The quality of these cards is high. Or maybe I just used to play with dilapidated playing cards too much when I was younger? They are easily shuffled if needed and dealt out with ease. That said, these cards are matt finished, rather than anything else. I might grab some of my old Magic:The Gathering card sleeves for these cards perhaps in order to improve their longevity.
The design of the cards is very functional. This ranges from their rounded corners through to the rules themselves and the pictures on the (sub set of) cards that illustrate their point (or are gratuitous space marines!).
Now, I know that many people have a dislike to these kinds of tactical objective cards. And I for one can readily understand why. The lack of option to ditch one of these cards that is simply not obtainable is a royal pain. I would expect to see many house rules allowing players to re-draw a card that is simply not obtainable. That said, there are of course command points in play that can help a player do exactly that. So maybe its not all bad?
Of course, at its base level, the cards are adding in an extra random element to certain games of 40k in 8th edition. Whether this is good as a ground levelling concept, or bad just because it is too random is up for debate.
That said, I do like these cards and their implementation. I just had hoped for them all to be usable in all missions.
I do like that they at least adjusted the deck to mitigate a bunch of the issues with 7th Ed Maelstrom. There are far fewer cards that have the potential to be completely impossible to achieve, and even then, most of them are much less likely to be. No more Demolitions, Master the Warp can now be scored by Denying a Power instead of Casting one, Scour the Skies triggers off anything with the Fly Keyword instead of only out and out Flyers, etc.
ReplyDeleteMy bigger issue is that all the Faction-specific Decks I have are no longer really usable. Many of them, I'll be able to modify the 31-66 cards with a sharpie or something, but there are a number that have Faction-specific cards involving things that are no longer part of the Game, like Challenges.