“They said, ‘Oh, this is good. Some virtual cards change the abilities of existing cards, while others add objects and characters that weren’t already in the game. A newer, more advanced platform called GEMP—whose name, fittingly, refers to a coming-of-age ceremony—requires less expertise. Lucasfilm declined, citing a lack of infrastructure and a preference for outsourcing production to an outside entity. Decipher, Inc. is an American company that produces several collectible card games. The reset, coupled with the renewed interest in Star Wars that’s accompanied the wave of new movies, has helped generate the new recruits that the PC needs to keep the community from dying. In 2001, Decipher attempted to capitalize further on their successful Star Wars games by creating a third game called Jedi Knights Trading Card Game. “It keeps you thinking,” Westergard says. 4.6 out of 5 stars 4. “Playing perfect poker is something that computers have started to be able to approximate, and the best humans can at least reasonably begin to imitate, depending on the variant. “We also had access to their props department and had high-quality photographs taken of all these little do-dads and props and things that are in the movie,” Braunlich adds. None of them has exploded the way Decipher’s game did in the ’90s, or inspired the same kind of community dedication. Decipher Star Wars CCG Enhanced Cloud City Slave I Starter Deck BRAND. “Magic players love to talk about how Magic is the most complex game,” he says, not needing much prompting to start smack-talking the SWCCG’s old rival (and indirect inspiration). Although Biesterfeld says he’s picked up a number of valuable programming skills while working on GEMP, his motives—like those of seemingly everyone else who supports the SWCCG—are mostly selfless. The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game Mines of Moria Gandalf Starter Deck Rating Required Select Rating 1 star (worst) 2 stars 3 stars (average) 4 stars 5 stars (best) Name “You realize when you play other games just how much better the mechanics of this one are, and just how much more enjoyable it is to feel like you have more control over it,” Gogolen says. “His pick this year meant more than any, ever,” Smith says. (He didn’t say it off the record, either. One byproduct of SWCCG’s obsessive attention to detail is that even if longtime players can’t remember every rule, they have near-perfect recall of Star Wars minutiae. “People are showing their kids how to play now. “I was just amazed at how good they were,” he says. The Star Wars Customizable Card Game was first released in December, 1995 by a company called Decipher, Inc. Over the next six years, the game’s following grew, and with a player base of over 40,000 strong, it became the second most popular trading card game in the world, after Magic: The Gathering. The last set, Theed Palace Limited, was released in the fall of 2001. Some Star Wars CCG players speculate that Decipher’s donation was a means of purchasing players’ loyalty to the brand to juice sales of the company’s now-defunct Star Trek and Lord of the Rings card games, which were then still in print, but Holland denies any ulterior motives. “They were really obsessed with, anything you could see or imagine in the movie had to be represented with the cards, even if it was some stupid thing no one would ever really want to do,” Zinn says. Star Wars Jedi Knights Masters of The Force 11 Card Booster Pack X2. “I definitely thought about it throughout the weekend and any time I felt like I was in trouble in a match.”, Anderson, who says via email that he has achieved remission, adds that he finds Smith’s gesture “gratifying and touching,” but also somewhat surprising, because he and Smith have had only limited interactions in person. But thanks to an all-volunteer team that picked up where the creators left off, Star Wars CCG never went away. “Those relationships have outlasted most of my other high school and college friendships,” Chu says. “Because literally, if the volunteers stop doing things, this game dies.”. Those Decipher-designated “player advocates” would work with the company to shift responsibility for the game’s administration from Decipher to the fans, setting up communication channels, organizing tournaments, settling rules disputes and, as Holland wrote in January 2002, “keeping Star Wars CCG in the limelight for a long time to come.” It was an unprecedented idea born of a desperate situation. For the card game published by Decipher, see Star Wars Customizable Card Game. GEMP notwithstanding, the key to the community’s longevity may be Mark Walseth, a social studies teacher at Rosemount Middle School in Rosemount, Minnesota. Lingrell estimates that the average age of a current SWCCG player is in the “early 30s,” making the typical player old enough to have been a teenager during the Decipher era. After Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast for $325 million in September 1999, Holland says, his smaller company was slowly muscled out. Total Cards: 324 Rating: 7.5 (2 votes) Click here to Rate The resulting game was a success, which convinced Holland to secure the Star Wars license from Lucasfilm and ask Braunlich and Tesh to design Star Wars CCG. 363 Spook Rock Rd. GEMP is