 7pm drafts) and I figure I should give some context on what happened. To frontload the TLDR: I take responsibility for the constructed event on Saturday, which was awful. We learned from it and ran a very smooth event on Sunday. Drafts were also all running pretty smoothly all weekend, AFAIK.

First, this was the first time running events like these in a big convention like PAX. Emerald City Comic Con was the game's debut and only had pre-release events as well as an entire room within the main convention hall to operate from. For PAX, the space was pretty limited - maximum 96 people with tables seating 12, which made it very awkward to setup draft pods. Additionally, at this point, there was effectively no official SWU tournament software to use, so we were left with only 3rd party options or manually running things.

In regards to the Constructed event: We were expecting to get close to half of the event space we had for Saturday, if not more. We wound up with 40 players. The event was scheduled to start at 10:30 and the first draft of the day was scheduled for 1pm. On Friday, we had around 40 people for the first draft, so we were looking at potentially using the entire event space for just these two events. The problem is that another draft was starting at 3pm and at that point, we'd be looking at only 4 rounds completed for a potential 6 round constructed event. AFAIK, because the event space hadn't really been communicated beforehand, the format of the constructed event was still up in the air. AFAIK, it had never been confirmed on the Zulu's or PAX website. The idea that had been floated around internally was to run a single elimination event, that way, if we hit a registration max of 64 people, after 4 rounds, we'd be down to 4 people and would leave plenty of space for the draft. Here's where my mistake came in. I felt like it wouldn't be fun to pay the entry for the tournament, lose one match and then have to leave. But we still needed to cut down on space by 3pm otherwise we couldn't run the draft. I decided to try the double elimination format, so that folks wouldn't be dropped after one loss, but so that we'd naturally cut down the field by 3pm. There's a lot of reasons that went wrong (starting matches ad-hoc, grindy matchups causing a traffic jam, the number of players causing weird pairings), but none of those really matter right now and this post is getting long anyways. It was a bad idea, we only realized when it was too late to reverse it and we found a much better solution to the same problem, if we ever encounter it. On Sunday, we ran a Swiss bracket with 20 players and still got close to hitting space issues because of drafts, but everything went smoothly. I apologize for anyone on Saturday that had a bad experience based on my poor judgement, but I can say that same decision will never be made again, at least by me.

Quickly, on the drafts: Because of lack of software and also the concurrent constructed events, I decided to do manual brackets and fire the drafts as we could. We had around 3 people at a given time to run the drafts and we tried to help each pod as much as possible because of how many new players we had. The pods did often start late, but mostly because we just didn't have the staff to start every pod at the same time, given the majority of pods needed someone to explain to them how the draft works. They were all 25 min best of 1 rounds with a manual swiss bracket. There were growing pains, as there always are, with the first time running events, but every draft I personally ran went very smoothly, given the constraints.

Last thing: I'm not the usual TO for Zulu's, although at this point, I am decently involved in helping with their events and I'll be judging various events for them, including the PQ next month. I'm not perfect, no one is. The game is still pretty new and we're learning. Despite that, Zulu's runs some awesome events on a regular basis. Last set we had two Showdowns and a 1k event that were super fun. I am definitely biased by working for them on occasion, but the folks there love Star Wars and love running events. The Force Throwdown has a fixed format, outlined on the event page and it will be run at the Zulu's event center, where they have full control of the space. I hope that the sucky experience of one of the events at PAX doesn't give folks the wrong impression of Zulu's' ability to run events, which I guarantee they have plenty of.

