The Alpha Strike Draft Cube
TL;DR: If you like drafting cards and playing Alpha Strike, this is the format for you! Click here for the full rules of the format.
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Inspiration
For my first non-introductory post on this blog, i want to share something i've been working on for a couple months. A marriage between my last hobby, Magic: the Gathering, and my current one, Battletech: Alpha Strike. Introducing the Alpha Strike Cube! Also known by its even clunkier name: Alpha Strike Booster Draft Cube. I really need a sexier name for this format...
When i played Magic more regularly, drafting, then cube, became my #1 favorite way to play. I now have an affinity toward deckbuilders, and card games with limited/draft play. So, when I got interested in Alpha Strike and noticed that their units are on cards, the very first thing I expected to see was a draft format using them. To my surprise, the only format I could find that was similar is Wolf Net's Drafted for War format which uses the salvage boxes or other boxed products as "boosters" in a draft-like format.
This is not the experience i was looking for. So, in the spirit of being a California Bay Area native, i decided to make a startup up my own format!
Overview
The defining feature of my format is the drafting portion of it. At a high level, players draft 2 packs of 10 unit cards, plus a pack 3 pilot cards. Afterwards they use those cards to create a 250PV list (12 units max), and play an objective focused game with the others at the table who did the same.
Taking inspiration from Wolf Net's AS350 format, the (currently in beta) matched play rules, and the Battletech video games, objectives are randomized and each table (which i set up ahead of time) has Terrain Rules which affect gameplay and list building.
Design Principles and Intent
Which brings me to the guiding principles of this format and the skills I think this format is designed to test: flexible list building and drafting. Everything about this format should point back to these principles. If a feature or optional rule doesn't connect back to these principles, it's not meant for this format. Keeping these in mind is how i settled on some of the unique features of the format.
Unique Features
This format has a few unique features that set it apart from other formats i've played so far:
Constrained Unit Cards
Pilot Cards
[optional] Terrain Rules
Below I'll describe each of these, and explain how I arrived at their inclusion.
Constrained Unit Cards
Normally in list building, players pick units then adjust pilot skills anywhere from 0-7 in order to help players dial in their point totals to be as close to a certain PV limit (250 in this case) as possible. However, this was slowing down list building, and it meant players could run really silly one-trick lists using only exactly the units they wanted. Part of my definition of being a flexible list builder, is going outside of your comfort zone and trying units you don't normally try. This exact kind of restraint is how I found some new favorite units!
A suggestion I got a few times was to constrain how much you can adjust a unit's skill. While I think this is correct, I didn't want to have players referencing the PV adjustment charts all the time, slowing down list building. Then, someone suggested writing the PVs on the cards. I almost dismissed this out of hand because it would make cards unreadable, but then I remembered that Jeff's Battletech Tools (RIP, Jeff) lists both the unit's current PV and the base PV of the unit (I hope you're listening MUL 2.0 developers!). This is a perfect solution because it gives me, the cube designer, the ability to balance the cube and a binary choice for players is easy to understand. You can take a unit as-printed or reset them to the default skill of 4.
Pilot Cards
I wanted to integrate some components that I think are cool but underutilized. So I looked at the Faction/Combat Command cards you get in the official CGL card packs for Succession Wars and Clan Invasion and the pilot cards you get in every force pack and boxed set.
In my testing, I found that using both of these was a bit too much for players to handle in a timely manner. So, I knew that one had to be cut (honestly one of my favorite parts of game design). In the end, pilot cards won because the nature of them ties more directly into your list since they can affect the PV of the unit they're assigned to. This extra "knob" lets players dial in their PV better so that they can hit on or close to 250PV much easier.
So, how do you use a pilot card? Well, I leaned on the information in the card and the AS PV system. In short, you may assign a pilot card to any unit that is exactly the same size as the pilot's listed unit. That unit must be set to the skill level (the large number in the top left or right corner of the card) of the pilot, paying for any PV adjustments. Then, you may turn on their Special Pilot Abilities (SPA) by adding the cost to the assigned unit's PV.
The above is an example of one of the pilot cards that I modify for use in the draft. This pilot card for Katherine is a Skill 2 pilot for Size 3 unit (the pictured Mad Cat is a Size 3 unit) with the Cluster Hitter SPA which costs 2 PV to activate.
It was this last bit that really made these pilot cards stand out. SPAs are cool features of AS and folks tend to not use them for balance concerns. In this format, I can curate which SPAs are allowed in a very invisible and organic way. No need to ban abilities when I can just not include them!
This relates to a fun fact about this format I discovered in playtesting and development: there's no reason to have a banlist of things like SPAs or Special Abilities. If I don't want people to, say, use artillery, I can just not include any artillery cards (I did include them because I want them in the format, but they're often banned in other formats). As a corollary, I can safely enable all abilities that are present on cards. This means we can get real weird with the card choice. But my method for building the card pool is for another post...
[optional] Terrain Rules
One thing I love about the Mechwarrior and Battletech PC games is the map variety. Part of that variety are terrain/weather conditions that affect play. These seem to be rarely used outside of campaign play, but when I have used them they greatly affected my unit choices. Sounds perfect for this format's guiding principles, no?
So, when planning for this format, I will print displays for special terrain rules for each table. What makes good terrain rules for this format is the same as everything else: the rules must have the potential to influence unit choice in a meaningful way without mandating it.
Good examples are the Snow Terrain rules shown earlier in this post and the Night Ops posted above. The former encourages the use of units with Overheat and units with Jump to get around the ice. The the latter encourages having one scary unit as an ambushing unit, drafting vehicles with SRCH and mechs to combat the night time modifier, and drafting scouts to help light up targets (literally!).
Conclusion
That's the overview of this fun and unique format. If you are interested in running it yourself, the rules are available at the top of this post. Additionally, I plan on doing some follow-up posts that detail what you need as an event host/T.O. in order to run this yourself. Plus, there will be advice on how to build an interesting cube pool for players to draft from.
Until then, If you're in the California Bay area and interested in trying this format out, keep an eye out at our many local gaming cons. I might just be running this there, or, at the very least, I'll have my cube on me if you want to play a pickup game with it. It's great for that!
