digiconda wrote:
I'm dusting off my sets of Star Wars Minis to play again. Pulling out my stuff I remembered that I have a few of the alternative mini cards that I picked up a long time ago at a Gen Con. I cannot remember how the alternative card sets are tied to the original sets. Is it a one to one ratio? Does a printed virtual set go with a particular physically published set? I have five of the v-sets (am I using that term correctly?) printed - two of each. Is it possible to get other sets printed? Is there anyone that I can trade my duplicate printed sets with to obtain more original printed sets? Does the minis community consider the v-sets better (more balanced, etc) than the original sets? I apologize for the burst of questions. I've been meaning to do this and keep putting it off. It seemed to be more productive to get as many questions out as possible. If need be I can break them down to different areas of the forum or simply separate them....? Regardless, I appreciate any efforts the community makes to answering these questions!
Vince
Welcome back! You'll find a more active community over at bloomilk.com. The forums here are actually pretty active - but only in the hidden forums where we design the vsets. For better or worse, the public conversations mostly take place on bloomilk where the database is.
All of the Vsets have been professionally printed, and someone has the extras. Probably urbanjedi or engineer. I'm not exactly sure, but urbanjedi (either here or on bloomilk) will be able to point you in the right direction if he doesn't have the extras himself. I know they run out of older sets. I don't know how far back you can go, but I know you won't be able to get professionally printed copies of everything. You can print your own cards, though, using the PDFs that you can find here:
https://swmgamers.com/SWM/V-setMain.htmlIf you want to trade or sell your duplicate Vsets, there are a couple of active groups on facebook that are probably the best bet for trading. The very first set, in particular, is really hard to come by.
In the competitive scene, the Vsets have brought "balance to the Force" in the sense that all of the factions are more even now than they were during WotC days. Those of us who have been playing competitively have appreciated the variety the Vsets have provided. For more casual players, there are mixed reviews. Vsets have now made more sets and more pieces than WotC made, so if you want a stat block for your favorite character than never got a WotC mini, there's a very strong chance that there's a Vset card for that character. Some players appreciate that. Some also appreciate the variety the Vsets provide.
On the other hand, WotC left us with about 900 pieces, but only about 150 that are playable competitively. Most of the ~1000 Vset pieces are targeted to that competitive power level. There are a lot more options now, but there are probably 750 "competitive" pieces with most of them being Vset pieces. There are some complaints that Vsets are overpowered broken garbage based on that. The complaint makes sense for someone with a couple hundred pieces. If you have 200 minis, that means you probably only have about 30 competitive minis. Now drop 600 stat blocks that are all as good as your top 30 minis. Pretty overwhelming and makes most of your minis look terrible. But then again, if you had all 150 competitive WotC minis, those other minis would already look terrible anyway.
Think of Yobuck, Thrawn, and Dash Rendar, Renegade Smuggler. They are far more powerful than most WotC pieces. Most Vsets are targeted toward that level. Well, not as powerful as Thrawn... he's uberpowerful. There are maybe 5 or 10 Vset pieces as powerful as Thrawn. But most Vset pieces are targeted to be able to have a role in a squad that can compete with Thrawn.