The Design Strikes Back
I don't know who at Decipher was responsible for turning this game around, but they did a
heroic job. Did the game still have problems? Absolutely. But a lot of the biggest issues got addressed, and the play experience improved dramatically.
Anti-Bullshit #1: Objectives
When the game first came out, each player only got to start with one location card in play. The Special Edition rulebook let you start with an Objective instead. And you did, because they were great! Objectives might be my favorite CCG thing ever. Let's look at an example.
An Objective is a double-sided card. It starts with its 'zero' side face-up.
The zero side puts a number of cards into play, has some sort of effects, and includes a condition that will flip the card to its reverse side.
This particular card puts into play a prison location, a Leia imprisoned there, the location you have to get Leia to, and associated docking bays that make getting from the Death Star to Yavin 4 pretty easy. Its effects are to prevent you from putting certain cards on the Death Star, to make cards that release prisoners uncounterable, to prevent you from playing a Nabrun Leids, a teleport-effect card that would trivialize the rescue operation, and to remove itself from play if Leia is removed as a battle casualty.
To flip the card you have to move Leia to her destination, but as a prisoner she can't leave by herself, and trying would most likely result in her being removed as a casualty and scrapping the objective. So you have to put together a team, send them in to get her, and then fight their way out again. In short, exactly the kind of thematic Star Wars gameplay that was missing previously. Also, the Dark Side player has a strong incentive to make the rescue as difficult as possible, because the reward on the other side is crazy go nuts.
I'm not going to go into the details; it's a series of combat buffs that will make the Dark Side player's life very difficult.
Here's a very popular Dark Side objective that also addresses some of the spam plays.
Thematically, this punishes your opponent for not having Obi-Wan or Luke (or a version of Leia) where you can easily send Vader to get them, and rewards you for getting them with Vader. It's pretty awesome. But it also hoses Sense and Alter, and self-destructs if you play Scanning Crew (a spam card that would also be pretty unfair in this situation).
Objectives reshaped the entire game. Previously, a deck had been about exploiting particular card interactions; now they were about playing variations on cool moments from the source material. You'd show up with a Jedi Training deck and a Death Star deck, and your opponent would show up with a Hidden Base deck and a Carbonite Freezing deck, and you'd get some really interesting interactions. Sometimes you'd get a directly opposed match, like a Death Star/Blow up the Death Star clash, and things would be
fraught.
They even started to print more support for stormtroopers.
So all was well, right? Well, mostly.
Anti-Bullshit #2 + Bullshit #4: Ban No Ban & the Arcane References
The Magic bans of '94 must have been really unpopular. I remember the old L5R ad that boasted 'Zero Banned, Zero Restricted.' Anyway, Decipher had a firm commitment to never explicitly banning any SWCCG cards, no matter how stupid or bad for the game they were. Instead, they implicitly banned those cards with effects on
other cards.
In the Death Star II set, they introduced Starting Interrupts. Now you could start the game with either a Location or Objective, and a Starting Interrupt in addition. The original Starting Interrupts just searched your deck for some Effects and put them in play.
And at the same time, cards like this showed up.
Oh look, it's a card with a small but meaningful effect that also happens to hard counter two of the most notorious spam cards in the game. If you showed up with a traditional package of 10-15 of either of those, they became blank and you lost super hard. The opportunity cost to playing Your Insight Serves You Well was so low that anyone who hated the cards it blanked (spoiler: almost everyone) could drop it in and create an environment where Scanning Crew and 3720 To 1 weren't banned, but might as well have been.
What the fuck, right? It's like the worst of both worlds. The people who'd have been mad about an outright ban weren't fooled by the 'stealth' ban, they got mad anyway. Also, it clogged the design space for some of the otherwise best sets with cards whose only real purpose was fixing previous bad cards, allowing those bad cards to project their badness forward in time.
Finally, it was very off-putting to new players. If you got into the game after Death Star II dropped, you might never know that Insert Odds decks, or Scaninator decks, or other similar nonsense, ever existed. And you'd be better off for not knowing. But you'd also be mystified by the prolific references to old weird cards that nobody seemed to play. SWCCG was never the most accessible game, and the not-ban cards made it
worse.
I mean, the most important thing was that the stupidest cards stopped being played and the less-stupid but still abusable cards were much reduced in their abuse. It was a worthy goal that was accomplished in a dumb way.
In a similar vein, they also refused to explicitly errata cards. When it turned out that the Rescue the Princess objective was overly vulnerable to losing Leia and self-destructing, they printed this:
About half that text is errata for another card.
Before the Dark Times, Before the Prequels
The year 2000 was the height of the game. The environment was diverse and robust; and play was thoughtful, thematic, and exciting. It wasn't perfect, but it was a good time. The Death Star II set had swept away the last remnants of the old stupidity, and the Reflections II set did a very creditable job of introducing popular Extended Universe elements without getting stupid over everything.
Strong, but not fanboy overpowered.
Then the Phantom Menace ruined everything. Predictable, really.