I have a great group of friends that are interested in games of all sorts - and are certainly willing to learn and play SWCCG - however the weight and time commitment that would be required for them to consume all of the possible cards and make their own decks isn’t feasible for most of them. We have spent years playing some of my personal favorite classic constructed decks, and I have made a few series of new paired decks to give us different experiences - but there feels like both a limit to the joy of this pattern, as well as a fairly steep strategy curve for each deck.

I was wishing there was a SWCCG format equivalent to the MTG Jumpstart format... the strategies would be simplified compared to the deep possibilities of classic SWCCG, but the lack of need for a big preparation commitment would be well worth it.

After some more consideration, I decided to try to make something that approximates that “shuffle and play” experience.

My goal in creating this format is to enable quick play with variety, while avoiding all time commitment or stress of deckbuilding. Additionally - the structure and rule changes below outline what I believe creates a ruleset that captures 80% of the value of the nostalgic SWCCG experience, while removing 80% of the complexity of lesser used mechanics and edge cases.

The focus of the ruleset is to reduce complexity and ambiguity, and focus the gameplay and strategy on battling first, with Force drains as a more limited secondary option.

Additionally, I wanted to streamline the card types, remove some of the less-used rules to make teaching the game to new players easier, and make weapon cards a staple in the format.

Each pack contains 27 cards:
- 3 starting cards (a system, a related site, and a thematic Effect).
- 10 Character or Vehicles (+/- 1)
- 5 Starships (+/- 1)
- 3 Weapons (+/- 1)
- 6 Interrupts (+/- 1)

One of the main lessons learned in playtesting version 1 was that it is almost impossible to make perfectly balanced packs. Unless I was willing to completely alter the scope and feel of many cards - then getting a pack with a Darth Vader is inherently better than a pack without Darth Vader. Such is a lesson I have accepted - however I have gone through multiple iterations to get the packs “close” to balanced.

Additionally, you will notice that each of the starting effects follow a general formula: Allow you to pull some type of card from your deck - and there are typically 3 to 5 cards in the same pack that are pullable. Then, some sort of ongoing bonus or one-time bonus effect, depending on how powerful or plentiful the pulling ability felt.

Finally, I tried my best to balance the range of ability values present on the actors (characters, vehicles, and starships) in each pack. They are not all exactly the same, but each pack has a few cards with ability = 1, 2, 3, and 4+.

In addition to changing several rules - in the same pursuit of simplifying the game - I made several small changes to the layout, design, sizing, spacing, wording, and structure of the card images.

You will notice that most of the text elements on the cards are slightly larger and bolder fonts that the original cards.

Additionally, the spacing between elements, like the bottom of the image area and the middle stat line area, is adjusted to allow for the font and text changes.

Also - vehicle and starship cards have the ability value of their permanent pilot surfaced in the middle stat box, and their armor or maneuver value is now in the right most stat box. Given how moving between systems works in Hyperdrive (the astromech indicating boolean value [true/false] for whether that starship has a hyperdrive) - there was no need to keep a dedicated Hyperspeed value (see the full rules doc for details).

Many wording patterns from the original cards were either abandoned, or adjusted for clarity and consistency in this format.