Yet Another Experiment: Sets Reclassified

Other Games SotM Game Engine
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If the core set and Rook City and Infernal Relics hadn’t all been created by a game company that never expected to be as successful as they were, and if the practicalities of manufacturing games were a bit more forgiving than the are in real life, I believe the same number of decks that we have could have all been fit into tightly themed expansion sets, probably not any more of them than we currently have, and with less of a sense of “why is this here? um…because!” than we get in a few cases. (Some of them are justified by C&A in the podcast by them saying that this is how the story played out in the comics, but in a lot of cases this has been done retroactively, and it’s often somewhat less than satisfying.)

Here’s my first-blush attempt at this rearranging:

  • Core Set: reduced to only the Freedom Five heroes, but includes the Freedom Tower environment and the villain Miss Information. Optionally include Unity. Very optionally roll in the entire Vengeance experience, including the Mobile Defense Platform environment, but excluding those heroes. And if we’re getting that optional, hey why not throw in Omnitron-4 (though definitely not Omnitron-X).
  • Second Core Set: Contains the five heroes from “our” core set who aren’t Freedom Five, plus some yet to be determined Villains and Environments. Gloomweaver is a likely choice for one of these.
  • Rook City: Contains the Temple of Zhu Long environment.
  • Infernal Relics: No changes for now.
  • Shattered Timelines: Formally includes the two mini-expansion Environments which were released alongside it, which I’ve always mentally regarded as part of it anyway.
  • Wrath of the Cosmos: Formally includes the Celestial Tribunal.
  • Vengeance: Probable new location of Omnitron-4. Contains, for now at least, the heroes originally released with it. In the unlikely event that Vengeance is in the core set now, this would need new villains; maybe half of the Villains of The Multiverse could be here (leaning toward the ones that have a few Nemesis targets in them - Bugbear, Miss Info, Ambuscade, the Operative, and maybe Hammer and Anvil even though they lack nemeses (otherwise perhaps Greazer, since he plays with the nemesis mechanic in a way despite not having any nemesis targets).
  • Villains of the Multiverse - Possibly renamed “Vengeance Returned”, which might be a good name for the aforementioned Second Core Set, so maybe shuffle things around so that the Prime Wardens are in the original Vengeance while those heroes arrive here. Definitely includes Biomancer, Plague Rat, and Sergeant Steel, probably also Greazer and La Capitan. (Having several matching Nemesis pairs here would be a nice bonus.)
  • OblivAeon - Leaving this one alone for now, apart from including Stuntman alongside the other villain-heroes (Benchmark I’m not 100% sure of).
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Well, they are going to be shuffling things around for the Definite Edition. So far though, it doesn’t match up with your ideas. (The Core Set contains the Freedom Five, Prime Wardens, Ra, Unity, the original Environments plus Freedom Tower and Magmaria, and the original villains plus the Matriarch and Akash’Bhuta.)

Also, I really don’t think having only five Heroes in the Core Set is such a good idea. Do you really want to be the last player in a five-player game and have no choice about who you’re playing?

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Yeah, this whole conversation is partially moot, because now they have the liberty to design the sets exactly the way they want with the whole series in mind.

However, one of the reasons they’re going with fewer larger sets is because they’re more cost-effective to consumers and more profitable to GtG in the current market conditions. We could imagine a scenario where the sets are smaller for some reason. I don’t think they’d ever do that to the core set, but fortunately they made that job easier, since it splits nicely down the middle into Freedom Five and Prime Warden sets. Although perhaps in that case, the PW might have gotten Apostate earlier.

As for the rest? They already seem to be tightly grouped by theme and hero team as far as we can tell. They could be divided further, maybe: Dark Watch could split off NightMist, Harpy, and GloomWeaver, and Cosmic could split Void Guard away from Sky-Scraper and whoever else is in that set. But it seems silly to do it that way.

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