The "objective" system, first introduced in the "Special Edition" expansion. Objective cards could be played by a player in lieu of a starting location and both allowed you to deploy extra cards from your deck at the beginning of the game and provided goals for you to achieve and rewards for achieving them, at the cost of minor penalties imposed by the cards and telegraphing to your opponent what your intentions were (as well as giving them ways to undo the bonuses). Supporters lauded the objective cards for allowing for extremely thematic, "fluffy" decks and breathing life into a few seldom-used mechanics like carbon-freezing; detractors complained that most of the objectives for the Dark Side and Light Side were carbon copies of one another that promoted cookie-cutter decks, with little variation, and that their introduction meant that it was difficult to build a decent deck that did not include an objective (and limited further by the fact that only a handful of the objectives were viable for competitive play).
Similarly, Starting Interrupts became controversial when they were first introduced. Similar to objectives, they allowed players to get some advantage at the beginning of the game (typically by drawing and/or playing extra cards); however, unlike objectives, they didn't take the place of a starting location. Supporters pointed out that most of the Interrupts were generic enough that it was possible to fit them into many different kinds of decks and it helped set-up decks so that a player was less likely to get screwed by bad luck; detractors disliked them due to power creep (since using one didn't take the place of a starting location or objective and was, essentially, a free action at the start of the game with no drawbacks, there was pretty much never a reason not to include one in every deck) and the fact that their small number (the light side got just five starting interrupts over the course of the game's run, while the dark side finished with seven) and their similarity (all of the light side interrupts were similar, if not completely identical, to a dark side counterpart) further contributed to cookie-cutter deck design.
Funny Moments: The Decipher team had a sense of humour when writing a lot of the cards. Some notable examples include:
Human Shield◊: "A shining example of Imperial honour and bravery", alongside a picture of an Imperial officer using Leia as a shield.
Stop Motion◊: The picture from this card comes from Han's Tauntaun collapsing in ESB, which was one of the more apparent uses of stop-motion animation in the film.
The flavour text for Swing-And-A-Miss◊: "It's the bottom of the ninth level of Cloud City, Vader steps up to the platform. Here's the delivery... oooh, he took a big cut there! The Force sure wasn't with him on that one!"
Game-Breaker: Any number over the years; see Loads and Loads of Rules. Most infamous, though, was the "operative" mechanic—rolled out, with insufficient playtesting (having been a last-minute addition to a set), just before that year's world tournament; discovered to be completely broken at said tournament (the hard way); errata'd within two months.
As listed in the Game-Breaker section, operatives were notoriously broken on release for being able to buff Force drains to insane levels and had to be heavily nerfed in the aftermath.
The game's last few expansions (Coruscant, Theed Palace, and Reflections III) had to be rushed out the door due to the imminent loss of the Star Wars license and the lack of time to properly test the cards shows. In particular, the "maintenance" cards from Reflections III (powerful cards that required you to pay a cost every turn in order to keep them on the table) were found to be particularly broken, as their high stats and powerful abilities gave their players significant advantages, even factoring in the requirement to pay a cost each turn to avoid losing them.
The legendary/notorious "Super Falcon" was responsible for almost singlehandedly destroying the Dark Side space game. The core version consisted of the Millenium Falcon, Captain Han Solo (who added three to the power and two to maneuver to the ship, as well as adding a battle destiny), and at least one additional co-pilot (common options included Chewie with Blaster Rifle, adding another 3 power and another destiny if C-3PO was also present, and Leia with Blaster Rifle, adding yet another destiny as long as Han was there). This resulted in a powerhouse of a ship that was Power 6 (9 if Chewie was flying), Maneuver 6, drew 3-4 destiny, and was immune to attrition <5. Toss in interrupts that could add an additional destiny or two and you had a one-ship wrecking crew that could absolutely shred all but the nastiest of Dark Side armadas. After this ship was discovered, nearly all Dark Side decks had to go ground heavy and abandon attempts at contesting space, as there were precious few things that could stand against the Super Falcon once it got up and running in earnest.
Bounty Hunting was an interesting mechanic, but generally not seen as not having a worthwhile payout considering the amount of effort it took.
Operatives were one of the most broken set of units Decipher had ever put out at the time of their release, and subsequently got nerfed through the floor. This wound up being an overcorrection in the other direction, as operatives are now notorious for being almost completely unplayable. The two objective cards focusing on operatives (Imperial Occupation/Imperial Control and Local Uprising/Liberation) are widely regarded to be the two weakest objective cards in the entire game and are pretty much only ever played by players looking to handicap or challenge themselves against a less-skilled opponent.
Dejarik is an oddball mechanic that was more annoying than anything else. If a player played either Dejarik Hologameboard (for the light side) or Imperial Holotable (for the dark side), Dejarik and hologram cards could be played at those locations as character-like cards that counted as having a power/ability equal to their destiny score. This was disliked for multiple reasons. The first is that if you didn't happen to have any Dejarik or hologram cards in your deck (and there weren't many of them across all of the sets in the game) and your opponent did (or they just had more than you), this was basically a free Force drain for them, since nothing else could deploy or move to one of the gameboards. The second reason is that the rules for Dejarik were somewhat unintuitive and led to a lot of weird interactions with other rules. For instance, Dejarik played as game-pieces didn't count as effects or interrupts anymore and couldn't be cancelled by things that target effects/interrupts, but they *could* still be cancelled by things that called out their cards by name; as well, Dejarik didn't count as characters, despite having all the characteristics of one, but *did* count as a character-like card with ability, which meant that if you had a card that targeted cards with ability or checked to see if ability was provided by cards of a specific type (like Scum and Villainy), Dejarik pieces would trigger them, even though intuitively it seems like they shouldn't.
Sabacc was another sub-game that got a lot of people annoyed whenever it came out. The short version is that whenever a player played a Sabacc card, both players had to set the actual game aside and play a round of a Blackjack-like game, using the destiny of drawn cards to try and get close to 11 without going over. There were a few additional rules that generally helped the person who initiated the Sabacc game (assuming they planned their deck around it), but after all the fuss the only prize for the winner was either stealing a card from the loser (so long as the card was a specific type specified by the Sabacc card being played) or causing a single of the loser's card to be lost, making it seem mostly like a more time-consuming, less-reliable Force Drain.
Underused Game Mechanic: Certain game mechanics waxed and waned over the course of the game's run, with a few seeing barely any daylight. Some, like Admiral's Orders or Defensive Shields, only showed up in a handful of expansions towards the end of the game's lifespan, despite having significant effects on how the game played; others had only a few cards of that type published, despite showing up in multiple sets (there were only 12 Epic Event cards ever published, despite the first ones - Attack Run and Commence Primary Ignition - showing up in the game's first expansion and the last one - Deep Hatred - showing up in the second-last). And a handful of cards fit in both categories (there were only six Jedi Tests ever published, all but one of which showed up in the Dagobah expansion, and they're still somehow not the rarest card type; that title goes to the "podracer" card type, of which there were only ever four, all coming from one expansion).
Viewer Name Confusion: The first C in Star Wars CCG stands for Customizable Card Game, not Collectible.
◊: "A shining example of Imperial honour and bravery", alongside a picture of an Imperial officer using Leia as a shield.
