Digital Card Central

Yesterday brought a bit of a surprise, as we saw the gameplay element come to a bit of a revelation for Star Wars Card Trader. Basically, because there is no fantasy sports element available for Star Wars, Topps is using your collection score as a way to rank the top collectors in the game.

Like we saw in the other sports games, the top ranked users get a special card for their collection, this time being a Han Solo base parallel that was picked by the top guy. Since the article was published, I started getting a lot of questions on twitter about how collection score is determined. Ill do my best to break down what we know.

Background

Starting with 2014 Bunt, users started being able to see what the team affectionately called “Collection Score” pertaining to ranking users collection against that of the whole. The scores ranged from 0.00 to 100.0, and was based on how complete and how powerful your collection would be against a user with different completeness of their own collection. Certain things factored into the score, including quantity of cards possessed, quality of cards possessed, and percentage of cards collected from the main sheet.

Each card you owned represented a small fraction of your collection score, and it gave a great indicator of recognizing who’s collection was the best in the game.

Transition to SWCT

With the release of the new app, one that is 100% collection based, the “FORCE SCORE” is the Star Wars version of the collection score from bunt. Only this time, as mentioned above, its being used as both the game play and the bragging rights.

Improving Collection Score Part 1 – Quantity

Right now, there are only certain base cards that are available in the game. Because not all cards are released yet, no one can have the 100% complete score on their main page. At the same time, having huge quantities of cards from the base set will improve your collection score to a point. Although we dont know how much one card is worth, there is likely a part of your score that is derived from how much of the available set you have completed.

Use the fan feed and blind trades from the main card sheet to acquire as many base as you can, and trade your dupes for ones you need. Not only will this give you awards for completing the sets, but your score should be well above 50 at that point.

Part 2 – Quality

As we saw in Bunt, Huddle and Kick, owning higher quality cards will get you a higher score. It will also improve the part of your score tied to completeness, so its two fold. Because so little content is available at the moment, inserts and other rare cards can give you a bigger boost than they might in the past. The Episode 7 set did wonders at first, because it was the only insert set available. Now, its one of a bunch more, so the cards arent worth as much to your score.

If you want to move up in the rankings, you will likely need to acquire a good deal of these inserts, and that should not come as surprise. Trying to get one of each cards is not a goal to chase at this point, but determining which cards improve your score the most will help you know which to chase. From what I can tell, it looks like the cards 1000 and below will be your best bet.

Part 3 – Completeness

This is where things get a bit complicated, as right now, not all cards are realistically able to be traded for. For the rarer cards, many are on lockdown, and wont be easy to get without massive firepower.

Secondly, its going to be very tough to be ranked in the top 25 without spending real money. You can trade and trade and trade, but without buying in, there will always be people who are spending and can get more of the set done.

I have spent 50-75 dollars on the game since release, and have a collection score about 77. If I wanted to spend the time cross trading between Huddle and Bunt, I could easily supplement my spending with people who were more interested in Bunt than SWCT.

From what I can tell, the people in the top 25 have completed most of the scene collections, have at least 10-20 inserts, and 5-7 gold cards. With all of that comes the purple cards, which many of them have a few of.

Part 4 – Changing Scores

Remember, your score is based as much on other users as it is your cards, so as more cards are released and more people pick them up, your score could change significantly. Obviously, you have to check back and get going with new inserts as much as possible, as you dont want to miss out on cards that all the other users have picked up, but you did not. If you cant pull it from packs, trading is your best bet.

Let me stress that everything in this article is a generalization because there is no set guide to the collection score available in game. In all honesty, because the score is based on user by user averages and stuff like that (from what it looks like), that might not be possible.

Keep on your toes and watch your score like a hawk.

The one thing that always drew me to Star Wars as a kid had a lot to do with what every child aspires to be – someone with awesome powers. Superheroes have become a part of a kid’s upbringing for years, and Star Wars is a version of that fantasy. However, thanks to some very complex characters and story lines, the popularity has grown beyond just the movies.

With SWCT the trading market will function on some very easy to understand principles, which include rarity and reward value (sets, credits, etc). Aside from those, one of the more volatile parts of the economy has to do with the popularity of the character, which can exponentially increase value for an already valuable card.