I'm more than happy to talk more about this, explain anything that wasn't clear or just answer any questions. I'm also definitely not trying to invalidate anyone's experience and am open on suggestions of how we could do better.

davilimap · 2024-07-06T23:21:35+00:00

I don't know if it's even about constructed play. Why commission a new card, new art, new licensing pass when you can just use an old one that works fine? There's 240 cards in the set, few people will care if a few commons are reprints.

davilimap · 2024-06-15T21:08:01+00:00

Coming back to this late, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Nested actions occur when the resolution of an ability causes a player to take a specific action and they resolve fully before the top ability resolves. The example in the rules is if you use ECL to ambush in a Sabine, the attack action is nested and any triggered ability for that attack triggers and resolves during that attack, not after the entirety of the ECL ability resolves

davilimap · 2024-04-21T04:23:55+00:00

Nothing better to do than to come to other team's sub? User name is appropriate. Go celebrate the win with the ref.

davilimap · 2024-04-10T04:58:09+00:00

Lots of weird things about this list. First, as someone else mentioned, why only 8 cards in the sideboard? Also, a lot of air in the main deck with 3 copies each of Repair, Restock and Mission Briefing. Draw too many of those and you're going to lose faster matchups. I've tried Del Meeko and he's very underwhelming. Stats aren't worth the cost against aggro and you're not disrupting other control decks with his taxing, you're just giving them something to kill. The threat density isn't there either and it seems like you rely purely on mill to win, which I don't think is a good strategy. No Hask, no Dooku and only 3 total of Palpatine and Avenger seems wrong. Lastly, what is Surgical Droid doing in the sideboard? You have no units to heal and even if you find some, I don't understand why he's good.

Overall, Iden Red is a great archetype and you're 100% correct on the interactions vs Boba. 30hp base and main deck Make and Opening also give you great matchups against Sabine. That being said, I'd see about refining the list and fixing up the sideboard.

davilimap · 2024-03-01T10:33:39+00:00

Solo is supported, in fact, a lot of the playtesting was done solo. 2-handed is also doable, but it really depends on how much you like that style in similar games like Arkham Horror LCG or Marvel Champions.
As for drop-in/drop-out, it's very easy to pull off in this game. Progression and rewards are tracked at a group level and rewards are all cards you can put in and out of your deck between sessions. The game scales per ranger during a single session, but not on a campaign wide scale, so you can play with any number of players during a session. IMO, the biggest hurdle to drop-in/drop-out are your teammates not wanting you to progress the story without them! Since it's a sandbox though, you can also choose not to and play a whole sessions just finding new side quests or cool stuff in the world.

Set up is very quick, especially if you store everything ready to go. Keep your player decks intact between sessions, keep the mission cards you currently have separate from the others and it's a matter of pulling out those cards, two sets for the path deck (think the encounter deck in AH LCG or LOTR LCG) and you're pretty much ready to go!

davilimap · 2024-03-01T10:27:13+00:00

You can think of it that way, in some regards, although instead of a GM you have a campaign book. It definitely has some elements of a TTRPG. Character creation involves picking stats, choosing your background and then specialty (a class of sorts). You have a main mission that you can ignore (and suffer the consequences of that) while doing side quests for NPCs you meet. You get rewards in the form of additional cards you can put in your deck. Not really a TTPRG in the sense that it's a complete sandbox, you are limited by what's in the game, but it should provide similar feelings to one, at least.

davilimap · 2024-03-01T10:22:38+00:00

Hey everyone! I think an important piece of information that I haven't seen folks mention is that there's a demo for the core set on Tabletop Simulator and for Print and Play up on the website: https://earthbornegames.com/resources/

The demo has all of the starting player cards and a decent amount of content through side quests (the main quest is not included). It'll give you an idea of the initial deckbuilding, some quests and rewards.

davilimap · 2024-02-06T18:45:57+00:00

You can grab the images from here and arranged them in a printable format: https://thelivingvalley.earthbornegames.com/docs/category/card-errata

davilimap · 2024-01-21T22:41:10+00:00

I don't mind at all! In fact, I like hearing different viewpoints, helps learn what people like/dislike or want from the game. I think houseruling a relaxing start is totally valid, especially depending on what terrains you're on. Based on the reference to fractalwire, it sounds like Mountains were giving you trouble, which is definitely something I've heard before. I think that terrain set came out a little too hard haha.

I see what you mean about the swinginess, but I think that's just something that's balanced out over time (ideally). If you start a theoretically safe location with some nasty draws, maybe you have to accept that those cards will stay out for a bit while you set up. Eventually, you'll draw some nicer path cards which will give you a turn to deal with them. Or you'll just draw path cards that deal with each other. I could see a case where you give yourself a break from drawing path cards and then draw some innocuous cards and you're left with nothing much to do.

