Hey everybody, today's Card of the Day is very special because today is my birthday! So I'm going to talk about my favorite card design in the IACP, Doctor Aphra!
For those not familiar with the character, Doctor Aphra hails as a major character from the Star Wars: Darth Vader Marvel comic run first released in 2015, debuting alongside what are now Imperial Assault fan-favorites, BT-1 and 0-0-0.
Doctor Aphra is my favorite design in IACP because she checks so many boxes of things that Imperial Assault needed more of in list-building, and I think she's a really awesome character from a time when the new Disney canon held so much promise and potential.
Aphra was a card that went through 2 full seasons of internal design before ever appearing to the public, and the only thing that remained the same from the original design was her dice pool and the ability to play Command cards from the discard pile. There were so many things that we needed to this card to do to represent this character's flavor and also fill several niches in the Scum and Empire factions. We needed her to cost 4 points to allow her to fill a similar support/offense role in Scum lists as Hera was in Rebel lists, we wanted her to play around in either player's discard pile to represent her being an illicit archaeologist, we needed her to be an efficient support option for Scum lists to compete with all of the Rebel options Scum was Temping in without also being strictly better than any of those options. We needed her to play nicely with BT-1 and 0-0-0 to represent her thematic connection to those characters, but in a way that made 0-0-0 stronger but didn't make BT-1 broken, and also in a way that players wouldn't feel like they were obligated to play those 2 figures with her to get full value out of including Aphra alone as a support piece, and we wanted her to play well in Imperial lists as well, both because of BT-1 and 0-0-0 being printed as Imperial figures, but also to represent her strong connection to Darth Vader in the lore and to entice players to play them in the same list together in Empire with the Temporary Alliance card. And I think her final design perfectly married all of these needs into a single deployment card with 2 named abilities.
Doctor Aphra is a wonderful deployment card that occupies spaces on both sides of the competitive spectrum of IACP. On one side she is an efficient 3-dice figure that allows players to wring as much value out of their Command cards as possible through her Excavation ability. On the other end, she's a wonderfully thematic card that enables and rewards players for including both of her droid counterparts in the list with her by augmenting their abilities without making them overly powerful.
And many competitive players do run her just by herself in lists just for the Excavation ability alone. Being able to get a 2nd go at powerful command cards like Element of Surprise, Planning, Negation and more, or even a 1st go at Command cards that get discarded from the hand or deck before they can be played, is quite powerful in a game where Command cards have so much power. Take note that Excavation triggers at the start of the round, which means you can Excavate a Start of Round Command card like Fuel Upgrade, Stall for Time, or Utinni!, and still be able to play it that same round. And of course for that reason there's restrictions on what you can get back with Excavation, limited to 0 and 1 point cards. Unfortunately for us one of the most powerful Command cards in the game, Take Initiative, costs only 0 points, so to prevent 1 player from being able to keep the initiative for multiple rounds by replaying their's and their opponent's copy, we had to explicitly write out that Take Initiative could not be chosen.
While Excavation becomes very useful in the mid-late game once the discard piles start filling up, it's especially powerful if you can enable it to trigger as early as round 2. Command cards like Planning, Black Market Prices, Stimulants, and Intelligence Leak are all great low cost Command cards to play on Round 1 and can be just as useful when Excavated at the start of round 2. And in fact with the card Rule by Fear, which is very commonly seen in Empire lists, you can even get an Excavation on round 1 from the opponent's discard if they have the initiative on round 1, especially since they often discard a cheap card like Fleet Footed or Element of Surprise to keep their more expensive, more important cards in hand. And if you're playing Aphra in an Empire list with Rule by Fear, you can excavate whatever card you discard to Rule by Fear, which is great synergy.
And finally her Dubious Counterparts ability can be great fun to build around when you include BT-1 and 0-0-0 in a list with her. Technically it is 2 abilities in one, but I think we were okay to roll these two abilities into one because of how they are linked. In addition to having the ability to include both droids in a list with Aphra if it's a Scum list, meaning you don't need to pay extra for a Jawa or Temporary Alliance but can't use Aphra to bring these droids into a Rebel list if played with Saska, we also figured out that by focusing on BT-1's Missile Salvo and 0-0-0's Invasive Procedure, we could make 0-0-0 a lot more efficient without doing the same to BT-1. Being able to do Invasive Procedure on a target before attacking it made 0-0-0 so much more efficient, however we purposefully worded it so that neither 0-0-0 nor BT-1 could double-move and then perform the action for free. In addition to that, we also forced players to bring both Droids if using Aphra's ability to do so to make sure they didn't just abuse the combo of Aphra and BT-1 together without 0-0-0, though you can still play Aphra and BT-1 without 0-0-0 if you pay the extra points for Temporary Alliance or a Jawa.
This makes me want to explore Aphra in Imperial lists more.