Card of the Week: Yu, Venerable Lord
by Evan "Heimlich" Lorentz
Adversaries were actually one of the later additions to Stargate TCG; in the earliest incarnations of the game, they were little more than glorified obstacles depicting the major villainous characters from the show. Even once they were broken out into their own separate card type, the rules of how they worked went through a few changes before settling into their final form. This version of Yu is arguably a small homage to the very last take on adversaries before the final version. Before the idea took hold to pay revive costs by discarding from the top of the deck, revive costs were much lower across the board -- and paid in power.
Changing from that model was not an easy decision. On the one hand, it was clear that the villain player's power reserves were too small for most playtesters to take any interest in adversaries: you simply couldn't afford the power to play and revive them all on the same turn, which meant they really were still no more than glorified obstacles that played to one mission and then went away.
On the other hand, the "discard to revive" idea had come up earlier, and met with some resistance. A player is able to have a lot more cards in his deck than power he'll ever receive in the course of a game. The argument could be made that discarding from the deck was scarcely even a cost at all, since a player could build his deck to be as large as he wanted, a near-inexhaustible resource to pay for adversary revival. This is a major reason why, to this day, Stargate TCG decks are commonly well above the minimum required size, when the most competitive decks in other trading card games tend to use as few cards as their allowed.
Ultimately, you know how the decision came down in the end, and I for one think it was the right call. There are other checks and balances in the game for the relatively cheaper cost of adversary revival. First, the game has limit of only 3 copies of a card per deck where many other games have a higher limit of 4. This makes it less reliable for a larger deck (planning to pay lots of adversary revival) to even draw the desired adversary in the first place. Also, the methods for destroying adversaries outright got "beefed up" after the design change. (Which is a large reason why Ishta was first printed as strong as she originally was.... but that's another story.)
What's it all have to do with Yu? (You can't talk about Yu without one good Yu/you joke, right? Or did that just make two?) A Stargate fan once told me that Yu was his favorite of the recurring villains, because he kept outliving so many of the others on the show. With that thought in mind, I remembered the "old way" of reviving adversaries, and thought Yu would be a good candidate for a villain with two different ways to revive.
