Each new expansion for Stargate TCG is of course going to offer cards to both hero and villain strategies. But you'd probably expect a little something extra for the bad guys in a set called "System Lords" -- and you'd be right.

Early in the design process, we took a look at the "villain victory condition." It was a part of the game even in the first set, but was by a good margin the least popular and most difficult of the three possible ways to win. And while we didn't want to suddenly take the game away from its emphasis on heroes adventuring together, we did want to add new cards to help players who want to have fun "being bad." One of those concepts to boost the villain win strategy has already been teased with the card Anubis, Powerful Nemesis -- the idea of adversaries that are truly meant to be scored. Another is the subject of today's article, a new keyword called dominion. Here's one example:

Dominion is essentially a way to make adversaries "score extra." Whenever you place an adversary in your score pile, if you've got any obstacles with dominion in play, you can score one of those too. (Only one, even if you have more dominion obstacles in play than that.) Sharp-eyed readers of the rules may have already realized this will call for a very slight adjustment to the rulebook: up until now, the rules have stated that the total cost of adversaries in your villain score pile count toward your victory condition. We'll be updating that with the release of System Lords to count the total cost of the cards in your villain score pile. It's a small adjustment that we'll take advantage of on a number of new cards.

While the dominion keyword works in combination with any adversary, these obstacles are really meant to show the power wielded by the Goa'uld System Lords. As such, you'll only find it on Goa'uld and Jaffa obstacles. And while there's nothing to stop you from pairing one up with, say, Replicator Carter, each dominion obstacle offers a something more if you've played it in a deck with "the right theme." Not What He Appears is arguably the simplest example of how this works. You could play it for 1 power in any deck, but if you play it to a mission where you've assigned a Goa'uld adversary, it plays for free. Useful? You bet. But also benign in comparison with some of the other dominion cards in the set -- cards like:

Again, here's an obstacle you could just throw in any villain win deck for the possible extra point to be scored. But in a deck heavy with Jaffa adversaries (and there are a lot more of those to choose from in System Lords!), you'll get some extra Failure game text on top of that, to add further insult to your opponent's injury.

Not every dominion obstacle costs just 1 power. In fact, this was one of the trickier aspects of working on these cards in design and development. With any other kind of obstacle, if a particular card seems to be too powerful during playtesting, one option available is to simply raise its cost. Not so with dominion; raising the cost of a dominion obstacle would in one way actually make the card better. As a result, the costs of dominion cards never gets that high. (Well, with one unusual exception you'll get to see soon enough.)

Well-timed dominion obstacles can add up throughout a game, ultimately saving you the need to score an entire adversary or more. They raise the risk to the hero player for ignoring a skill as part of their deck strategy -- that uncontested skill becomes a more significant opportunity for the villain to score points.

Is dominion going to single-handedly prove to be "the answer" for players who have tried villain victories before and failed? Probably not in all cases. This is by design, though. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, this is just one way we looked to help villain victories in this set. There are others, and above everything else, we still wanted to leave the freedom of choice in deck design up to the players. If there's debate about which cards best help a villain win, that's good for the game. If some players swear by dominion, other players try different options, and still others decline to attempt a villain victory entirely, I'll have a warm, fuzzy feeling.

I hope many of you will get the same kind of warm, fuzzy feeling wielding the power of the System Lords to crush all who would oppose you.