Today is going to be a little different from a normal Rampant Speculation article; I’m not speculating about the future at all. However, I am looking at a past that never was, but could’ve been, and that’s sort-of a form of speculation? Anyway, it’s my column, so I’m going to stop justifying it and just get to the point.
As I talked about in my first article, I believe that set symbols are an indication of design order, and that each set was designed to work independently of the others (as well as together with the others). I also think that when the big November 2021 update happened, all cards in set 1 were evaluated for whether or not they needed updating, and no cards outside of that set were looked at.
Taking all these factors into account, I had an interesting idea; what would it look like to play with only pieces from set 1? The way this game releases always leaves it in a state that feels partly unfinished. There’s usually at least one affiliation (often more) that don’t quite have all the tools they need (or all the tools they were designed to have) and while they’re playable, they’re not really up to their potential yet. Right now, X-Men and X-Force both feel very much like they’re in that spot. It has happened in the past, though, with affiliations like Spider Foes.
Hence this new unofficial format: Set 1 Complete. It uses all of the updated cards from set 1, the banned-and-restricted list as it was when those updates came out, and nothing else. This feels like the closest we’ve ever had (or may ever have) to a complete, self-contained product. If this was more like a board game, with large expansions instead of getting a handful of characters at a time, this format feels more like what it would look like. And it’s fresh with all of the updates that the playtesting and the feedback of the community resulted in, making it the most balanced, polished version of that product that you could ever imagine.
I’ve created a Google Drive folder for Set 1 Complete. It includes copies of all the rules PDFs as they were just as the final polish was put on set 1 with that November 2021 rules update. More importantly, it includes a Google Doc that I wrote with all the details of exactly what is and is not legal in this format, as well as some of the reasoning behind the format’s existence (which I went into more detail about in this article). Please leave a comment to let me know if you spot any errors; either cards missing that should be legal or cards on there that shouldn’t. I have tried to format the list so it is easy to use for roster-building.
Also, please leave a comment if you try out this format! I would be very interested to see what people think of it.