Grip.Cards

Null Signal Announces The Liberation Cycle's First Set

From nullsignal.games

I am beyond excited. Just like Borealis/Parhelion were rooted in Northern Russian locales and society, this will look at Brazil, only place in the Netrunner lore where androids have rights — rights suddenly under fire.

More Netrunner is good Netrunner, y'all.

Tabletop Standard: A Q&A with Huey Jenkins and Andrew Brown (WeeklyMTG)

Lots of nuts and bolts announcements, but little in the way of specifics — which makes sense, because those specifics are all tied to future plans.

Long story short: in addition to a longer Standard rotation window (3 years), ban windows are also now regimented to one a year, with the only exception of emergency windows in the three weeks after a set release. A one-off Standard-only ban day will be on 5/29, followed by the first of these regular ban days end-of-summer before Wilds of Eldraine previews start.

The rest seems all targeted at giving more runway for development to focus on Standard, plus making it more palatable and a little more predictable, budget-wise, as a LGS-run or local-play format. This is on top of promoting it as the format for RCQs/RCs next year. One announcement is that a panel at Gen Con will look forward three years (!) and expound on what exactly the design philosophy changes in the wake of this shift.

Star Wars: Unlimited Trailer And First Look

From starwarsunlimited.com

A short overview of some of the basics of the game. I had to stifle a chuckle at “your play area, which is divided into two different arenas: a ground arena and a space arena.”

CFB Pushes ‘Grand Archive’ TCG

From youtube.com

CFB/TCGPlayer again attempts to play kingmaker here, this time with an US-based card game that has been quietly making the rounds for the last year after a successful kickstarter in early 2022. It bills itself as trying to marry a maximalist aesthetic typical of Japanese TCGs with ‘western’ design sensibilities (their words being exactly ‘an anime trading card game with western game design’, whatever that means, really — all ancestries of xCG design have a terrible relationship with complexity and while this streamlines things somewhat, it is still comparable to Final Fantasy TCG, BSS or Lorcana in rule complexity).

It is also run by a company called ‘Weebs of the Shore LLC’, which gives me pause.

Previously, it is my understanding that CFB’s distribution deal was the way Flesh and Blood found its way into wide circulation in the US.