a labor of love by Troy Biesterfeld, a software engineer who estimates that he’s sunk about 3,000 hours into the project over the past four years (an average of more than 14 hours per week). “There’s no other thing that I’ve been doing for so long.” The escalating demands of Carulli’s full-time job as a project manager at a translations company are forcing him to cede some of his design responsibilities, but he remains almost awestruck about being a guardian of a game he got into at age 11. In its early years, Decipher made puzzles, party games, and Pente sets, but its business changed soon after a competing company, Wizards of the Coast, released Magic in 1993, starting the customizable/collectible card game craze. Overseeing a large team of testers, they tweaked each card’s attributes until they were confident that the game would be in balance, with no one card or combination of cards from the CCG’s hundreds-deep library lending its owner an unfair advantage. If anything, the game’s reach seems to be spreading. In 2014—the same year that Disney decanonized the expanded universe that predated its purchase of the Star Wars franchise—the Players Committee decided to “reset” its library of virtual cards, which had ballooned to roughly 1,100 and included some early creations that weren’t as well-implemented as later additions. Great deals on Star Wars CCG (Decipher) Trading Card Games. Having fought entropy to a standstill for 17 years, SWCGG seems set to live on indefinitely, preserving an important piece of Star Wars history even as Solo and subsequent films propel the franchise forward. Customer Review. December 23 at 7:15 PM. $11.49 New. Now that ’90s kids have aged into peak buying power, everything ’90s is new again: Tamagotchi pets have returned to stores, Power Rangers and Goosebumps are movie material, and the Spice Girls are getting back together—for lunch, at least. Decipher was originally founded by Warren Holland in 1983 as a games producing company. WARS (Decipher, Inc.) Product/Service. Click here for more tips to help ensure there are no issues with your order. On the weekend after the January weather that exposed the Northeast to new synonyms for “storm,” the external temperatures in New Brunswick, New Jersey, could have killed a tauntaun. “That being said, I actually believe it’s not the literal skills that the game teaches you that are the most important. Decipher could capture an in-focus image of a barely glimpsed alien in the corner of the Cantina and flesh out the franchise’s lore by creating a card out of it, working with Lucasfilm to bestow backstories and names on any character that didn’t already have them. Another byproduct, Zinn notes, is that “the rulebook gets extensively complicated because it has to account for all these crazy corner scenarios, even if they don’t come up in most games.”, That depth can be daunting to NARPs, but experienced players know how to navigate the subtleties of the game. 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By far the best game that Decipher Inc ever held the license to produce, Star Wars Customizable card game will forever live in the land of legend when it comes to trading card games. Home Base Games. Inside the Hyatt Regency hotel, though, Conference Room C was sweltering. Star Wars CCG was first released in December 1995 after game play rights were purchased from a game designer. T… Decipher, Inc. logo. Star Wars: The Old Republic. Get the best deal for Star Wars CCG (Decipher) Trading Card Games from the largest online selection at eBay.com. And because Decipher printed so much stock—and because the present-day SWCCG audience is relatively small—there isn’t much money in the secondary SWCCG card market, either, in contrast to Magic, whose rarest, most collectible cards have become a big business. Fast & Free shipping on many items! Monks Gaming Battlefield - MGB. So there’s not as many people back from ’02, but there’s [still] more than you would think there would be.” Gogolen mentioned a matchup at last year’s world championship between Vince Hutchins—son of veteran player Grady Hutchins—and Matt Sokol, who won the 2000 world championship, the last one administered by Decipher. In February, the community held its first-ever European MPC in Hannover, Germany, drawing enough players to fill out a 32-person bracket. “Because the minute we lose it, our site’s gone.”, Thus far, the community has steered clear of copyright infringement, but continued creation eventually led to a different problem: an unmanageable number of cards. A new TCG in a proprietary Sci-fi Universe that revives the mechanics of Decipher's Original Star Wars CCG. 2 seed) Reid Smith revealed via email that before the event, he’d privately dedicated his performance to John Anderson, a fellow member of the design team who’s been battling acute myeloid leukemia. In the Star Wars TCG, unit cards are placed in three different arenas: Space, Ground, and Character. The WARS Trading Card Game is a trading card game released by Decipher in October 2004 with science fiction themes, using game mechanics from the Star Wars CCG. “You can get a completely terrible opening hand and still come back. Business & Economy Website. While Decipher, Inc., the company that produced and printed the Star