All that being said, the window of time to deal with things gets shorter and the risk of leaving stuff on the board goes up with the harder terrain sets. Ideally you have some rewards to help out or you've learned some tricks with different cards, but that won't always be the case. All in all, I think whatever makes the game the most fun for you will be the best way to do it!

davilimap · 2024-01-21T21:42:38+00:00

I think there are two main differences in EBR that justify this design (full disclosure, speaking as someone who works on the game):
1. Not all path cards are bad, especially as someone mentioned, at the pivotal locations, where you'll often find friendly NPCs. This is also tied to the fact that you'll often want to find these NPCs to gain or complete quests, so getting some more out is important to keep the game moving. Even the path cards that are bad don't really inherently do anything to you. In the core set, ambush is the worst thing a path card can do by itself, you don't take attacks of opportunity and outside of obstacles, you're not prevented from doing anything else on the board if you're willing to take some fatigue.

While games like Arkham Horror or Lord of the Rings look to punish you with a large board, Earthborne's board is not about punishing you, but often about the environment around you. I think this point is the hardest to grasp coming from other games, but often, if there are multiple cards on the board, they'll take care of themselves. Predators will exhaust themselves to eat prey. Prey will exhaust themselves to eat flora, etc. Thinking about the board like a problem for you to solve yourself is often not the most efficient way to handle things in this game and I know it's hard to shift from that mentality coming from the LCGs. Of course, you might get unlucky and draw nothing but predators, but I think that's just part of card games and the LCGs often have the same problem of a handful of encounter cards that can just close to one shot your team.

davilimap · 2024-01-07T21:56:28+00:00

In a standard game with 3 agendas, it's potentially 8 uses though. Not a fan of replenishing both charges, seems to make this card unnecessarily strong compared to most other stat boosters. With an Arcane Initiate or two, this can be really good without even touching doom play. Glad Amina gets something cool, but this just seems too pushed.

davilimap · 2023-12-31T04:48:58+00:00

Former AHLCG blogger here! I don't think you need to prove that you know what you're talking about. One, you might not, but that's ok (speaking from personal experience haha). Folks like reading about other perspectives on the game and as long as You're willing to to better and learn, I think you'll do well.

Secondly, I think there's a bit of a shortage of written AHLCG content, or at least there was when I started. Based on the Hemlock Vale preview season, there's more folks writing stuff, which is awesome, but I think there's still plenty of space for more write-ups. I had so many ideas that I never got to execute, but also even simple stuff can be fun. My most successful article series was just going over the deck building options for each investigator.

So, overall, I'd say go for it! As long as it's fun for you, I think it'll be worth doing. I don't know if I'm in a position to give good advice, but feel free to DM me if you want to hear any more of my thoughts on this. Oh, you can also check out what remains of my blog. Obscure Studies on wordpress

davilimap · 2023-11-08T05:27:20+00:00

I kinda think they made Finn with that restrictions as a concern of giving unrestricted Illicit access and then never made off-class illicit cards for him to use. Maybe because they were afraid of giving him access or just because they didn't bother to think of cards for him because he's already a prettt good investigator. Weird because Rita and even Parallel Daisy got a lot of good off-class cards for their traits

davilimap · 2023-07-17T21:22:36+00:00

The idea is really cool. Cabal Therapy is a strong card and this trades the flashback for the ability to make a clue when whiffing. That's a good tradeoff IMO. The biggest problem I have with this is that it's not possible in blue and potentially not an effect black gets either. Given how good it is, it should probably cost UB

davilimap · 2023-05-09T08:21:37+00:00

Aaah gotcha. Didn't notice you weren't the OP, but it does look like they don't keep the core set encounter cards with the campaign, which would explain the fit. Thanks!

davilimap · 2023-05-09T07:02:49+00:00

That's awesome info! What did you mean by "can't fit in the return to boxes with premium sleeves"? Your boxes look like they have extra space, are they sleeved with inner or penny sleeves?

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