The Fury of Exar Kun. And 18 damage bonus.

By Joe "Palejo" Alread, Game Designer

Today I'd like to share some information about the upcoming four-player Star Wars Galaxies Trading Card Game heroic encounter: Exar Kun! This heroic encounter is unique when compared to our previous heroic encounters and we're looking forward to seeing how players react to it.

The first thing you'll notice as soon as you enter is that Exar Kun's cards don't use the standard raid template that we've used in the past, they use the Sith template. Why? The simple answer is that he's a Sith and uses Sith abilities. His ability to AvA effectively is done by many cheap abilities and his ability to destroy them to ready himself. Be prepared, he'll attack early and often.

Another big difference is the format. Our previous heroic encounters (IG-88 and the Tusken King) take place in a single location and you don't have to do much "traveling" to get to the main boss. With Exar Kun, not only do you have to reach the depths of his temple to get to him but you also have to defeat numerous disciples and other smaller bosses along the way. We wanted to recreate the tension of facing different bosses at different times before facing Exar Kun himself. To accomplish this, we created a number of these bosses as unit cards in his deck that he has only one copy of. When these bosses come into play, your party will need to immediately shift gears or make adjustments to account for them. My personal favorite is Caretaker of the Lost.

Before walking into the encounter, it's best to ask everyone, "Got abilities in your deck?"

Initially, Caretaker of the Lost didn't have such big numbers. His first version that we tested had him with numbers of 2/2/2/2 and if somebody didn't discard an ability when he was played, he got +4 to all of his stats (we didn't want him to go beyond 6/6/6/6). He worked all right at the start, but after some playtesting we realized that he could be so much cooler if players were penalized each time one of them couldn't discard an ability. The end result I think got us an even cooler (and more brutal!) card for players to deal with.

Exar Kun also starts this heroic encounter with some units already in play.

  

These are only some of his starting units, there are others as well and they have similar gametext to what you see here. Some of these guys you'll prefer to kill outside of battle, others just the opposite. The important thing to note here is that with these units in play at the start, your party has to be very careful about where they attack first. Some players will need focus their unit strategies away from Vengeance and more towards Harmony. Others that deal more with direct damage and questing will want to focus more on the Vengeance-type units. Coordination will be key.

With Exar Kun's powerful AvA abilities and his disciples providing support, taking down this mad Sith will be no easy task. I've touched on a few of the basic concepts here but there is much more that you will need to figure out on your own (I don't want to spoil everything!). Good luck.

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