Wars CCG no longer prints physical cards, the game continues with a very active playing community. December 23 at 7:15 PM. Expand your options of fun home activities with the largest online selection at eBay.com. But in 2001, a Lucasfilm licensing crisis orphaned the game from its designer, nearly ending its existence. Despite his top-tier track record, Kelly borrows all of his cards from another player who asks only that Kelly give him any cards he acquires as prizes. The game spanned all of the original Star Wars trilogy (A New Hope, Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back, and Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi) as well as Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. It was created by Decipher, Inc., which also produced the Star Trek Customizable Card Game and The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game. A member of the community’s inaugural Hall of Fame class, Chu is a two-time world champion and the reigning Player of the Year. “And when those piles are completely empty, they’re dead.” At the MPC, each participant constructs both Light and Dark decks and competitors switch sides after their first face-off, so that no one can depend on only one deck. By controlling locations and launching successful assaults, a player can gradually deplete the opponent’s deck, leaving them with less Force and fewer options. All Rights Reserved. “We owe everything in our lives to Star Wars and to the Star Wars CCG,” Keefer says today. 1 seeds, two-time tournament champion and 2016 Player of the Year Tom Kelly tends to stick with the same light and dark decks, which he plays “over and over and over,” honing his conservative but controlling technique and savoring the small permutations that make each victory distinct. For a few years following its 1995 debut, Star Wars CCG outsold every game of its kind except Magic: The Gathering, appealing to fans of both Star Wars and strategy. Disney Under the Moonlight Vinyl Figure 2-Pack #458 [Movie Moments, Jack & Sally on the Hill], LEGO Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1995 Decipher Star Wars CCG Premiere Limited. Star Wars Star Wars CCG Ultra Rare Lord of the Rings Collectable Card Games, Star Wars Star Wars CCG (Decipher) Trading Card Games, Star Wars Rare, Star Wars CCG Rare Lord of the Rings Collectable Card Games, Star Wars Endor Rebel Trooper Action Figures, Endor Rebel Trooper Star Wars LEGO Sets & Packs, Star Wars CCG (Decipher) Trading Card Games, “It keeps you young.”, Other Star Wars card games have come and gone in the years since Decipher lost the license, including Wizards of the Coast’s successor, Star Wars: The Trading Card Game (designed by Magic creator Richard Garfield), which was in print for only three years, as well as the comparatively simplistic Star Wars: The Card Game and Star Wars: Destiny, from Fantasy Flight Games. Although the English-language cards make it challenging to explain the game to the Portuguese-speaking locals, Hutchins has had some success among other expats. … As best we could, we needed to protect not only the thousands of dollars many of our players had invested, but more importantly, the place Star Wars CCG had in their hearts.”. Another crucial development in the pursuit of new players has been the advent and refinement of online play. (One Walseth alum, Bryan Mischke, was the second-place finisher at MPC.) MPC matches also last an extra 15 minutes each, increasing the odds of one side succumbing completely. And the artists there would do computer magic, and the players really loved that.”. Because the community encourages deck-sharing as a means of making it easier for people to play, it’s not necessary for players to own SWCCG cards at all. They were talking about strategies that I hadn’t even thought of.”, Braunlich believes that the game he cocreated played a role in bringing about the current golden age of tabletop gaming. Tournament organizer Gregg Keefer successfully lobbied Lucasfilm and Decipher to memorialize Valdez with a card and a canonized character name, posthumously fulfilling his dream of making a mark on the game. Decipher imported the equipment from Hollywood to its headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, and used the machine to capture high-quality images for use on the cards. Fast & Free shipping on many items! CategoryOneGames.com. Thanks to that prolific pipeline, Kelly calls Walseth “one of the most important reasons the game is still continuing.” More than 220 kids have passed through Walseth’s program, which the Players Committee is planning to document via video and export to other schools. “I thought I was a pretty good player, and I realized right at that point that I was a total novice compared to these guys, that they were already way beyond what I even realized was in the game. A few years ago, the Players Committee got Walseth’s work classified as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization; last year, Lingrell’s employer donated $10,000 to the charity, which will cover Walseth’s expenses for years to come, ensuring both that his afterschool program can carry on and that the SWCCG community will continue to see a steady influx of young converts. 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