As title says, at least to the degree of playing this game that I shall be trying to do now, I am fairly new. I still never intend to attend any conventions and play semi competitively to any degree... Looking into the game though, appears to be some mixed reactions to the gameplay without "mods" effectively. Seems to be a big portion of the community here designing their own stuff and tweaking rules and other past cards, so has me wondering how necessary all that is? Is the game truly broken or "bad" if I only go off of the official wizards FAQ and rulings and nothing else? A big example I saw mentioned was some type of change to the piece "General Obi-Wan Kenobi" but couldn't determine for myself what exactly the change was and why it was bad before vs after.

Also, had some curiosity about the "meta" and such, I have seen a lot of pieces with crazy price tags, Darth Revan, Darth Sion, Cad Bane, Kreia... Are these all just for being rare and sought after or are any of these considered some of the best pieces in the game, gameplay wise? Anyone able to share some pieces that I should be after from a gameplay stand point?

So far I just started buying into the Ultimate Missions and pieces for those, getting enough to play the Episode 4 missions, but discovered that might not be the best approach as those don't seem super well made... I've been buying lots here and there and trying to grab deals on pieces that seem cheap for what others sell them at, trying to fill in "army" type pieces, clone troppers for republic, droids for separatist, About the only faction I own barely anything for currently is Yuuzhan Vong. I have a very good map collection left over from way back, I think the only official maps I don't own are the ones in the AT-AT pack and the battle of hoth pack map.

I plan to eventually likely try my hand at making my own RPG type campaign, but I'd prefer to keep it set in the mechanics of Star Wars Miniatures itself, kind of like an Ultimate Missions style thing but better with its own story... But I can see an issue there if there are things truly "broken", hence the seeking of info. Thanks for responses.

Welcome (back) to the game!

As for your question about the game that WotC left us (before the Virtual Sets came into play), Mando is correct: there are some factions (Old Republic, Sith, Mandalorian, Yuuzhan Vong) that were significantly underpowered compared to others (Imperials, Rebels, Republic, Separatists)...at least from a competitive standpoint. Of course, you're welcome to play at whatever power level you prefer. One of the main goals of the initial V-Sets was to try to balance all the factions so that every single faction had several different competitive options. Playing with a WotC-only collection is totally fun too. It just depends on what your playgroup enjoys the most.

One way to get (back) into the game (which I used when teaching the game to my kids) is to 'release' one set at a time. Start with the first set (Rebel Storm) and play a few games with a variety of those pieces so that you have a chance to figure out how they play. Then when you've gotten a bit familiar with those pieces, 'release' the next set (Clone Strike) and so on, until you've explored all of the various pieces and squad types. We've found this to be a fabulous way to re-live the history and development of the game, and also to discover all of the various pieces along the way, some of which are inevitably replaced with stronger versions in later sets.

General Obiwan Kenobi (aka 'GOWK') has the Soresu Style Mastery ability on his card (he prevents all damage from any attack with a save of 11). That, combined with Mettle and Master of the Force 2, means that he can sometimes need to roll just a 3 to prevent all damage that comes at him from an attack. For this reason, he was banned for a while and errata'd too, so that he just had Soresu Style (which is really just the same thing as Evade) and so he was defenseless vs melee attacks and against attacks made by adjacent enemies. That made him significantly weaker, so that just about nobody used him again for a long time, until his original abilities were restored...but I don't think that happened until after the V-Sets started being made (though I might be wrong about the timing here).


If you're interested in the RPG or in making your own version of an RPG using the SWM rules, then I want to recommend this to you (it's a thread here on BlooMilk): Star Wars Adventure Gaming Take a look and see what you think of it, before you put all the effort into building your own. I played a version of this with my boys several years ago, and we loved it. I think it's really well thought out.