Star Wars: Unlimited is a force to be reckoned with in a resurgent TCG landscape

polygon.com:

My biggest beef with trading card games, a genre now in its fourth decade of existence, is just how hard it is to get ahold of the damned cards. The challenge of searching inside random packs is obvious, of course, but two other obstacles loom large. On one side of the spectrum, you have newer games like Disney Lorcana,where sometimes there just aren’t enough cards being manufactured to meet demand. On the other, you have more established games like Magic: The Gathering, where the very best cards in a set can only be found in quantity on the secondary market. That’s why fairly mid Commander decks can run you, at minimum, a couple hundred dollars each.

So, what if you just… didn’t need as many cards to play in the first place?

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The more that I learn about TCG history, the more I find that design decisions — fundamental principles laid down at a game’s inception — play just as big a role in card availability later on as manufacturing bottlenecks or artificially created market pressures. Star Wars: Unlimited, which launches today into a resurgent TCG marketplace, is designed with this in mind. By reducing the number of cards needed to construct a competitive deck from 60 to 50, the game becomes more affordable to own at the start. Additionally, the cards themselves form highly modular blocks that can be used to quickly build different decks, which makes the rest of the cards in the game so much fun to chase after. So to me, it’s the perfect mix: a game that respects my wallet by allowing me to play with fewer cards, and one that respects my time by making