Twin Suns Starter Thoughts

Individual Cards

Preview season for the Twin Suns pre-constructed decks is upon us. Some of the cards look very interesting. Others look miserable, however it has been pointed out to us that a card that would be terrible in competitive play may be amazing in Twin Suns due to the politicking that can occur during the game.

Take the new ship Fortune and Glory. At first glance this card seemed horrendous. The when played of capturing another unit is good and the stats are on curve. The downside is that on defeat you get basically a 3 for 1 against you. You lose Fortune and Glory itself of course, the previously captured unit is released back to you opponent, and then the Bounty part allows the opponent to capture another unit. So you could be minus two and the opponent is plus one.

Now while obviously bad for Eternal play, when you factor in the politics and that there are multiple opponents, people could be making side deals to gang up on people. For example “I’ll help defeat that unit for you to release the captive, but then I’m going to capture something for another person entirely.” Not being a true Twin Suns aficionado we’re going to figure that people in online chats may be correct and this is in fact a good/fun card.

Eternal Play

The main purpose of the Twin Suns decks is to get people involved with the format. Not ever having built a deck for the format, the ease with which these pre-cons could allow dabbling into that realm becomes phenomenally easier. Buy deck, sleeve it up (or shuffle it bare if you are a masochist), play game, have fun. Easy enough.

However, these new cards are also legal for Eternal play. Fortune and Glory mentioned above likely won’t be an Eternal staple anytime soon, and it’s at least possible that no cards from these decks have major impacts on the Eternal format.

The big downside and largest complaint we’ve seen online is that if there is a card that does in fact become extremely useful for the Eternal format then, because of the singleton nature of Twin Suns, a person would need three of the new decks to have a play set of the given card. Should that card only be included in one of the new decks, then that player is going to need to buy three of the same Twin Suns deck, or find a trade partner that is willing to part with the card in question from their deck.

Final Thought

This is probably a good entry product for many people that don’t already play SWU.

We’ll likely get at least a couple of these new start decks. If for no other reason than it’ll be nice to have something to play in a Twin Suns game should be want to do so and without having to borrow a deck from another player.