8 replies to this topic

[FuzzyNova]

Hey has Anyone Ever played or collected the Wizards of the coast Battletech or MechWarrior Collectable cards? There are a bunch of different vintage sealed booster packs and booster boxes online and I am Buying enough Packs for two people to play.
So 8 packs or so. Right now the options I have are The WOC 1996 Mercenaries Booster packs or The regular Battletech Titled Silver and red packs. The mercenaries came out after But not much after. Mercenaries looks dope. Counter strike Battletech boosters look cool too. Any advice on which ones are the best? I know you can buy the lots of used cards but they all say common or uncommon and I'd rather just pay the $8 a pack and Open them for that nostalgia factor ya know

[FuzzyNova]

Lockheed_, on 31 July 2021 - 02:47 PM, said:

I played it a bit, it was pretty bad.

Really? They have the vintage Wizards of the coast mid 90s look too and that's why I'm drooling over them. I knowbl there was a booster set that wasn't good. But I heard a few of them are good. Over anything it's just to add to my vintage Card collection. The cards in mercenaries look cool and Counterstrike too. The Clan packs idk.
I want a piece of this FASA history bad

[Valdarion Silarius]

If you are worried about opening vintage card packs, you could always try tabletop simulator and searching for the booster cards under the workshop. Might be able to find old battletech card decks there without jeopardizing the value of collectible cards if you are concerned about opening anything that is in sealed mint condition.

[Leone]

I've some somewhere in storage. Not a bunch, because I'd not had anyone to play with, but enough to make a few decks to try (and fail) to get others interested.

I cannot recall which set'd be better at this time.

~Leone.

Edited by Leone, 31 July 2021 - 04:04 PM.

[Escef]

I think I have a full page of a binder filled with various Urbanmechs.

[Wildstreak]

Packs will not work, you need starter decks to get enough resources for a deck.
I played it when it first came out, FASA dumped money into it for several sets but really should not have. It is more involved than Magic or similar CCGs.

Instead of 5 mana types, you have 3 resource types.

Units can be paid in full or part, partially built units are placed face down with markers to show how much you paid into it. A 15 cost unit, you could pay 3 for one turn and more on later turns. Opponents can attack partially built units denying you the ability to ever get them out.

Instead of one row of units deployed, you had two, a front line and rear behind the rear were the partially built units.

Units had one of three different ranges for firing plus a special LRM firing method.

You see where this is going. The complexity drove off anyone, BT fan and not, who thought about playing it ever. It died before FASA stopped pumping money into it.

[ScrapIron Prime]

I still have my cards, kept them for the art and the vain hope they’d one day increase in value. MTG or Pokémon they ain’t.

I wasn’t turned off by the complexity of the game, but it was a niche market and never developed a following, so there weren’t many people to play after a year or two.

Still… it was a better game than the collectible Star Trek TNG. THAT one sucked so bad that the value of a plastic card case full of those things was less than the value of the plastic card case itself.

[Der Geisterbaer]

FuzzyNova said:

Hey has Anyone Ever played or collected the Wizards of the coast Battletech or MechWarrior Collectable cards?

Yes I have and I still miss playing it every once in a while.

FuzzyNova said:

There are a bunch of different vintage sealed booster packs and booster boxes online and I am Buying enough Packs for two people to play.
So 8 packs or so. Right now the options I have are The WOC 1996 Mercenaries Booster packs or The regular Battletech Titled Silver and red packs.

Well, it will be quite painful to get proper decks just from boosters without at least two starter sets and I'm fairly certain that 8 packs won't cut it when trying to adhere to deck construction rules.

FuzzyNova said:

The mercenaries came out after But not much after. Mercenaries looks dope. Counter strike Battletech boosters look cool too. Any advice on which ones are the best?

Well, pretty much every edition had it's highlights, lows and on occassion broken cards (although the official tournament ban list is relatively short). [edit]I do have to add though that Counter Strike is considered to be the weakest edition[/edit]

The only true problematic edition was Crusade (which would have added it's most significant new card type to the ban list if tournament gameplay hadn't faltered already).