Right now, there is still a vacuum in content creation, stemming from the early stages of the app combined with the amount of huge demand for top cards. As a result, character basis can really have a huge impact on the value of a rare card, especially if that character is Sith related. Its been no secret that fans often gravitate towards the dark side, as the characters were always full of different layers. Where the Jedi were the boy scouts of the universe, the Sith were conflicted. This makes for a more interesting dichotomy between the groups. Because this article is not about why bad guys are popular in movies, I digress.

This means that a Darth Maul high value card will likely carry more weight than one of the minor soliders. Same thing goes for Boba Fett, Han Solo, and other fan favorite characters that have an attachment to the nostalgia of the movie series. That doesnt mean that a Cantina based scene collection isnt cool, or is worthless, just that more popular characters get more love in certain situations.

This may seem pretty obvious, but you would be surprised. Topps is going to have a very tall task of writing out checklists with character popularity in mind. It goes all the way down to trading base at some points, as its clear that someone may be less inclined to give up a dupe of Yoda vs a dupe of Grand Moff Tarkin. This can lead to some major rifts in what the users think is a cool card, vs how a character fits into an overall plan for the content of the game.

Im sure we will find out more as the game progresses. So far they have done a very nice job keeping things diverse.

We are now through our first week on the new Star Wars Card Trader, and with it, a number of awesome card releases as I posted about yesterday. I have gotten a lot of questions about the value of certain cards in the game, and how much I have had to give up in each case. There are two classes of cards, and both have their pros and cons.

Rare Base

The first class of cards that I have seen is the rare base. This group contains the gold, purple and now orange parallels of the base cards, some of which are very valuable. There is also an argument that can be made towards how valuable the new yellow cards are worth, as they can be expensive the day of release.

Here are the obvious rankings:

1. Orange Base – So far, only one has been released in Qui Gon Jinn. With so few of them in circulation, you will have to give up a ton. Because so little is know about future availability, I would hold off chasing until more is revealed. Jinn isnt exactly the most popular of the Jedi, despite Liam Niesson’s VERY specific set of skills, and I would guess more popular characters are on the way.

2. Purple Base – When collecting the 3 daily yellows, plus the golds, you will get a purple as a reward. Because only a few people can manage to get all four cards in the 24 hour window provided, the purples are very rare.

3. Gold Base – This is where things get interesting. Gold base are only available in 1 pack (Darth Vader), and you have to make a purchase to get access. On top of that, they are only 1% pulls, and may be valuable as part of multiple scenes at once. The issue is that once available, they are not sold out, so the card counts will continue to climb. Right now, popular characters are trading for low tier inserts, but that could change.

Inserts

As of right now, the inserts are divided into categories as well. The first group is the set based inserts (sometimes released in 3-4 different rarities at once), and the second is the group of weekly inserts that will have new cards each week. These weekly sets are SW Vintage, Topps Choice, Connections, Galactic Moments, and the like. The last group are the single inserts that have a shared concept, like the Greedo Bounty card that was released yesterday.

Here is how I would rank them right now:

1a. Connections – Cool concept and cool looking card. The first one was 1000 copies, which is rare by this standards.

1b. Vintage – Han is still highly sought after at 1500 copies

3. Widevision

4. Topps’ Choice

5. Galactic Moments

Another thing to keep in mind is that each of the weekly inserts has a collection reward for collecting the run of the set. That means that even high count versions of each of the cards may still carry more value just to get the set reward.

As for the set cards, the rarer versions are close to impossible to get. When you see that some of them only have like 50 copies, there might not be any available card in the game that one could trade. I have seen some nice cross app trading go down, but that is at your own risk. Think about what someone would have to give up for the 50 count Maul Nightbrothers or a similar card.

Overall, I have traded Hoth type set cards of the lower versions for golds, and I have traded golds for some of the higher parallels in the other sets too. As the cards age, the value will drop, so dont think you could get shut out for your whole career on the app. With a ton of people busting the Vader pack each day to get the daily bonus, you know the card counts on the golds will eventually top any insert available.

At the same time, we really know so little at this point that you almost have to take it day by day. Keep in mind that the apps change considerably over time, which means something valuable today may be more valuable tomorrow or vice versa.