Although I must say that I did enjoy the game most under the slightly updated rules and errata of the Commander's Edition (technically just a reprint of cards from all the the prior editions and a very limited number of new cards and those "card but not a card" things called "box powers") and the starter sets for that edition - despite the controversial change to card layout from that edition onward to the next (and last) - certainly where quite good quality when ignoring the included dice.

Wildstreak said:

It is more involved than Magic or similar CCGs.

I'm not too sure that many Magic players would agree on that

Wildstreak said:

Instead of 5 mana types, you have 3 resource types.

It had 5 "named" ressource types (colors) as well:

• Assembly
  
• Logistics
  
• Munitions
  
• Politics
  
• Tactics

... and just like MtG there were a number of "colorless" ressources as well.




The difference to Magic was that "single color" simply wasn't an option (outside fringe / gimmick decks) and the vast majority of deck builds ended up as "triple-color" (ALT or AMT) with some (seemingly Lore inspired) exceptions here and there.

Wildstreak said:

Instead of one row of units deployed, you had two, a front line and rear behind the rear were the partially built units.

Actually it was more than that:

• You had "Patrol area" where your active units resided and could be attacked
  
• You had the "Command Post" where your ressources resided and could be attacked
  
• You had the "Construction Area" wherein all cards were being constructed / paid for and could be attacked while under construction.
  
• You had your "Stockpile" that also served as your attackable life point pool which could be attacked
  
• You had the "Scraphead" which technically could also be attacked ... but I can't recall if there actually was a card that made this option worthwhile.

Wildstreak said:

Units had one of three different ranges for firing plus a special LRM firing method.

Nope, units had one of three movement speeds S(low), M(edium) or F(ast) that determined attack and defense (block) capabilities for the various attack scenarios.
The LRM firing method you refer to was called "Missile" that - along with providing random damage values - gave an attacking player the option of attacking the original target for the Missile part of his attack once the attacked player had succesfully declared blocking units and thus formally prevented the attack on the original target (but only diverted the damage to the blocking units). There was another card option called "Long-Range" which did a similar thing for certain mechs that typically field Gauss weapons or AC2s in their lore configuration.

Wildstreak said:

You see where this is going. The complexity drove off anyone, BT fan and not, who thought about playing it ever. It died before FASA stopped pumping money into it.

I'm not too sure about the complexity of the rules really killing it but rather the general imbalance of the cards that gave very limited choices for competitive deck builds. The almighty "meta" pretty much boiled down to two or three base deck strategies and those were generally only supported - to varying degrees - by 5 to 6 out of the 12 originally included factions while the rest was just gimmickey at best ... and then came Crusade that nominally introduced an equally "not worth the hustle" 13th faction (the Steel Vipers) plus the Alliance cards that were supposed to shake the limited meta up but ultimately just introduced the most broken card in the game's entire run: The Star League.

Another problem of course was that the game itself came from a niche franchise to begin with but originally demanded the same retail prices as the already established MtG did.

[edit2]And then ofc there's the fact that WotC also had little interest in actually supposting the BT CCG long term because the nature of the game made it a competition to their main game MtG and primarily canibalized the already existing MtG player base. These days any CCG WotC will offer is only something that can serve as an entry into the CCG scene towards MtG but never anything that can only serves as an alternative to MtG itself.[/edit]

***************************

When Fantasy Flight started their "Living Card Games" series and picked up Netrunner I had hoped that they would also revive and maybe fix the Battletech CCG in that manner but I guess the licensing for that is just too much of a nightmare and neither Topps nor WotC are willing to grant permission for doing that.

Edited by Der Geisterbaer, 01 August 2021 - 06:13 AM.

[Ekson Valdez]

This thread seems to have been posted in the wrong forum section, so I moved it to BattleTech® Discussion